Anne Pezalla

Who they are

Pezalla's affiliation is given on the 2024 paper as Macalester College. The paper reports a survey conducted with parents in the Midwest, Southeast and Southwest of the United States.

This page records only what the papers and their published records state. Biography beyond the cited work is not given here.

Key papers

"Trying to remain calm...but I do reach my limit sometimes": an exploration of the meaning of gentle parenting (2024), with Davidson. The authors surveyed 100 parents of at least one child aged two to seven in three regions of the United States. Forty-nine identified as gentle parents. The paper opens by noting that, despite its popularity, gentle parenting "has received no empirical scrutiny". Inductive analysis described the approach as one that stresses high parental affection and emotion regulation for both parent and child. The authors found that it stood apart from established measures of parenting in its emphasis on boundaries, though parents did not enforce those boundaries in a uniform way. Gentle parents generally reported high satisfaction and efficacy, but a subset who were highly critical of themselves reported significantly lower efficacy than the rest of the sample, and statements of uncertainty and burnout appeared in more than a third of the gentle parent group.

Key ideas

The study's main contribution is descriptive. It gives a first account of what a popular label means in practice, and it shows that the label covers a range of approaches to limits. The authors list its limits plainly: a small sample that was mostly White and highly educated, self-reports rather than observation, no observational data on parent and child together, and a single point in time. The study measured parents and did not measure child outcomes, so it cannot say whether gentle parenting helps children. The authors call for observational and longitudinal work.

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