Is FAFO parenting a new fad, or a useful long-term approach? And can you get burnout from gentle parenting?
Gina*, a 36-year-old from Auckland, has a ‘gentle parenting’ approach with her three-year-old son and five-year-old daughter. “My parents did the naughty-step, wooden-spoon parenting, which made me determined to do things differently.” Her husband feels the same.
Gentle parenting emphasises empathy, respect, and understanding toward children. Parents try to regulate their own emotions, help their children identify and manage their emotions, and lean into physical and emotional affection.
It’s important to Gina to validate her children’s feelings and give them options, so they can respond to situations in a way they can learn from. “For example, if my son has a playdate or is at kindy and melts down over another child using a toy, I might say, ‘I can tell you’re sad because you wanted that toy’ and offer choices like ‘why don’t you use that other toy’ or ‘what might you play with instead?’.” But she knows that saying ‘no’ is often needed.
However, recently Gina has been wondering if she’s being too permissive as a parent. If her daughter leaves a raincoat or lunchbox at home, Gina parachutes them into school. She does set boundaries but if her kids cross them – for instance, stealing chocolate and lying about it – she doesn’t always enforce consequences, such as no sweet treats for a month. “So they may feel they can get away with things.” Her kids are young, but she’s worrying about how to parent when they’re older.
“Honestly, I don’t know if I’m doing it [parenting] right. Sometimes I think I’m too soft. And always trying to stay calm is exhausting.”
She’s interested in knowing more about FAFO parenting, though she’s very hesitant about it. “I’m not a big fan of the F word.”
What is FAFO Parenting?
It’s an acronym for ‘f**k around and find out’. Some people prefer to call it ‘eff around and find out’.
FAFO is a child-rearing style that focuses on natural consequences. Parents can ask things of and remind their children, but if a child makes a choice (for example, not packing a lunch), then they ‘find out’ the natural outcome of that choice (for example, being hungry at school). If they miss a bus because they were dawdling, they have to walk or catch a later bus, rather than you dropping them off.
The term FAFO parenting entered the mainstream lexicon when Ellen Gamerman wrote a Wall Street Journal article last July titled ‘Goodbye Gentle Parenting, Hello F-Around and Find Out’.
“FAFO, often pronounced far-fo,” she wrote, “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.”
She gets the appeal. “For parents who have spent years trying to meet their children’s emotional needs without slipping into overt permissiveness, FAFO can sound blessedly simple.”
Gamerman has the following case study. “Carla Dillon tried lots of ways to discipline her rambunctious 13-year-old, including making him write the same contrite sentence 100 times. But when he sprayed her with a water gun at a campground after she asked him not to, she saw only one option: she threw him in the pond, clothes and all. Some of the best lessons in life are the hard ones, she said.”
“She said her son, who is comfortable in the water, thought it was hilarious but still learned a lesson.”
The WSJ story also introduces Andrea Mata, a child psychologist who has made a YouTube video ‘Why Parents Are RUNNING Away From Gentle Parenting!’. “Recently, her 8-year-old son kept having accidents in what Mata thought was him intentionally disregarding the urge to go to the bathroom during a fun activity. After attempts to correct it, she told the boy to take his allowance and buy himself new underpants.”
“She later discovered the problem was related to a medical issue, which was resolved, and she has since apologized to him. But she didn’t reimburse him since he’d lied about it and tried to cover it up, and she stands by the idea of repercussions when children intentionally fall short of expected behaviour.”
(Um… just nope.)
Gamerman, who wrote this WSJ article, doesn’t explicitly say if she’s for or against FAFO parenting. But two weeks after the article, the Wall Street Journal published a different article by Erica Komisar, who had a strong opinion. Her article is called ‘Don’t Fool Around With FAFO Parenting’.
