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A couple of weeks ago, a video posted on TikTok by Paige Carter, a mother in Florida, went viral. Carter explained that she had thrown her daughter’s iPad out of the window when she had been misbehaving on the way to school, and she films herself retrieving the tablet, now with a cracked screen. The video has been watched 4.9m times, and Carter was congratulated in the comments, with one person writing “Learning Fafo at an early age: top tier parenting.” Welcome to the parenting trend that doesn’t seem to be disappearing: “Fuck around and find out.”
In another video, when a small child announces he is going to leave home, his mother says “see ya”, shuts the front door behind him, and turns off the outside light – then opens the door to him screaming and pounding to be let back in (it has been liked 1.5m times). He had learned, said his mother, “the meaning of Fafo”.
Last summer, a piece in the Wall Street Journal heralded the rise of Fafo parenting and the end of “gentle parenting” – a trend that began about 10 years ago as a response to the more authoritarian “naughty step” parenting of the early 2000s, which has been blamed for everything from entitled young adults destined for disappointment by the cruel realities of life to societal collapse itself. Gentle parents reported being exhausted from taking the lead from their child, carefully explaining every decision, watching their every move and naming each emotion their child might be feeling, in a calm and tender way.
A backlash against gentle parenting had been brewing for some time. “You could watch Instagram all day with people taking the mickey out of it,” says Prof Ellie Lee, director of the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies at the University of Kent. She says that “parenting has become very intensive”.
Advocates of Fafo say it teaches their child independence and the consequences of their actions, even if those consequences are uncomfortable or, at the extreme end, harsh. Critics say it relies too heavily on fear and humiliation, and that while children might comply as a result, it damages trust. Done properly, however, there isn’t much to separate the styles: true gentle parenting embraces boundaries and consequences, and Fafo doesn’t have to be punishing. But this is online-influenced child rearing, where extremes are pushed, nuance is out and polarisation is in.
“I’m a fan of children experiencing natural consequences, at the level of ‘I’m not going to keep battling with my child about them wearing a coat,’” says Dr Maryhan Munt, a psychologist and host of the How Not to Screw Up Your Kids podcast. “If they don’t tidy away their toys, and someone treads on one, something gets broken. That, I think, can be good learning. What I have more of an issue with is: ‘OK, see what it’s like to try that fizzy drink you keep going on and on about.’ As parents, our role is to provide the boundaries and scaffolding for our children. Where it’s relevant, there can be natural consequences. But when we tip over the edge to almost like, ‘I can’t be bothered, if that’s what you want to do, just do it,’ then I think that’s where it sends the wrong message.”
Gentle parenting methods, or at least what people often think that involves, can leave parents feeling burned out, says Dr Emma Svanberg, a psychologist and author of Parenting for Humans. “For me, that’s about parents feeling they’ve been told they must validate, empathise, explain and absorb dysregulation without ever having experienced this themselves in their own childhood, and with very little structural support. I think Fafo might be a reaction to that – a pendulum swing from something that can be interpreted as permissive to something that can seem more authoritarian.”
Fafo is appealing, Svanberg says, because “on an immediate, explicit level it gives permission for parents to relax, to bring in natural consequences rather than endless negotiation with an unwilling, ‘non-compliant’ child”. For those parents who grew up in the 90s, they know where they are with a tough love style. The emergence of Fafo, she says, “happened at the same time as nostalgia for 1990s parenting, and we tend to find it easier to repeat patterns which are familiar to us. After a lot of pressure on parents to parent in specific, child-focused ways in the context of intensive parenting, it is almost inevitable that there would be some shift on a societal level.”
Also, adds Munt, new parents observing older childen who have been raised “gently” may feel the method was not all that good for them: “The evidence seems to be that we’re just getting more and more anxious children.”
But there’s a danger in taking Fafo too far. Svanberg says: “Children don’t just learn from consequences; they learn from how adults stay present with them through those consequences. If Fafo becomes emotionally hands-off – ‘you’ll learn the hard way, I’m not getting involved’ – children may internalise shame, feel unsupported or struggle to make sense of experiences developmentally beyond their capacity. The risk isn’t independence, it’s emotional isolation and shame.”
When Gaby Gonzalez became a mother and joined toddler groups, she noticed different styles among other mothers. “You have the helicopter parents, you have the one who intervenes every two minutes.” Fafo parenting appealed to her. “The acronym sounds harsh, but you are allowing a safe, age-appropriate consequence instead of constant intervention.” Given her children’s young ages, these are small-scale. If her three-year-old wants to jump in a puddle in the park, Gonzalez will let him, even if it means taking off his wet clothes in the car on the way home. “We do a simple talk-through. I’ll ask him, ‘Oh, what happened? You’re cold. Why are you cold?’”
Gonzalez, 41, is from Los Angeles, raised by Mexican parents “in a Fafo style, now I think of it”. At 12, she was expected to contribute to the family business, and at 13, living in Mexico for a while, she learned to drive, sitting on cushions to be able to see. “I had my dad there to support me, because I had a clear and safe dynamic with them, [but] I never experienced ‘gentle parenting’ with them.”
