A few days ago, I came across a news story.

On August 6, a Porter Airlines flight from Victoria to Toronto had already pushed back from the gate and was preparing for departure when it turned around.

The reason: a young child on board could not be safely buckled into their seat.

According to the airline, the child was standing on the seat, and despite repeated attempts by the parent and crew, they could not get the child seated and secured. The plane obviously couldn’t take off like that.

By the time it returned to the gate, the family disembarked, their luggage was removed, and the flight paperwork was redone, the airport’s nighttime runway closure had gone into effect.

So an entire plane full of people went nowhere.

The anger online was predictable.

“Parents today are afraid to discipline their kids.”

“This is what gentle parenting gets you.”

“Why should a whole plane pay the price because one child won’t buckle up?”

My own reaction was complicated.

A seat belt on an airplane is obviously not something you sit down and negotiate with a child about. It is not the same as, “Do you want to wear the red shirt or the blue one?” or “Do you want to eat the chicken or the broccoli first?”

When a plane takes off, every passenger has to be safely secured. No family’s parenting philosophy gets to override that.

But the next day, another detail emerged.

A fellow passenger said the child had not been running around the cabin or deliberately challenging anyone. The child appeared genuinely terrified and kept trying to get away from the seat.

That detail made me stop.

Because once the “badly behaved kid” becomes “a very frightened child,” the story suddenly feels more complicated.

And yet, when I thought about it again, maybe it isn’t actually that complicated.

The child could have been truly terrified.

And the seat belt still had to be buckled.

Both things can be true at the same time.

It occurred to me that this may be one of the things we most easily lose in our arguments about so-called gentle parenting.

We keep placing empathy and boundaries on opposite ends of a seesaw.

As though, once I understand your fear, I can no longer ask you to do something you don’t want to do.

As though holding a boundary means I haven’t really understood how you feel.

After years of raising children, I’m increasingly convinced that this either-or choice was false from the beginning.

Every evening, my family has one completely unremarkable moment that manages to test my entire parenting philosophy.

Turning off the TV.

Before dinner, my kids are usually allowed to watch something for a while. I cook. They watch. The house can even settle into that rare kind of peace that tricks you into believing you have figured family life out.

Then dinner is ready.

I walk over and say:

“Ten more minutes.”

Without looking away from the screen: “Okay.”

Five minutes later:

“Five more minutes.”

“Okay!”

Before the episode ends, I remind them again: “When this one is over, we’re turning it off.”

“We know.”

If you heard only these conversations, you might conclude that our family has developed an exceptionally mature screen-time system.

Then the time comes.

I turn off the TV.

The world ends.

“I wasn’t finished!”

“Why do we have to eat now?”

“I’m not hungry!”

Sometimes they also insult the dinner I have spent the last hour making, as though what I switched off wasn’t the television but their last remaining reason to live.

I used to respond to these moments in one of two completely opposite ways.

The first was to explain.

“But didn’t we agree?”

“You’ve already watched for a long time.”

“I reminded you three times.”

“Dinner is ready. It’s going to get cold.”

The more I talked, the more I developed this strange conviction that if I could simply make the logic comprehensive enough, my child would eventually snap back into rationality, wipe away the tears, and say:

“Mom, you make an excellent point. I really do need to work on my time-management skills.”

This miracle has yet to occur.

The other direction was doubt.

Maybe they’re especially tired today.

Maybe I should give them five more minutes.

If I turn off the TV while they’re upset, will they feel like their feelings don’t matter?

Should I validate more thoroughly before mentioning dinner?

One thing I’ve discovered about being a mother who has absorbed a lot of positive-parenting advice is that you can end up with an invisible parenting supervisor living inside your head.

The moment your child cries, it appears.

“Were you too harsh just now?”

“Did you validate first?”

“Are you damaging their sense of security?”

Sometimes the person exhausting me isn’t even the child who is crying.

It’s the imaginary evaluator in my head, constantly grading my performance.

Then one day, I was standing in front of the dark TV while my child melted down, and an uncomfortable thought occurred to me:

Maybe I’m the one who can’t tolerate my child being unhappy.

I had always thought I was helping him regulate his emotions.

But often, I was actually trying desperately to make the emotion disappear.

I explained and explained because I wanted him to understand me immediately.

I considered giving in because I wanted him to become happy again.

