Parenting Doesn’t Have to Be This Hard. You Can Just Tell Your Kids What to Do. 

Editors’ Note: Parents of young children in the U.S. report finding parenthood to be increasingly difficult and stressful, even though life, by nearly every metric, is much better for us than it was for our ancestors. Why? There are probably many factors, and in our next three essays, we will explore a few of them. First, we will consider the burgeoning trend of “gentle” parenting and its cousin, “intensive” parenting, considering why these modes of parenting prove not only untenable for parents but stressful for kids. Next week, in our third essay in the series, we’ll revisit a recent New York Times interview on the new technology of IVF with genetic screening. What will the world of parenting and family planning look like when optimizing the conception and upbringing of our children becomes a moral imperative? We hope to explore that question and, in doing so, push ourselves and our readers to think about what a better path may look like. 

We hope you enjoy reading. 

Not long ago, I was chatting with a family friend in her 60s, who mentioned that her daughter was afraid to have kids. “I tried to tell her it doesn’t have to be as hard as she thinks,” the mother, who would like a grandchild, told me; “but she doesn’t listen.”  

Married, educated, employed, and in her early thirties, the younger woman has explained over and again that becoming a mother while retaining one’s sanity is clearly impossible; that all her friends who do have kids are constantly on the edge of despair; and that mothering is a relentless, full-time job requiring total self-abnegation.  

So, clearly, she is listening all too well. Just not to her mother.  

Leaning in … to Hell? 

Earlier this year, pop singer Chappell Roan created a stir when she said with conviction: “All my friends who have kids are in hell.” This certainty that parenthood equals self-inflicted torture is now the baseline perception among what I would hazard amounts to a plurality of today’s increasingly child-free young women.  

Yes, this may be in part the result of ever more curated TikTok reels and Instagram posts and ever fewer organic interactions with actual parents and children. But posting and scrolling are no longer wholly separable from touching grass; these realities of life now bleed into and inform one another. Together—alongside economic considerations that may be influential but are ultimately not determinative—online perceptions of parenthood and the lived observations of actual parents are convincing more young women to forgo motherhood. 

Conservatives tend to blame two broad cultural trends (potent both online and off) for the decreasing birth rate. The first is so-called “Girl-boss” feminism, that is, the presumptive premise of higher education and mainstream popular culture that mothers who prioritize caring for their children are unfulfilled and oppressed, while women (whether mothers or not) who prioritize “leaning in” to their careers are fulfilled and empowered. The second trend is intensive parenting, the idea that children are best served by constant engagement, supervision, and enrichment—and the attendant normalization of time-consuming parenting practices that endlessly engage, supervise, and enrich.  

I am a thirty-eight-year-old mother of four boys. At baseline, I “lean out” more than “in” professionally, so that I can provide primary childcare. I also mostly resist the admittedly potent temptation to overparent my sons. So, I have no doubt that both the girl boss’s facile iteration of feminism and the intensive parent’s vampiric maternalism are in part to blame for young women’s hesitancy to embrace motherhood. Indeed, I have argued that these false idols reinforce one another: when children are perceived not as universally acclaimed goods in themselves but as morally neutral commodities—when motherhood is no longer seen as “breeding immortal beings” but as making a personal lifestyle choice like any other—the work of raising those children is reduced from a vocation to a hobby. Why spend time and money on a mere hobby only to be mediocre at it?  

Toddler Boss 

Nevertheless, the trend that I think really pushes having children today over the perceptual line from “challenging” to “impossible” is gentle parenting.  

In The New York Times, Caitlin Moscatello defines gentle parenting as “an approach that steers away from punishment and focuses instead on helping children to become more self-aware.” Gentle parents prioritize understanding children’s feelings over modifying their behavior. To the extent that they attempt to inch children toward compliance, they rely on the kids’ sympathy for their own feelings. For example, according to the Cleveland Clinic, instead of saying, “Stop [whining] and put on your shoes,” a parent trying to get a child out the door in the morning could say, “When you don’t get ready on time, it hurts my feelings and makes me anxious. Why are you having a hard time?” 

Notice the lack of any presumptive difference between right and wrong (“being late is rude”) or between adult and child (“because I said so”). In gentle parenting, erstwhile parental standards like these are verboten.   

Unsurprisingly, as Macalester College Professor Annie Pazella has documented, gentle parenting has adverse consequences for parental well-being. Parents in thrall to this trend report “hanging on for dear life.”  

Meanwhile, as anyone who’s been to a crowded playground in the past half-decade knows, gentle parenting is failing to deliver on its promises for children as well. As Abigail Shrier argues in Bad Therapy, constant parental narrativizing of children’s emotions fosters not inner peace and emotional resilience but deep fragility and endless dysregulation. According to Pazella, “parents often underestimate their kids’ resilience; … ironically, they may be doing a disservice with all the lavish care and heady, cerebral talk.” 

Yet gentle parenting is far more endemic and universal than either mainstream feminism or intensive parenting. Even today, you can stay home with children whom you let walk around town unaccompanied and refuse to sign up for travel soccer while still inhabiting a sizable slice of the mainstream. The assumption of basic adult authority in relation to one’s children, by contrast, is now countercultural in a way and to an extent that would have been unimaginable as few as twenty years ago. 

Hence, I would go so far as to claim that parenting today looks so prohibitively daunting more because of the perverse fruits of gentle parenting than any other single factor. 

