Curious to hear what you all think. Is this really a new trend, or not really? And if it is, is it a good thing, or bad thing?
Neither my friends nor I have kids old enough to be parents themselves, so I have no idea what parenting is like these days.
https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/fafo-gentle-parenting-625da658
Apologies, I don’t have a gift link (perhaps someone can help?) But here are some key paragraphs from the article:
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.
FAFO (often pronounced “faff-oh”) 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.
Parenting that’s light on discipline has dominated the culture in recent decades. But critics blame the approach for some of Gen Z ’s problems in adulthood. They cite surveys that show young adults struggling with workplace relationships (was it because their parents never told them “no”?) and suffering from depression and anxiety (was it because their parents refereed all their problems?).
For parents who have spent years trying to meet their children’s emotional needs without slipping into overt permissiveness, FAFO can sound blessedly simple.
Here’s an article about same topic for free access.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/what-is-fafo-parenting-1.7462555
So, basically to not raise kids as entitled snowflakes, we’re returning to the earlier era of how generations of parents raised their kids?!?
There’s a different way?
My mom used to say, “Stop crying or I’ll nail your other foot to the floor.”
I always told our son at bedtime that if he even popped a toe over the side of his bed, the big black dog that lived under it would eat him alive. Then, when he looked and said there was no big black dog, I warned, “Well, then, the monsters in the closet will get you. Go to sleep.”
Meh.
Oh, good. I was hoping that by the time my kids had kids gentle parenting would be on the way out. I’m not sure how many times I could’ve bitten my tongue.
The “natural consequences” method is distinct from the authoritarian “because I [the parent] said so” method.
My only issue with the FAFO as portrayed in the first article is that the consequences aren’t natural. They are manipulated by the parent to be humiliating or harsher than “natural”. Natural consequences are great. A parent plotting the next great way to humiliate their kid on the internet or for bragging rights doesn’t do much to facilitate trust.
So we’re the only parents that threw our kid’s into the pond? 
…
My kids fell into the pond without any parent intervention! 
Thinking about it, I guess our kids experienced “natural consequences,” but we didn’t threaten them or add extra hardships on top of the consequences they created for themselves. Some of the “FAFO” anecdotes seem a little more harsh than what I’d be comfortable with.
Lol. When we told our kid’s that we’re taking away their electronics like phone or iPad they were like “OK, here”… Well, that didn’t work… 
Exactly. Teaching your kids to break someone’s stuff, throw it away, or throw them in a pond because they didn’t listen to you, MIGHT make them listen to you the next time, but it will even more likely teach them to break other people’s stuff when they are mad at them.
That being said, sometimes I, as a parent, waited for natural consequences to occur and they didn’t. My kid wasn’t good about brushing teeth or wearing his Invisalign. I keep telling him he’d get cavities/have to wear his Invisalign longer. Everytime we went for a checkup, he got a stellar report. Maybe it was my lesson to be learned about fighting about things that aren’t even going to happen. Eventually, the natural consequences kicked in and he became an avid toothbrusher when he got a girlfriend.
I shudder when the phrase “latest trend” is used to refer to parenting. This is not fashion choices, parenting really should not be TRENDY.
I will be glad if this means the end of snowplow parenting though.
“Natural consequences” can be effective, like with the example of not wearing a coat on a cold day.
However, it may not be effective if the “natural consequences” are:
Ha! First time I heard that phrase (snowplow parenting). I had to look it up 
I agree. There is a middle ground. I do worry about Gen Z’s ability to cope with adulthood, as many of them had parents who orchestrated every aspect of their lives. Read any of the FB college parents’ groups for daily evidence of this. Questions about how their kids will change their sheets on a lofted bed, what if they forget their key and get locked out of their room, what if they refuse to wear the winter coat mom bought them, etc.
My oldest D was a spirited child at times. We only had one FAFO moment with her when she mouthed off after being warned and we canceled a Girl Scout trip that she was scheduled to leave on and was really looking forward to. She still remembers that penalty.
This. I don’t feel my parenting is overly permissive but I do aim for it to be respectful of my children as individuals and to model emotional regulation. I treat them the way I hope they will treat others when they go out into the world (including modeling how to apologize if I get something wrong). I certainly don’t think I get it right 100 percent of the time but my goal has always been for my kids to choose to do the right thing not out of fear of my reaction but because they intrinsically strive to do the right thing even when I’m not there to see. I don’t feel I need to be their first bully in order to teach that.
Like some others chiming in, we also strove to set firm boundaries when necessary, but to not be overly harsh.
Our first kid was a real challenge until his frontal lobe switched on at age 4. So we read a lot of parenting books and talked to doctors, teachers, etc. We strove to adopt an authoritative (not authoritarian) style of parenting, and it worked out well. Many of our friends were either permissive parents (which would not have worked well for our kids), and a small number used harsh or corporal punishment, to which we are opposed. About 1/3 of our friends parented very similar to us. Yet we realized that almost all of these were good people trying their best and their kids were loved and cared for.
We were big on natural consequences, but did have firm boundaries around things that mattered most to us (e.g., safety, sleep, and kindness). We always followed through with a threatened consequence, so we were super careful about proposing consequences. There was a huge emphasis on teaching emotional regulation, as the first kid has a stable mood but low emotional intelligence and the other one has high emotional intelligence but BIG feelings.
We did a lot of the same things that “gentle parents” do, in that we treat our kids with respect and try to practice what we preach. However. Some of the gentle parenting things I’ve seen overestimate the maturity and logical capabilities of children, and the patience of adults. You can’t reason with a hungry / tired toddler, and you can’t let kids grow up thinking every adult will have the patience of a saint.
Heck, sometimes adults need a time-out. Once our kids were 5 or so, we didn’t even need to force them into time-out anymore, since us parents modeled putting ourselves in time-out when we needed it. It was just a normal part of being human and they became adept at using that tool at a young age. We have explicitly taught them pretty advanced emotional regulation tools as they’ve grown. We’ve worked hard to learn those ourselves and are happy we can pass that down to our kids.
I can just see all the #FAFO posts by parents on social media now. Proudly holding up smashed Lego sets because Johnny did hop up to clean up his mess when told to. Or a soaking wet kid whose parents poured water over his head for not getting out of bed when the alarm first went off. Complete with picture of smiling parent and a humiliated kid.
If your first thought is to step it up 20 notches to gain compliance, but you put no thought into figuring out what the issue is (the kid needs time to transition, the kid is staying up too late), you aren’t parenting, you’re playing prison guard.
The wearing of winter coats seems to be a common example. Perhaps it is worth noting that, on average, women tend to feel colder than men, and older people tend to feel colder than younger people. So it may not be too surprising that mothers can feel that the weather is cold enough to require a winter coat, but their child or adult kid (particularly if male) does not at the same time.