'tender toward' is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
It is usually used in the context of being kind, gentle, or affectionate to someone or something. Example: He felt a tender toward his grandmother as he hugged her goodbye.
Strand feels toward that missing child (and we feel toward Strand, from whom the child always seems in some crucial way to be missing) tenderness without an object of tenderness, since you can't feel tender toward an absence.
He was tender toward the breed, regardless of partisan or ideological affiliation.
Respectful of its characters, even tender toward them, his book nonetheless errs on the side of Bishop's reticence.
I felt tender toward this array of brave, intelligent humans, even as I felt hopelessness about the future.
We now have a much broader sense of what our history is, which is more social, and tender toward the underprivileged.
So for a moment Mather imagines that Maureen has grown suddenly tender toward him, even with the boyfriend lurking in the bedroom.
The Sound and the Fury was always the book that Faulkner felt "tenderest toward," he said, "the most gallant, the most magnificent failure" of all his novels.
Nothing new there – except Osborne illustrated the government's tilt towards the right in his tender words toward classes of public servants traditionally beloved by Tory backbenchers.
I do have enormously tender feelings toward a great many people and things and creatures.
The team had also asked that same crowd to write tombstone epitaphs for broccoli, as a way of eliciting possible tender feelings toward the product.
Recognizing the strength of Pashtun bonds, and looking to consolidate his power rather than create resistance, the governor, Gul Agha Shirzai, is taking a fairly tender approach toward former Taliban.