More children now behave badly because more parents allow it. As a result, parents and nonparents alike have come (not incorrectly) to view having children as something akin to indentured servitude under poor conditions. As a parent, you are obliged to accept this lot: a tyrannical, unreasonable master; zero autonomy; and zero self-determination. “Big feelings” will govern your days. Unreasonable demands will dictate your decisions. Meanwhile, you are no longer ultimately in charge in your own home. A toddler will rule the roost—unless he’s particularly willful, in which case you will cede the authority you never claimed to therapists and counselors who give you elaborate instructions in how to manage said child without upsetting his sense of presumptive entitlement (by, say, asserting your mandate to be his parent). 

This does not sound appealing, nor should it. So, the question becomes: How can we empower today’s parents to reclaim their authority and, by extension, give motherhood the rebranding it so desperately needs in order to regain its vocational place in the lives of more women?  

Shrier recommends that parents follow their own intuitions instead of the influencer scripts that codify the hell of gentle parenting. And for Shrier’s Gen X peers, that probably makes sense. But many of my fellow millennials seem to have no intuition. This is not their fault; compared to Shrier’s contemporaries, they came of age in a world with less social density (more families with fewer than three children) and more infantilizing pacification (by the 1990s, the participation trophy era was well underway). So, parents and prospective parents under about age forty today cannot rediscover an authority that they never had. Instead of throwing out all scripts, then, they need a better one.  

Take it from me: girl boss or not, travel sports or not, having kids can be a lot easier and more fun if you just remember that you’re the grown-up, so you can just tell kids what to do. 

Less Gentle Parenting 

Children are not small adults. They are inherently unreasonable. It’s not important to understand why they don’t want to put their shoes on. They would rather continue playing than get ready to walk out the door because getting ready to walk out the door is boring. I would rather continue drinking my coffee than get ready to walk out the door, too. But, unlike me, my young children have not yet learned to delay gratification. It is my job to teach them how to behave in accordance with the need to do things we don’t want to do, so that they become habituated to that kind of multi-step self-discipline. So, I don’t ask, “Are you ready to put your shoes on?” or “Why don’t you want to put your shoes on?” I just tell them what to do: Put your shoes on. Clean up your room. Do your homework. And so on. Functional adults do these things without being told, regardless of how they feel. That starts in childhood, with being told to do them and being expected to comply—with alacrity and without dialogue.  

Raising Good Kids, Raising Expectations 

When an adult tells a child what to do, it is not a suggestion or a negotiation; it is a command. The parent is in charge. When we raise our expectations of preschoolers to include standards that they are entirely capable of meeting but that most people do not make their preschoolers meet, that consequence can be quite simple and not particularly punitive: “You have to come back downstairs to clear that plate,” which shortens bedtime story time; or, “I will stop reading or pause the television unless and until you sit calmly,” in a way that respects the privilege of hearing the book and/or watching the television. When, by contrast, we heed the “experts,” and wait until children are approaching middle school to expect basic follow-through and focus, we rob them of formative experiences they should be able to have—and ourselves of pleasant, increasingly reciprocal bonding time sharing those experiences.  

It is not “authoritarian” to deploy authority. In fact, some research shows that it is the best way to reliably raise children who are unentitled, focused, functional, and increasingly capable of mature interpersonal relationships, including with their parents.  

Obviously, we have to raise our expectations within reason. We cannot and should not subject three-year-olds to constant management. The expectation that a preschooler put her shoes on with alacrity and engage read-aloud books while sitting still is only functional within a broader framework in which child-directed play free of adult interference is the baseline. After all, children are not adults. Nevertheless, appropriate expectations are far higher than we’ve been primed to believe. Yes, a three-year-old should be expected to sit through a meal without screens and without whining. A nine-hour car ride, however, likely requires a distraction or two. Judiciousness about expectations, along with plenty of time when there are no expectations to be met, is essential to sustainably raising our standards.  

The Dangers of Narrating Fears 

Gentle parenting instructs us to engage and rehash our children’s fears and anxieties ad nauseum in a bid to make them feel understood. But there is a better time to talk out your kid’s fears: after he’s conquered them. In The Vanishing American Adult (2017), former U.S. senator Ben Sasse endorses this method for teaching preschoolers to ride a bike: dress them in snow pants and a helmet, take them to the top of a low-grade hill, and let go. When I did this with my sons, one of them was frightened. I let go anyway. Eventually, we discussed his fear of that hill. After he had mastered bike-riding. This kind of parenting—what Shrier calls “shake it off” parenting—is not born of parental indifference. On the contrary, it comes from the selfless conviction that children are capable of developing the capacity to engage, conquer, understand, and enjoy all the world has to offer.  

Coddling kids and encouraging them to ruminate makes most childhood  fears worse. It should come as no surprise that the more deference we give to children’s fears and hesitancies, the less mentally healthy those children become. Facing and conquering fears, by contrast, provides a boost in kids’ confidence and autonomy.  

Ironically enough, my husband and I mostly (not entirely, but mostly!) gentle parent our ten-year-old. While we remain most concerned with his characterological and behavioral formation, we also recognize that dialogic engagement with his emotions is now a part of that development. Why? For the same reason that we engage dialogically with one another’s emotions and those of our friends: unlike any four-year-old, these are reasonable, functional, self-aware people who typically evince both appropriate conduct and presumptive resilience. Which is exactly what all our children have a prayer of becoming by age ten or so, if we buck this gentle “parenting” trend and actually parent them.  

Image licensed via Adobe Stock.