Gentle parenting — or as BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey calls it, “permissive parenting” — was all the rage for a while. It encouraged parents to replace authority and traditional discipline with empathy, compassion, and positive reinforcement, promising flourishing children who were confident, autonomous, and respectful.
What it really did was birth entire generations of undisciplined kids ruled by their emotions, who loathe authority and don’t understand the first thing about natural consequences. You’ve seen the videos of parents futilely attempting to reason with their screaming 3-year-old who wants to eat dirt or permitting their 6-year-old to smear paint on the walls because she’s just “expressing herself.”
We’ve seen the fruits of gentle parenting. They’re poisoned.
The pendulum, however, is now swinging back. Authoritative parenting — modernly called FAFO, or “f**k around and find out,” parenting — is back in style. Even the Wall Street Journal says so. In a recent article titled “Goodbye Gentle Parenting, Hello ‘F— Around and Find Out,” author Ellen Gamerman defines FAFO parenting as an approach that “[teaches] children accountability through tangible repercussions.”
Allie is relieved that people are finally returning to common sense. “Yes, we should all be authoritative parents,” she says, noting that it’s possible to be an authority while still being gentle in the way the Bible instructs.
“If you’re not the authority in your home, your 3-year-old’s going to be the authority in your home. That is disordered, and you are setting them up for failure,” Allie warns.
“[Children] don’t have the emotional regulation, the maturity, to be able to do that.”
According to the WSJ article, FAFO parenting depends on letting children suffer the natural consequences of their actions. “FAFO is based on the idea that parents can ask and warn, but if a child breaks the rules, mom and dad aren’t standing in the way of the repercussions. Won’t bring your raincoat? Walk home in the downpour. Didn’t feel like having lasagna for dinner? Survive until breakfast. Left your toy on the floor again? Go find it in the trash under the lasagna you didn’t eat,” Gamerman writes.
She also stated that “critics blame the [gentle parenting] approach for some of Gen Z’s problems in adulthood.”
Allie agrees, “Yes! Like not being able to look in people’s eyes … and just, like, the overemphasis on, ‘I’m sorry, like, that’s outside of my realm of comfort. I’m not comfortable doing that. I don’t want to do that. That’s outside of my boundary.’”
The difference between the thriving Gen Zers and the stereotypical ones who get roasted for their laziness and entitlement, Allie says, is that the first group “had good parents … who told them no.”
“They had parents who said, … ‘You’re not going to get a phone when you’re 11. You’re not going to have social media when you’re 13,” she says.
“The parents who knew that their role was to steward and to be an authority and to love their children … while still being as kind and as gentle and as supportive as possible — those are the kids I’ve seen that can look you in the eye, that can sit through dinner and they’re not looking at their phone. They’re not obsessed with social media; they’re not obsessed with themselves; they’re willing to work hard even when it’s not fun.”
To hear more of Allie’s commentary, watch the episode above.
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