'AITA for telling my sister that 'gentle parenting' is BS and kicking her out?' UPDATED

"AITA for telling my sister that 'gentle parenting' is BS and kicking her out?"

My younger sister and her family, which includes her, her husband, and 2 kids (3F, 5M), were visiting my husband and I and staying at our home for a week. A little background: We don’t live in the same state. I’ve had kids of my own but they are young adults now and out of the house.

My sister is much younger than me and is still in the young family stage. We’ve always had a pretty close and good relationship despite our age gap. My sister does gentle parenting. I’d never heard of that before she came to stay with us because I guess I’m out of the loop since my kids are grown now. She explained to me that gentle parenting means they don’t do time out, don’t do grounding, etc...

Instead, they just talk about their feelings. I thought that was a bit odd because it sounds like there is zero discipline but didn’t say anything as to not rock the boat. Until I saw gentle parenting in action and was appalled. During the first 2 days of their stay, her daughter drew on my walls with crayon.

And her son pulled up flowers I had recently planted in my garden bed and threw a rock at my car parked in the driveway. To top it all off, they both kept constantly pulling my golden retrievers hair and hitting my dog in the face. My dog is very sweet and a little on the older side so she’s very calm. She never bit, attempted to bite, or did anything that would harm or spook the kids.

In every instance, I was expecting my sister or her husband to discipline the kids. They never did. So I did. Or at least I tried. Just me telling her kids to stop, or scolding them in the slightest made my sister lose her mind. She told me it’s not my place to discipline them.

I told her someone has to because they’re messing up my home but I agree it should be their parents scolding them, however, it seems their parents are not willing to. I told her they need a fairly stern punishment for what they’ve been doing and she started going off about how they refuse to spank their kids like we were spanked as kids.

I told her I’m NOT suggesting she spank her kids but a stern talking to and making them clean up what they destroyed would be a good idea. She said what her kids were doing was not worth what I would call discipline. All she did in every instance was ask them “what kind of feelings are you having that made you do that?” And that was it.

So I realized this behavior was not going to stop and my husband and I told them they need to find a hotel or go home. Even though we had planned for them to stay a full week, we couldn’t handle more than 2 days because of the gentle parenting. I told her the gentle parenting is going to cause her kids to have a very hard life and rude awakening someday, probably even jail time.

She argued back and really lost it when I told her “this hippy dippy gentle parenting crap is a scam and will ruin your kids life” which I regret now but boiled over in the moment. Now she won’t speak to me and our mom says I’m in the wrong for kicking them out when they planned on staying longer. Am I the ahole?

Here's what people had to say to OP:

Conscious-Practice79 said:

NTA. If you went to their house and drew on the walls, how would they react? Your sister is going to have a rude awakening when The kids start school. Life is going to be hard for them and her.

Dlodancer said:

NTA, their gentle parenting can have consequences without hitting out yelling. “You drew on the wall, so you need to clean it” “You pulled out a plant, so you need to replant it and apologize."

[deleted] said:

NTA. That isn't gentle parenting. Gentle parenting in fact does include time outs and nonviolent punishments. It's just that nondestructive behaviors are met with questions and an attempt to develop their emotional maturity early so that they can develop reasoning skills by 7-10 years old that properly guide them with sense instead of fear.

It absolutely is NOT allowing your children to destroy their environment while asking about their feelings. This is your sister caving to her motherly instincts and completely surrendering her common sense. Personally, I would've thrown them out the second she went off the first time. You're not going to scream at me for being upset that your family is destroying my home.

October1966 said:

Your home, your rules. I threw my SIL out because she wouldn't control her kids and I caught all manner of crap about it. Today I was vindicated after 23 years. Her daughter ran off to Vegas to get married but didn't invite my despicable MIL because the "venue didn't have enough room for her." In Vegas. I tried to warn them, but now I'm laughing my butt off. Totally not TA.

Celtedge65 said:

NTA. I've seen gentle parenting and the kids become terrors. Wait until Mommy has to pay because the little darlings did something that she doesn't think is worth getting upset about. Also nc because she has no regard for your property or your pets Tell mom she can put the family up while they destroy her home and torture her pets the best laid plans of mice and men ofimes go awry.

Limp_Ganache2983 said:

What your sister is doing isn’t “gentle parenting” There are no natural consequences. We used this technique with our daughter, who is now 10. Draw on the wall with crayons/pens/pencils? They go away, and you don’t get them back for quite a while. Pulling the. Dogs hair? No playing with the dog. And so on. It works. That aside, you were quite correct, she wasn’t parenting at all. I’d have kicked her out too.

UPDATE:

Someone either sent my sister my original post or she read it herself. She texted me a link to my post and said she can’t believe I’m airing our family drama online. She told me she was leaning towards working out our differences but now that I’ve posted it on here, she’s done, and blocked me. Since I can’t reach her by phone, I’ll address her on here since she’s clearly reading this.

Allison, I do love you and have always cherished our relationship but if you feel like you’re done then that’s ok, I can’t change your mind. Look at me talking about feelings, you should be proud. At this point I’m pretty done too so here it is.

You are family but that doesn’t mean I am going to be a pushover and allow your children to behave the way they did in my home, especially pulling Bella’s hair and smacking her in the face. That was animal abuse. It was all completely unacceptable and I don’t understand how you allow them to behave the way you and Stephen allow them to.

Some people have suggested I send you a bill for the damage your kids caused but I’m not going to do that, I’ll pay for the repairs but only because I know this will never happen again since your kids are not welcome back at my home unless you drastically change your parenting style and finally implement legitimate discipline.

I’m still not saying you need to physically discipline them, but you need to do some form of actual discipline before it’s too late and their future is ruined. I don’t understand why you have decided to gentle parent (or whatever your form of gentle parenting is) and it has changed you as a person.

You don’t act the way you use to and now you are offended by everything and don’t agree with the way anyone else does anything. I just don’t understand what happened. I encourage you to look at some of the comments on the original post to prove to you 99% of people would have done exactly what I did in the situation and I was not just being harsh.

There has to be consequences for bad behavior or else you are doing your kids a disservice which is not kind on your part. When you read the comments, some have good parenting advice and others are harsh. But hey, that’s life, it’s not so gentle.