Komisar wrote that “the latest child-rearing fad, the Journal reports, is ‘FAFO parenting’. Let’s hope it passes quickly. The spelled-out acronym is unprintable in a family newspaper, but we’ll approximate it as ‘fool around and find out’. It elevates consequences over the ‘gentle parenting methods that have helped shape Gen Z,’ according to the Journal. Didn’t feed the dog? No food for you. Realize a particular after-school activity isn’t for you? Tough luck – you’ll do it until you pay for the gear we bought you. While these tactics may be deployed in a spirit of tough love or humor, they ‘confuse humiliation for discipline’.”
Following the Wall Street Journal pieces, Emine Saner wrote a Guardian story called ‘The rise of Fafo parenting: is this the end of gentle child rearing?’. It says “gentle parenting began about 10 years ago as a response to the more authoritarian 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.”
So FAFO parenting is a backlash to a backlash to a backlash.
Sander writes that “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 Professor Ellie Lee, director of the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies at the University of Kent.”
MomTok
Now you can watch FAFO parenting clips on social media, particularly MomTok on TikTok. Here’s a case study from the Guardian. “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. She films herself retrieving the tablet, now with a cracked screen. The video has been watched 4.9 million times, and Carter was congratulated in the comments, with one person writing ‘learning FAFO at an early age: top-tier parenting’.”
I looked up another TikTok video. A boy, maybe four years old, says “I’m going to a different house because you don’t wanna cuddle me, I wanna sleep with you and you said no”. His mother replies: “you’re leaving to a different house because I won’t let you sleep in our room? Yeah, see ya”. He asks her to help open the door, she says ‘gladly’, he bounds out, and she turns the outdoor light off. There’s a jump cut in the video, so we don’t know how long he was crying and pounding on the door before his mother opens it and says “that’s what I thought”. He had learned, said his mother, “the meaning of Fafo”. The video has been liked more than 1.5 million times.
The FAFO parenting depicted and encouraged on social media, particularly on ‘MomTok’, seems to lean into mean, rather than no nonsense. Some posts seem performative. As the Guardian says, “this is online-influenced child rearing, where extremes are pushed, nuance is out and polarisation is in”. Things may be quite different in the real world.
What’s best?
Before considering the pros and cons of FAFO parenting, let’s look at a hugely influential rubric. The late Diana Baumrind – an American developmental psychologist – revolutionised understanding of parenting in the 1960s. Baumrind identified four parenting styles: authoritative, authoritarian, permissive, and uninvolved. They’re based on responsiveness (warmth and support) and ‘demandingness’ (control and expectations). You can probably guess which two are not great.
Research suggests that the authoritative style leads to the best outcomes for children. Psychotherapist Amy Morin says “parents who exhibit this style listen to their kids and provide love and warmth in addition to limits and fair discipline”.
Gentle parenting can be seen as a more emotionally focused branch of authoritative parenting – but one that may at times downplay structure or consequences. Research supports many of the principles behind gentle parenting.
Burnout?
The way parenting styles effects children is the most important thing. But it’s worth thinking about how these approaches affect parents, too.
How gentle parenting affects parents received little scrutiny until a 2024 academic paper called “‘Trying to remain calm…but I do reach my limit sometimes’: an exploration of the meaning of gentle parenting’.
The authors write that “the pressures to fulfil ‘perfect’ parenting standards, and the explosion of ‘expert’ parenting advice on social media have fuelled the rise of ‘gentle parenting’”.
“Overall, gentle parents reported high levels of parenting satisfaction and efficacy but a subset of gentle parents who were highly critical of themselves reported significantly lower levels of efficacy than the rest of the sample. Statements of parenting uncertainty and burnout were present in over one-third of the gentle parent sample”.
Yep, burnout from gentle parenting is a thing. Is FAFO a better approach?
*Look out for Part 2 in a week’s time. Can FAFO parenting align at all with gentle parenting, or is it ‘revenge parenting’? What does FWMAFO stand for? And what does a New Zealand parenting coach think?
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