Gonzalez now lives in the UK, and is building an online community of mothers. She thinks Fafo is slow to take off in the UK. “People are more cautious,” she says. “Whereas in America and other places in Europe, I see people embracing it.” It’s a style, she hopes, that will shape the “children I want to raise, and I don’t want to raise asshole kids. I need to make sure [my son is] going to be a great, productive citizen of the world, who is inclusive and worldly and open to experiences.”
You could argue that that is a fairly universal parenting goal, equally important in gentle parenting – it’s just that it has been misinterpreted. “What many people have practised under the guise of ‘gentle parenting’ is actually high-intensity, child-centred, permissive parenting with very little attention to adult limits, power or context,” says Svanberg. “Many parents have found this incredibly overwhelming because when children don’t have clear boundaries or expectations placed on them, and parents are stressed to the max because of lack of support, children tend to escalate. Fafo pushes back against the idea that parents must prevent all discomfort or distress. The risk is that it swings the pendulum from overinvolvement to under-responsiveness, and even punitive withdrawal.”
Is the permissive end of gentle parenting in danger of raising “asshole” kids? “Absolutely,” says Gonzalez with a laugh. She saw it in her career as an early years specialist. “If you don’t have all the right tools and knowledge, it can bite you in the ass. Children thrive within clear rules, guidance and boundaries. That’s where I’m coming from.” The Fafo style, she says, is not “parenting running loose. You have to make sure that you know what it is and be safe.” This is not parenting for the lazy, either – the way Gonzalez describes her approach sounds as much work as gentle parenting, whether it’s helping your child understand the results of their actions or picking up the pieces when things go wrong for them.
Typical Fafo examples that have emerged online include forgoing the battle to get a child to wear their coat and letting them get cold instead, or letting them go to bed hungry if they refuse to eat their dinner. Scenarios such as these won’t seem all that remarkable to anyone who grew up in the last century, but it is the sort of faultline that has opened up, especially on social media, between parents at each extreme. Discussions about parenting styles, says Lee, “have now become so tied to identity expression”.
The idea of “parenting styles” emerged in the 1960s, with the American psychologist and researcher Diana Baumrind’s three types: authoritarian, permissive and, taking the best aspects of both, authoritative. “It was [Baumrind] trying to find a way through the conflicts that were emerging between a traditionalist view of relationships between generations, and all the things that were starting to become characteristic of the 60s,” says Lee. Authoritative parenting – which many gentle and Fafo parents would both say they’re doing – “has, at its centre, a combination of what she calls warmth and demandingness”.
It requires a sense of adult, or parental, authority, which in turn requires a clear distinction between adults and children. “What’s happened over time is that whole borderline between adulthood and childhood has become very fragmented,” says Lee. In broad terms, childhoods are no longer what they were – children’s time is regimented and filled by their parents; they lack physical spaces to play; they’re exposed to adult media and academically tested relentlessly at school – but neither are adulthoods. Grown-up children are remaining at home for longer, housing is unaffordable and jobs are unstable. Then add in the general online noise and conflicting messages, as well as the polarisation of everything, including parenting.
“People are, in quite an individuated type of way, trying to work through it,” says Lee. “They flip-flop between messages that tell them you’ve got to pay intense, continual attention to every single feeling your child has about anything, to telling your child to Fafo. I think both are horrible.”
Is there a political dimension to each? As the Wall Street Journal article put it: “The paradigm of gentle parents versus Fafo parents isn’t quite Snowflake Kids versus Maga Kids, but there’s a whiff of that.” Lee says: “There may be some of that going on.” The term Fafo has a rightwing flavour: on social media, it is more likely to be used not in a parenting context, but in approving posts about the actions of ICE in the US. There is a general “anti-woke” dimension to “some of the reaction to gentle parenting,” says Lee. “It would be unsurprising if it’s become bound up with a culture war.” (For the record, Gonzalez would definitely not describe herself as rightwing.)
But Lee adds it is hard to make broad claims about parenting and political leaning. Look at the discussion about vaccination in the US, she points out. The US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, a vaccine critic, has slashed routine childhood vaccinations. “You might think about that as part of Trumpism and Maga, but it’s got a big appeal among so-called crunchy mums [who favour a natural lifestyle], attachment mothers and that alternative medicine world. It’s quite difficult to map politics on to some of these phenomena.”
If there is a backlash against gentle parenting, it’s hardly new. It has been nearly 30 years since sociologist Sharon Hays wrote The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood on the intensification of child rearing, shouldered predominantly by mothers. “There’s been a ramping-up of demands which say to mothers, in particular, that you’ve got to spend more time with your children, otherwise you’re going to screw them up and society is going to fail,” says Lee.
“I think the popularity of Fafo tells us less about parents becoming harsher or more relaxed, and more about how unsupported families are,” says Svanberg. “When parenting advice swings between extremes, it often reflects structural failure – too little community, too little rest, too much pressure on individual parents to get it ‘right’.”
Fafo parenting is just the latest to grab attention online. “Then it will be something else, but it’ll be another form of the same thing,” says Lee. There are already signs of this, of course. Scrolling through TikTok, I spotted a parenting style that isn’t child-led and where consequences for actions play out, but without the humiliation or the “I told you so” stance that some parents online seem to revel in. Its name? Gentle Fafo.
