So much of the gentle parenting school—Perry, Lansbury, Dr. Becky—is great. Who wouldn’t want to give their child the best opportunities in life? Who wouldn’t want to learn how to help their child develop emotional resilience? The problem isn’t the desire to look after children as gently and consciously and respectfully as possible, it’s the fact that this work still mostly plays out along unequal gender lines. The pressure is, as ever, on the individual mother rather than shared among wider social structures. And, sometimes, that mother is sleep-deprived and overburdened. This ideology is too
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