Sometimes I raised my voice because I wanted him to obey.

One response looks too soft. The other looks too hard.

But underneath both may be the same thing:

I cannot tolerate this chaos. I need it to stop now.

That was when I began to rethink what “gentle” actually means.

Gentleness does not mean a child is never allowed to be disappointed.

Seeing his disappointment does not make me responsible for removing it.

“I know you want to keep watching.”

and

“It’s dinner time now, so the TV is going off.”

can belong in the very same conversation.

The first says:

Your feelings have a place here.

The second says:

But not every decision belongs to you.

None of this is a revolutionary parenting discovery.

Developmental psychologist Diana Baumrind famously described parenting along two different dimensions: responsiveness, warmth, and understanding on one side; expectations, structure, and boundaries on the other.

What later came to be called authoritative parenting does not choose between the two. It combines high responsiveness with clear expectations.

The first time I encountered that framework, I felt strangely relieved.

Warmth and expectations are not forces that cancel each other out.

An adult can kneel down and listen carefully to a child.

And when the child is finished, that adult can still say:

“No.”

France, as it happens, has been having its own fierce argument about this very question.

Over the past decade or so, positive parenting—what Chinese parents often refer to more broadly as “gentle parenting”—has become increasingly influential there. It challenged older models of parenting that emphasized obedience and adult authority, and encouraged parents to look beyond whether a child was simply “behaving.”

Why is the child doing this?

What are they developmentally capable of?

Could the behavior be driven by fear, exhaustion, frustration, or a need they cannot yet put into words?

That shift matters.

But it has also provoked a backlash.

French child psychologist Caroline Goldman has publicly criticized some forms of positive parenting, arguing that parents have become so afraid of letting children experience frustration that they are losing their position as the adults who set limits. She has advocated the use of time-outs for certain boundary-crossing behavior.

At the same time, other pediatricians, psychologists, and educators strongly oppose what they see as an attempt to repackage isolation and punishment as scientifically justified authority.

Even in 2026, French media are still debating time-outs, children’s rights, educational violence, and what legitimate adult authority should look like.

Whenever I read these arguments, I have the same strange feeling.

Parents seem to be trapped between two walls that keep moving closer together.

One side says:

Don’t frustrate your child too much.

Don’t speak too firmly.

Don’t make them feel unheard.

The other says:

Stop explaining.

Don’t negotiate.

You’re the adult.

Your child needs to know who is in charge.

As if we have to choose one posture.

Either become a giraffe towering over the child.

Or crouch on the floor waiting for a tiny ant to approve what time dinner may begin.

But more and more, I think what is missing is not a better parenting script.

It is the adult’s capacity to carry the boundary.

That sounds powerful.

In real life, it is usually not impressive at all.

Often, it looks like this:

My child is crying.

I am standing nearby.

The TV does not come back on.

That’s it.

The American Academy of Pediatrics’ guidance on discipline is not especially mysterious either: rules should be clear and consistent, consequences should be explained and followed through calmly, and children should still be treated with listening and respect.

Even when it comes specifically to meltdowns after screen time ends, one piece of advice is strikingly simple: don’t try to deliver a long explanation while your child is at the peak of their emotions. Stay calm. Use as few words as possible. Hold the original limit.

I find that advice mildly exposing.

Apparently my child does not always need me to perform a flawless emotional-processing session.

Sometimes all he needs is:

“I know. It’s hard to stop. It’s dinner time now.”

And then I let him cry.

The hardest word in that sentence is not anything I say.

It is let.

Let someone I love be unhappy with me for a while.

Since becoming a mother, I’ve realized that I used to carry a quiet assumption about what a “good relationship” should look like:

A good relationship should feel harmonious.

If my child gets furious with me, if he shouts “I hate you,” if he cries because I said no, an alarm goes off inside my body.

Something is wrong with the relationship.

Fix it.

Quickly.

So I explain. Comfort. Compensate.

Sometimes I quietly move the boundary.

But maybe one of the experiences children most need is something else entirely:

A relationship can be temporarily out of harmony without being broken.

I can be deeply disappointed, and Mom is still here.

I can hate her answer, and she will not abandon me because of it.

I can cry, and the rule will not keep changing in response to my tears.

And when I am done crying, we can still eat dinner together.

We can still take a bath.

At bedtime, I can still crawl into her arms.

