If you’re looking for parenting advice, TikTok isn’t necessarily the first place you’d go. After all, the app is known for being the platform for Gen Z, or those aged 10-24, who comprise over 60% of the platform’s user base and can spend as much as five hours on the app daily.
Recently overtaking Instagram in users, TikTok is a place for dancing, making art, cooking food, discussing issues like climate change, and, as I found out fairly recently, talking about parenthood.
As it turns out, alongside younger platform users, a reported 43% of millennial parents are on the app, too. They make up the audience for hashtags like #MomTok, which has amassed 7.6 billion views.
Where Instagram moms often portray their home lives in pixel-perfect posts and stories, TikTok moms are a little more real. Through short, binge-able, and re-watchable clips, moms on TikTok get messy, funny, and helpful about child-rearing.
A growing portion of this content is dedicated to a movement called #GentleParenting, which has had over 800 million views on the platform so far. The contents of these TikToks are great for young parents and those who want to have their own children in the future. But as someone who is neither, I was surprised to find one afternoon that I had devoured so many of these videos for longer than I care to admit.
And, more importantly, they struck a chord.
That said, the Gentle Parenting TikToks on this list are an invitation to do three things.
First, they’re useful for reflecting on how I was raised, and why I am the way I am. Often, how we are raised is a product of culture and our family’s experiences, and finding new ways one might try and be better — that is, to break the cycle of trauma — has helped me see things a bit more clearly. It’s also incredibly cathartic.
Second, they’ve been an invitation to learn how I can take care of my inner child, or the metaphorical representation of that part of us that we’ve had to deny, neglect, abandon, or stifle in the process of “growing up” in a society that deems things like wonder, playfulness, and awe as childish. Though videos about gentle parenting often focus on raising a kid, a lot of what they say can be applied to reparenting one’s inner child, too.
Lastly, they open doors to becoming more understanding of others, who might be adults on the outside, but hurt and angry little children on the inside. After all, gentle parenting has four main elements — empathy, respect, understanding, and boundaries — and these are all things that are important whatever age you may be.
But First, What Exactly Is Gentle Parenting?
Verywell Family defines it as “an evidence-based approach to raising happy, confident children” through empathy, respect, understanding, and boundaries. A term coined by child care expert and author Sarah Ockwell-Smith, gentle parenting de-emphasizes expectations and rules. Instead, it encourages building relationships with your child based on willingness and choices.
Somewhere between authoritarian parenting (which focuses on control and punishment) and permissive parenting (which has very few rules and little structure), gentle parenting emphasizes connection, communication, and consistency. Here’s a quick TikTok video to illustrate the difference:
With gentle parenting, the goal is to model positive behaviors for children and to help them regulate their emotions, which can be quite overwhelming for grown-ups and more so for little ones.
Breaking the Cycle on TikTok
We’re all a product of our upbringing, and we can see this in how as adults, we adopt or reject practices, beliefs, and values our parents and wider communities have shown us. But sometimes, deep-seated feelings and patterns can be harder to trace back.
This TikTok by High Impact Club’s Marcela Collier is simple, but it drives home a good point about generational trauma, parenting, and why we need to break the cycle.
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“Discipline doesn’t have to be negative to be effective,” writes user LauraLove at the end of this TikTok, which opens with a child climbing dangerously on a shelf of toys.
Where parents would normally have a fit and demand that the child get down for their own sake, the video instead walks through six steps for correcting the behavior — with a happy ending for both parent and child.
The five love languages — quality time, receiving gifts, words of affirmation, acts of service, and physical touch — are often discussed in the context of finding and keeping romantic partners. That’s fair, because the full title of the 1992 book where Dr. Gary Chapman coined them is The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate.
But this TikTok offers an interesting take on meeting a child — both literal kids and your inner child — halfway, and communicating with them in the love language they respond to the most.
Consent is something we aren’t taught about enough, and when we are, it’s often in pretty vague ways. This TikTok by ParentsTogether shows some good examples of how to teach children to “flex their consent muscles.”
By respecting them and their preferences, we give children more opportunities to practice making choices for themselves and show them that their feelings matter. What’s more, it gives them a blueprint for learning how to respect others, too.
