The parenting method RIE — that stands for Resources for Infant Educarers and is pronounced “rye” — and its most famous practitioner, Janet Lansbury, are having another high-profile moment, with interviews this year by Ezra Klein in The Times and Ariel Levy in The New Yorker. And because I’m old and cranky and have been on the parenting beat for a minute, my gut response to this resurgence is: Again? I remember RIE’s previous moments in the sun, with features in Vanity Fair in 2014 and The Daily Beast in 2017.
“At its core,” Klein explained, “RIE simply says to view children, even infants, as whole people and to treat them with respect.” The idea, in other words, is to listen to our children and allow them to lead the caregiving process. Meanwhile, fuzzily defined approaches continue to be popular, with #gentleparenting (1.3 billion views) and #respectfulparenting (430 million views) percolating on TikTok, and seem to take some cues from RIE but also freestyle into a sort of open-source mélange, interpreted and remixed by moms across the country.
Gentle or respectful parenting sounds great — after all, who doesn’t want to be gentle and respectful to our children? But then you get into the details of RIE, and they are quite prescriptive. As The Daily Beast put it, “It has its own tight-knit circle of instructors; its own rituals (the narration of the diaper change); its own spare aesthetic (no mirrors, no dangling mobiles, no Baby Einstein); and its own set of guidelines (no singing, no rocking, no playpens). All of this honors the baby’s ‘struggle’ and builds a more ‘authentic self,’ proponents believe.”
It’s well meaning but also pretty time intensive and maybe a bit dour. (As one Twitter wit put it to me, “Are there inauthentic children?”)
I’m not trying to pick on RIE in particular. Other philosophies have trended semi-recently: free-range parenting, French parenting and tiger parenting, to name a few. If you find RIE or any of these other methods beneficial to your kids and it makes you feel more confident and less agitated as a parent, that’s fantastic, and you should keep using them. But having read parenting literature for years, having seen trends come and go and having witnessed the individuality of my own kids and their peers and the differences in their family situations, I’m confident that there are numerous ways to raise thriving kids without cleaving precisely to one particular parenting dogma.
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