That may be closer to genuine security than, “Mom never lets me feel bad.”

Of course, none of this means every boundary an adult sets is automatically justified.

That is something else I’ve become much more cautious about as a parent.

Some “rules” are really just adults wanting the world arranged to their liking.

My child’s hair falls into their food, and it annoys me.

The toys aren’t sorted according to my system, and the room looks messy.

They put on an outfit I think looks terrible.

Sometimes these things wear the costume of “teaching.”

But really, they are control.

So when I want to say no now, I try to ask myself one more question:

Is this actually a boundary about safety, health, time, or respect for other people?

Or is it simply—

I want things done my way?

That question has saved me many times.

But when the answer really is the former, I’m also practicing something I used to be very bad at:

not quietly handing the decision back to my child.

Before an airplane takes off, the seat belt has to be fastened.

A child can be afraid.

They can cry.

They may need Mom or Dad to hold them. They may want to buckle the belt themselves. They may need to hold an adult’s hand. They may need a lot of help.

Understanding their fear changes how I help.

It does not turn the seat belt into an option.

This is another distinction I’ve come to value:

Helping is not the same as taking over. Participation is not the same as deciding everything.

Children can still have a place inside the limits reality gives them.

When the TV goes off in our house, my child cannot decide that dinner is canceled indefinitely and the show will continue forever.

But he can press the power button himself.

He can choose whether to wash his hands first or sit down at the table first.

He can tell me very clearly:

“I’m angry right now.”

Those are real choices.

Having choices does not mean the world must remove every limit for me.

Maybe genuine autonomy is partly the ability to stand inside a reality you cannot change and ask:

What can I still decide from here?

I also understand better now why the backlash against gentle parenting has become so intense.

Parents are tired.

If every refusal requires a ten-minute explanation, every emotion has to be labeled with clinical precision, and every bout of crying is treated as a rupture requiring immediate repair, parenting becomes an extraordinarily intricate form of emotional labor.

Worse, the moment the parent gets angry, a second layer of anxiety appears:

I got angry.

Did I damage my child?

Soon, we barely feel entitled to be ordinary human beings ourselves.

But I don’t want that exhaustion to push the pendulum all the way back toward shame, fear, and punishment.

What I want to keep is the small, unglamorous space in the middle.

In that space, I can say:

“I’m sorry. I raised my voice. I shouldn’t have spoken to you that way.”

And after the apology, the TV still does not come back on.

Because I am apologizing for the way I held the boundary.

Not for the boundary itself.

For a long time, I confused those two things.

So if someone asks me now:

Is gentle parenting’s problem that it has become too gentle?

My answer is:

Maybe not.

At least for me, the real problem was never that I loved my children too much, or that I tried too hard to understand them.

It was that I had quietly turned “gentle” into something else:

My child must never be unhappy because of me.

But raising a child probably means disappointing them again and again.

No more TV.

We’re not buying that toy today.

It’s bedtime.

That isn’t safe.

You’re allowed to be angry, but you’re not allowed to hit.

I know you’re scared, but the seat belt still has to be buckled.

We cannot build our children a world without the word no.

Nor should we.

What we can do, perhaps, is help them slowly learn what happens when a no arrives.

Reality has boundaries.

Other people have boundaries too.

You will be disappointed.

Many things will not happen the way you want them to.

But you can cry.

You can speak.

You can ask for help.

You can look for another way forward.

And none of that requires you to lose love.

A few days ago, it was time to turn off the TV before dinner again.

As usual, my child was not happy.

And as usual, I felt that familiar impulse rise in my body—the urge to explain, to smooth everything over, to prove that I was right.

This time, I resisted it.

I just said:

“I know you want to keep watching. It’s time for dinner.”

The screen went black.

He sat there, angry.

I went into the kitchen to bring out the food.

No one experienced a breakthrough in parenting wisdom.

There was no cinematic moment where mother and child looked deeply into each other’s eyes and understood everything.

For the next few minutes, the mood in our house wasn’t even particularly pleasant.

But eventually, we sat down at the same table.

We ate.

He started telling me about something else.

I laughed.

Life moved on.

And in that moment, I thought:

Maybe this is the kind of security I most want to give my children.

Not the promise that the world will never tell you no.

But the knowledge that when a no does come, you can dislike it.

You can be disappointed.

You can even temporarily dislike the person who said it.

And love will still be there.