“It’s okay, you will get it next time.”

When it comes from a classmate, it feels comforting. But when your dad, the man who has been pushing you to do every homework, says it, it feels like something is missing. Suddenly, you are free.

But you might also feel the weightlessness of indulging without someone watching. The contrast between past pressure and present freedom often divides people and breaks people down.

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At first, you might feel relieved and start to avoid doing homework. But after a period of time, anxiety pours in. When gentle parenting gradually turns into detachment, and the freedom given becomes a source of pressure, it leaves my peers in different states: some become completely independent, others feel trapped between freedom and the fear of disappointing their parents, and some simply stop trying.

According to the Cleveland Clinic, “The goal of gentle parenting is to raise confident, independent, and happy children through empathy, respect, and understanding, and setting healthy boundaries.” In a boarding high school context, when your parents adopt a gentle parenting style, they don’t care about your grades anymore. But when strict parents suddenly change to gentle parenting as teens leave for boarding school, that 'gentleness' can feel like something else entirely: disengagement.

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First case, the sense of “you used to care too much, and now you don’t seem to care at all” makes you feel unseen, so you decide to abandon yourself: dropping out of classes and accumulating some absences. However, you involuntarily start to think about how much time to spend on each homework just before you are going out for a party. The internal guilt of “parents paying to send you here, you are just here partying” surfaces at any moment.

Every time you hear about your peers winning a math competition, you might think you could also achieve that if you didn’t choose to hang out every day. At the same time, parents are hoping for you to be independent and steer your own future. Living in the crack between freedom and trying hard learning makes you struggle between completely letting go and working hard.

In the second case, you are disappointed in your parents. You have no one to swing the A test paper in front of anymore. Loneliness sets in, and you can only fill the emptiness with more work on your desk and social events.

Even though your academic performance isn’t dropping, your mental state worsens every day. Neither realizes the other's intention. The “gentle” pedagogy comes across to you as indifference, while parents think they're giving independence. Eventually, the miscommunication becomes the seed for emotional distance that neither side knows how to fix.

In the best-case scenario, you maintain discipline every day, get As in all classes, never miss homework, and go to bed early every night. Even if your parents aren’t calling you three times a day to check in, you still text them to share your progress. The internal drive to success stays by your side until graduation, and it proves to your parents that their choice of gentle parenting is correct.

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Coming from an Asian family, my parents are not gentle. They’d stay up dissecting every wrong answer, not because they doubted me, but because they believed effort fixes everything. Now that I'm at boarding school and away from my parents, I am on my own with all the schoolwork.

It was hard to stay disciplined and control myself to stay on task at every second. Sometimes I just wish there was someone to remind me after I realize I've spent an hour scrolling on my phone. But the freedom of time allows me to explore different study habits. For some of my peers, however, they would slide their C paper into the recycle bin and tell their parents everything is going fine.

But independence doesn’t mean emotional disconnection. True gentle parenting means being present without pressure. It’s not constant supervision, but they still ask about the food you ate for dinner and the fun things that happened in English class today. From a child’s perspective, the kindest thing parents can sometimes do is simply keep asking.

Now, please reflect on your relationship with your parents: Is it in a state that you wish it to be? Do you think your parents are too “strict” or too “gentle?” It’s impossible to always be on the same page with your parents, but I know they are always making the effort to care about you. If the relationship isn’t ideal now, try to communicate and adjust.

Strict parents might push too hard, and gentle parents can fade too fast. In the end, we don’t need constant reminders to study—just reminders that someone still notices.