What is gentle parenting on this edition of Truth and Love?

I'm Dale Johnson, and you're listening to Truth and Love, a podcast of the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors,

where we seek to provide biblical solutions to the problems that people face.

This week on the podcast I have with me

to friends, and I'm looking forward to our time together. Dr. Sam Stevens is here with us. He's

assistant professor of biblical counseling at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and his full-time

job is with ACBC, where he serves as director of membership and certification. I also have with me Emily Staley,

who's an ACBC certified counselor. She's pursuing her Master of Arts in Biblical Counseling at Midwestern,

and she's author of an ACBC booklet on the Duluth model. She's married to Alec and they have two

girls, Doddy and Gemma. Guys, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having us. Thanks. Now, if you remember, Sam, I think you were a part of this, we talked about the book, Bad Therapy, Abigail Schreier's book. And in there, she talks about several different issues, one of those, social emotional learning, trauma, and she also talks about gentle parenting. We said that we were going to circle back. So this is our circling back where we want to make sure that we're coming back to describe some of the ideas and practices that we see are being implemented within the church that might not be the most helpful.

And many of them have similar foundations.

So before I get too far into it, I just want to raise a question, if I can, the title of

today's podcast, What is Gentle Parenting? So let's give some definitions about what we're talking

about, and then we'll get into some of the concerns. So I'll just throw that open to either

of you. When we talk about Gentle Parenting, what's being described here? Well, we were just

chatting about this before we came online. Essentially, we need to think about it as a broader movement. It's definitely become

more popularized lately, but it's been around for a little bit now a few years in its current form.

But as we all know, nothing new under the sun. And essentially, it's a parenting philosophy,

right? How do parents seek to parent their children,

to lead them, to help them grow and develop? And so it's got a worldview attached to it.

It's got strategies attached to it. We thought the best way to define it would be through some

core commitments, because we were chatting about this too. There's not necessarily one

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