RCL5: Gentle Parenting

The Ted Talk I picked to analyze is said by Becky Kennedy and is titled “The Single Most Important Parenting Strategy,” which I have linked above. She is a parenting psychologist who helps parents with issues they may encounter when raising kids. 

The central theme of Becky’s speech is the idea of repairing any arguments you may have with your children and self-reflecting. She states how all parents yell at one point or another but that parents need to relax and think. Kennedy believes apologizing is not the best option, but instead, trying to repair the relationship by talking and reflecting. 

I linked this Ted Talk to the idea of gentle parenting and how that has been a paradigm shift in recent history. Parents used to be strict with their kids and would yell and occasionally lightly hit them as punishment for their misbehavior. Kids were also hit with a paddle in school. In today’s day and age, that would be shunned and completely unacceptable. The shift in thought over this type of punishment has been immense over the past decade.

This has been a shift in both thinking and actions because it changes how people think about parenting and how they act on it. Parenting used to be viewed as a thing where it was your kids, so you could do whatever you wanted. It was also harsher because that seems to be the only way for kids to behave. Now, people think that gently talking to kids and being nice is how to make them behave, and it is ‘terrible’ to be aggressive when punishing your child.

This speech was very knowledgeable and focused on one specific topic. Becky talked about the psychology of kid and parent relationships and how people have trauma from being yelled at from a young age. She also made the strong point of parents having self-blame that leads them to be depressed and think they are a bad person. She says to take responsibility and be open; this is another shift because parents used never to take blame and would parent the kid to not step out of line instead.

The speaker had strong hand signals and used her voice well to portray emotions. She was clear and kept the speech interesting the whole time. She was a bit over the top and dramatic at points, but that could work in her favor most of the time. The speaker was energetic and gave a speech to teach people something, not a presentation with slides next to her describing an object. Overall, there has been a paradigm shift in the idea of parenting and this speech was an example.