Aconsequence of socialising with family and friend groups at Christmas is the front-row seat we all get to other people’s parenting, or the “ew, is that how you’re going to do it?” subcategory of entertainment. This year, judgment is likely to fall on where you stand in relation to the most popular new school of parenting. It’s called “gentle parenting” or “child-centred parenting” or, sometimes, “child-led parenting”, and in outline it doesn’t sound bad. Where I live in New York, it’s the dominant approach among parents of young children, where the air is busy with identifiable phrases. “You seem to be frustrated, why is that?” says a mother to her toddler, as he screams and refuses to leave the playground. Or “I hear that you’re hurting right now”, delivered to a bellowing child who just kicked another child’s shin. The harshest line you’ll hear in this vein is a softly intoned: “That’s not OK.” Child-centred parenting has been around for years, but only now is it starting to yield young adult graduates. It a correction of sorts both to the high-intensity “helicopter” parenting of 15 years ago, and to the more authoritarian approach of all parenting prior to that. In child-centred parenting, shouting at your child is not only counterproductive, it’s damaging. Ditto forcing your child into schedules and structures that appear to suit you, not them. Praise, meanwhile – the ubiquitous American “good job” issued to a child for every action that rises above the level of breathing – is considered as ruinous as excessive criticism. The child who is told “you’re so good at this!” is, in the gentle parenting schema, shoehorned into a competitive mindset in which conquering a task is more important than taking pleasure in it. The better approach, it is said in countless podcasts and newsletters, is to offer neutral commentary along the lines of “you really enjoyed that!” To which my response is: I mean, I guess … I’ve tried some of these things and some of them feel good and some of them work. Being given permission not to helicopter your kid’s schedule is definitely a win, as is the invitation to worry less about tailoring them into little Einsteins. For snobbish reasons, I’ve always slightly been drawn to those romantic memoirs of posh English people in which they write about the “benign neglect” of ranging around the stately home, enjoying Rousseau-levels of freedom. On the other hand, I don’t think that’s what this is. In some iterations, child-centred parenting simply seems to be another form of neurotic engagement, in which rather than telling the child what to do, the parent stands off to one side quietly fussing internally while issuing occasional, ineffectual validations. The point is that there can be as much sly proscription in the idea of letting your child take the lead as there is in devising a rigid structure for them. And the potential downsides, it seems to me, are considerable. Some of this is aesthetic. At the trivial end, you can buy framed posters on Etsy memorialising phrases such as “Excuse the mess, we’re making memories” (of living in chaos). Some popular phrases from child-led schools of thought cut so aggressively against the grain that I die of embarrassment just uttering them. When I road-tested the “you really enjoyed that!” line on my daughter who’d just done a painting, she gave me her what-is-wrong-with-you look. I cleared my throat and ploughed on. “It doesn’t matter if it’s good or not, it’s just whether you enjoyed it.” “Are you saying it’s not good?” she replied. “Because I think it’s amazing.” I said: “No, I totally think it’s amazing.” The child’s a genius, who am I kidding. What sits oddly here – this isn’t quite the right phrasing, but is as close as I can get – is pretending to be someone else while parenting. It seems less than ideal to switch into a weird, whispery mode of condescension every time you talk to your child. Officially, child-centred parenting aims to treat children like mini-adults, which means to dignify their emotions by taking them seriously. But to state the obvious: if I’m waiting for another adult while they fanny about not putting their coat on, I won’t be reaching for the line: “You seem frustrated, how can I help?” Instead, I will say: “Stop dicking about, we’re going to be late” – a tone that, in this mindset, you’re not allowed to take with a child. I once heard a friend with a six-year-old get around the gentle-parenting rules by saying to the son who’d just kicked her: “You are acting like someone who is acting like a jerk,” an amazing piece of sophistry deployed to avoid what we’re told is the ruinous harm of direct confrontation. There are times when aspects of the child-led approach sound like nothing so much as Stepford wife parenting, soft tones disguising sublimated rage. I don’t know. I’m sure less yelling is a good thing, but some yelling is fine and even necessary. I’m sure there’s a magic line between overvalidation and dismissal. Child-centred parenting is supposed to turn out confident kids, but taken to extremes, it turns out kids who may be so destabilised when another child confronts, challenges or proves unmindful of their feelings, that they lose the plot every time they go out. Various studies of the past few years have sought to identify links between parental overprotection and excessive risk control with narcissism in young adults. On a less scientific level, constantly saying your child’s feelings back to them strikes me as vaguely creepy and controlling. The best version of this is, I think, tactical. When one of my children starts faffing about a minute before we have to leave for school, it’s an invitation to be challenged, which will permit her to escalate and waste more time. The only successful approach in this case is to give her nothing, no reprimand, no attention, no “are you feeling frustrated?” Nothing. Very soon, the faffing, deprived of oxygen, dies out. I understand that she would like another 10 minutes at home and I also understand that, like all children, she is wanting to feel where the boundary is. (The boundary is my crossed arms and sour face). As parents, most of us are clearly overthinking it. “Are you sure you don’t just need to eat a banana?” I will say when one of my children kicks off. It infuriates them. It invalidates their feelings. It makes them feel dismissed until they howl with rage. Meanwhile, they just need to eat a banana. Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist based in New York