Hey a few things about this book: I haven't read it, but I've listened to podcasts with her. AND i've read Raising Raffi that she's talked about and that you mention here.
First of all, Raising Raffi is written by a dad who is obscenely oversharing about his life, and so is the mom, writer Emily Gould who overshares everything including h…
Hey a few things about this book: I haven't read it, but I've listened to podcasts with her. AND i've read Raising Raffi that she's talked about and that you mention here.
First of all, Raising Raffi is written by a dad who is obscenely oversharing about his life, and so is the mom, writer Emily Gould who overshares everything including having a fundraiser for her divorce and then canceling her divorce, cheating on her husband and then publicly admitting it in a very famous essay, which her husband than shared on twitter..... long story short, they are not emotionally stable people.
And the kid Raffi has a hole in his heart. Not metaphorical, a real hole in the heart he had to have surgeries to fix.
So this kid already has started off at a disadvantage. He has more pain in his life than other comparable toddlers. So he isn't going to be the best behaved kid.
And then the book is full of their disciplinary tactics, which often involve locking the kid in a dark bathroom. I'm Indian and no one in my extended family/community would ever do that to a child because they worry it'll be a villain origin story. But that's considered totally normal in Raffi's house, unfortunately. A huge chunk of the book involves all the tactics the parents use to keep Raffi locked in his room and not come seeking his parents if he had a nightmare. Right from when he could walk. This child is learning to scale child gates just to be able to be with his parents. In most of the rest of the world, parents would never pathologize a child wanting to be with his mom. But this author and his wife literally get "experts" to tackle this "problem" their kid has.
There's just so much emotional neglect and abuse that Raffi goes through that it's totally understandable if he's so angry and wants to hit everything in sight. To blame gentle parenting on this despite all the admissions of abuse and neglect in the book is simply dishonest and insane.
Also while I'm not one for labeling parenting styles, most "gentle parents" I know are actively trying to not be like their parents, who, you guessed it, locked them in dark rooms or beat them with a switch. Not everyone has an intuitive grasp of how to parent differently when they have been parented with beatings, so you're going to get some people making mistakes. They need to be given grace and help. Also most of them I see on forums try to be emotionally present for their children while they enforce boundaries. So it's more like holding a kid and soothing them while they cry about not being able to have more candy rather than giving a kid more candy because you can't stand to see them cry. The author could have logged on to ANY forum and gotten this explanation, but she doesn't. She creates a straw man and then takes it down with "gentle parenting"
These two things by themselves seems like extreme dishonestly and I wouldn't trust anything else the book says. These are the easiest things to do right - they don't involve any studies or anything complicated. She's proven quite dishonest with these simple things and I wouldn't take anything complicated she says at her word.
Thanks for your thoughtful response, in particular your insight into Raising Raffi, which you're right, I haven't read. Some other people have accused me of steelmanning Shrier, which is probably far. The book did help me come of with the framework which featured so prominently in the piece, the zero-sumness if you will of bad therapy with resilience. And I'm not sure I entirely agree that one example of Shrier's lack of effort (or worse) should necessarily invalidate everything else in the book, though I agree it should count as a pretty point against it.
The narrative feels strong, but once you start going down the citations and looking at missing information, you find that the narrative doesn't add up.
Hey a few things about this book: I haven't read it, but I've listened to podcasts with her. AND i've read Raising Raffi that she's talked about and that you mention here.
First of all, Raising Raffi is written by a dad who is obscenely oversharing about his life, and so is the mom, writer Emily Gould who overshares everything including having a fundraiser for her divorce and then canceling her divorce, cheating on her husband and then publicly admitting it in a very famous essay, which her husband than shared on twitter..... long story short, they are not emotionally stable people.
And the kid Raffi has a hole in his heart. Not metaphorical, a real hole in the heart he had to have surgeries to fix.
So this kid already has started off at a disadvantage. He has more pain in his life than other comparable toddlers. So he isn't going to be the best behaved kid.
And then the book is full of their disciplinary tactics, which often involve locking the kid in a dark bathroom. I'm Indian and no one in my extended family/community would ever do that to a child because they worry it'll be a villain origin story. But that's considered totally normal in Raffi's house, unfortunately. A huge chunk of the book involves all the tactics the parents use to keep Raffi locked in his room and not come seeking his parents if he had a nightmare. Right from when he could walk. This child is learning to scale child gates just to be able to be with his parents. In most of the rest of the world, parents would never pathologize a child wanting to be with his mom. But this author and his wife literally get "experts" to tackle this "problem" their kid has.
There's just so much emotional neglect and abuse that Raffi goes through that it's totally understandable if he's so angry and wants to hit everything in sight. To blame gentle parenting on this despite all the admissions of abuse and neglect in the book is simply dishonest and insane.
Also while I'm not one for labeling parenting styles, most "gentle parents" I know are actively trying to not be like their parents, who, you guessed it, locked them in dark rooms or beat them with a switch. Not everyone has an intuitive grasp of how to parent differently when they have been parented with beatings, so you're going to get some people making mistakes. They need to be given grace and help. Also most of them I see on forums try to be emotionally present for their children while they enforce boundaries. So it's more like holding a kid and soothing them while they cry about not being able to have more candy rather than giving a kid more candy because you can't stand to see them cry. The author could have logged on to ANY forum and gotten this explanation, but she doesn't. She creates a straw man and then takes it down with "gentle parenting"
These two things by themselves seems like extreme dishonestly and I wouldn't trust anything else the book says. These are the easiest things to do right - they don't involve any studies or anything complicated. She's proven quite dishonest with these simple things and I wouldn't take anything complicated she says at her word.
Thanks for your thoughtful response, in particular your insight into Raising Raffi, which you're right, I haven't read. Some other people have accused me of steelmanning Shrier, which is probably far. The book did help me come of with the framework which featured so prominently in the piece, the zero-sumness if you will of bad therapy with resilience. And I'm not sure I entirely agree that one example of Shrier's lack of effort (or worse) should necessarily invalidate everything else in the book, though I agree it should count as a pretty point against it.
This is a good very specific takedown of the book https://thecassandracomplex.substack.com/p/bad-journalism
The narrative feels strong, but once you start going down the citations and looking at missing information, you find that the narrative doesn't add up.