I think one of the risks of the gentle parenting discourse is that so much of it focuses on scenarios involving young children, where the stakes are ultimately very low. Kid won't put on his coat? That's okay, we don't need to go to the park. Oh now it's on, okay we can go later than planned, whatever, it doesn't really matter. Kid won't eat his food, well we can sit for an hour at the dinner table playing mind games and negotiating around his feelings about the textures and colours on his plate, or maybe he can wander off and come back in a bit when he's more hungry, or maybe I'll just only prepare food I know he likes so that I don't have to deal with it.
The older kids get, the less this works— older kids have real commitments, things like school that have consequences to the parents if they are missed. They have sports and other activities to attend that are on a schedule and may have cost money to enroll in. They need to get enough sleep to be functional. They are increasingly exposed to situations that are more complicated to untangle if/when they go sour.
And older kids are smart enough to walk away from a "validation" discussion if they detect that the end goal is just to get them to do the thing— they will simply issue ultimatums: "I don't want to talk about my feelings on this, I've told you straight up I'm just not doing it, end of story."
So it's not that parents are "focusing only on control", it's that particularly as kids get older parents need to strike a balance between good faith listening and validating, while still ultimately retaining the last word and being able to be an authority when it matters. I think some gentle parenting acolytes miss this reality and believe that the toddler scenarios cleanly extrapolate up through teen years, and that everything can be managed through a pure consensus model— and believing that is how you end up capitulating to your kid over and over again, ultimately letting them run wild.
The older kids get, the less this works— older kids have real commitments, things like school that have consequences to the parents if they are missed. They have sports and other activities to attend that are on a schedule and may have cost money to enroll in. They need to get enough sleep to be functional. They are increasingly exposed to situations that are more complicated to untangle if/when they go sour.
And older kids are smart enough to walk away from a "validation" discussion if they detect that the end goal is just to get them to do the thing— they will simply issue ultimatums: "I don't want to talk about my feelings on this, I've told you straight up I'm just not doing it, end of story."
So it's not that parents are "focusing only on control", it's that particularly as kids get older parents need to strike a balance between good faith listening and validating, while still ultimately retaining the last word and being able to be an authority when it matters. I think some gentle parenting acolytes miss this reality and believe that the toddler scenarios cleanly extrapolate up through teen years, and that everything can be managed through a pure consensus model— and believing that is how you end up capitulating to your kid over and over again, ultimately letting them run wild.