This list of emotionally invalidating things never to tell your child by Destiny Bennett is based on a simple truth: Because we are exposed to our parents the most in the first 18 or so years of our lives, the things they say have a powerful effect on how we think about ourselves and the world around us.
“My voice is going to be my child’s inner voice,” she says — and that’s something I’m going to have to sit and cry about.
Just in case you aren’t already sobbing, this TikTok by Melissa Lea Hughes, about what every child needs to hear, might just make you.
Many of the folks in the comments are moms sharing how they say the same things to their kids, which is great, but also commenting are people who’ve never heard these words from their own mothers. Given the point made earlier about your mom’s voice shaping your own inner voice, it might be worth using this video as inspiration for some positive self-talk, too.
This TikTok by Rachel Rogers provides several examples of how gentle parenting differs from traditional parenting, and how the latter can be a little hypocritical.
It provides a good starting point for reflecting on how you might’ve felt the world was unfair as a kid — feelings that, too often, are dismissed or invalidated. All behavior, after all, is communication, and knowing how to listen and respond better can be useful for dealing with oneself and with others.
For those who might be thinking that gentle parenting is too “soft” or permissive, this TikTok by Gwenna Laithland is a good reminder of the fourth element of gentle parenting: boundaries. This is what differentiates it from permissive parenting. Gentle parenting isn’t always graceful or picture-perfect, but as long as we respect emotions and treat kids with dignity while keeping them safe, then that’s okay.
When reparenting your inner child, it might be worth thinking about how you deal with your own emotions, and the ways these might drive you towards behaviors that can be harmful or self-destructive. “I get that you’re mad. It’s okay to be mad,” Gwenna says. “But be mad on the ground.” What walls are you risking yourself trying to climb in anger?
Parenting in general and gentle parenting in particular aren’t easy. This TikTok by The Honest Mom lives up to their username: It’s honest and vulnerable, and lays down how there’s so much to figure out about raising kids right while trying to overcome your own childhood trauma.
But in real-life parenting and taking care of your inner child, it’s good to know that though the hows can be a mess, the why of it makes it all worth it — and we can draw strength from each other.
TikToks like this one can also be a source of strength. When we treat children and our inner child with empathy, respect, and understanding, we’re modeling behaviors that they can learn and practice with others, too.
Just as this TikTok shows us how it’s never too early to learn how to empathize while also setting boundaries, it’s also never too late.
This last TikTok, posted by Erica Burrell, is a bit on the controversial side, but it’s worth including. Everything we’ve covered so far about listening, patience, and boundary-setting are all shaped by privilege.
This isn’t to say that you can’t take care of a kid or your inner child if you don’t have enough material or emotional resources — it’s just that it’s harder. And it’s not about invalidating people who are able to practice gentle parenting either.
What it does mean is that your resources affect your circumstances, as well as how much time and energy you’re able to devote to being patient with a child or with yourself. Gentle parenting is difficult, and if you’re stressed about work or have no social support, it gets even harder. And despite the many misconceptions about it online, gentle parenting is not for the faint of heart.
That said, there’s no need to beat yourself up if you make mistakes or don’t do parenting (or reparenting) the same way viral gentle parenting TikTokers are doing it. That’s the kind of guilt, shame, and pressure we’re trying to leave with Instagram. Do your best with what you have, and in the process of learning to parent a child or your inner child, remember to be patient with yourself, too.
Healing Your Inner Child
Hurt children often become hurt adults, and this statement is not only a challenge to break the cycle with the next generation, but it’s also an invitation to look inward.
As adults, many of us walk around with untreated wounds, big and small, that we don’t talk about enough. It’s okay to mourn the fact that you weren’t raised the way you needed to be. It’s okay to mourn the times you were hit, yelled at, or made to feel like you’re not enough. You can also mourn how your parents were probably struggling at the time, too.
And when you’re ready, you can start creating an environment with the safety and security you needed back then, and unlock our capacity to live and love better.
“When we heal the inner child, we heal generations. We heal the world,” explains Trish Phillips, Psy.D., a clinical psychologist based in California. “We literally affect one another.”
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