Label-focused parents can constantly feel as if they’re failing, an expert says.Westend61/iStockPhoto / Getty Images
The morning scene is frustratingly familiar: One kid is ready to go to school – eager to get her shoes on, hop in the car and sing the new Taylor Swift album with me at full blast along the way.
The other kid is rolling around on the living-room floor, moaning about how she’d like to stay home today. She doesn’t need school. Her friend didn’t go to school yesterday, so today can she stay home? Please, please, please?
My inclination on how to respond to this recurring scene, though, changes dramatically day by day, depending on what Instagrammed parenting advice of the moment is swirling around in my head. Gentle parenting gurus would say to empathize with my school-averse child’s feelings, and join her on the floor. Authoritarian parents would say to pick her up and put her in the car, ignoring the tears. The most trending style of the moment, FAFO parenting – which stands for an idiom which we can only refer to in writing as “mess around and find out,” is focused on teaching kids consequences and might say to let her discover the car has left without her.
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The camps are extreme and polarizing – on social media, at least, where they are pitted against each other with no room for shades of grey. Knowing which camp to subscribe to can feel overwhelming and confusing – but what if it’s the labels themselves creating the real problem?
“If you buy into these formulaic approaches to parenting, you miss the point entirely,” said Vanessa Lapointe, a Vancouver-based parenting educator and author of Discipline without Damage. The more we subscribe to categories, Lapointe said, “we are actually outsourcing what is meant to be in-sourced. We’re not intuitively responding to the child that’s in front us.”
Lapointe’s youngest son was much like my floor-wriggler. “He was born into the world not terribly happy about it, and stayed that way for the next eight years,” she laughed. Although she was firmer with her first child, “in all seriousness, if I didn’t soften my parenting mentality in order to really connect with my second, to be who he needed me to be instead of some ideal on the internet… my son wouldn’t have survived the high school years.”
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Parents turn to easily digestible Instagram advice, she said, “trying so hard to get it just right.” “But in the experience of parenting, we are called so beyond these labels. Our children will absolutely sniff out those inauthentic scripts.”
Parenting frameworks have always existed – permissive versus strict, attachment versus free range – each one a pendulum swing from the generation before. But today, the swing is supercharged by the internet’s love of polarization, said Toronto therapist and parent coach Mackenzie Kinmond. That also means the frameworks themselves become distorted beyond their original meaning.
“We live in a culture that thrives on division – us versus them – and an algorithm that feeds you more of what you already believe,” Kinmond said. “That just pushes the interpretations of these labels further and further from the centre.”
Gentle parenting, for example, is actually not so gentle. “It’s high warmth, but when done as intended, you set very firm boundaries,” she explained. “It’s been co-opted online and has become synonymous with ‘roll over, let the kid do whatever they want’ parenting.”
Kinmond works with label-focused parents who constantly feel as if they’re failing. “They’ve been convinced that one set of strategies will raise a secure child and another will irreversibly harm them,” she said.
For example, she said the sticker chart method that many parents use to reward kids for good behaviour has been criticized online as a kind of “bogeyman, a vilified tactic of parental manipulation.” But she said she herself uses sticker charts with her kids for a smooth-sailing morning routine. Nuance, she said, is not often found in parenting advice online, but it has to be found in the home: “We don’t do enough permission giving – we need to embrace more of ‘you-do-you’ parenting.”
For Australian documentary producer and mother Sam Jockel, authentic and effective relationships with her three kids came only after she threw off the labels entirely. “I was doing all the things but always felt like something was missing. What I know now is that labels are easy and they are lazy. I don’t mean this offensively, but that’s not the real work.”
The work, she said, is understanding that how we parent is intrinsically connected to how we were parented. Jockel’s documentary, Seen – which has been called a film “every parent needs to watch” – chronicles the challenges of four parents as they confront their own childhoods in efforts to be better parents.
Now, in moments of tension, pain or frustration with her kids, Jockel has a simple yet profound approach that I instantly knew would be the only parenting style that I’d come back to: “Before I say or do anything, I ask myself: How would love respond? That’s not to say love needs to be fluffy nor soft. But it’s always kind and firm, and it has boundaries.”
During the next floor protest, I realized my daughter didn’t need a perfectly calibrated response; she needed me to see her as a human being struggling with the transition of leaving her home. I was likely rushed out the door as a kid, trailing behind my hockey-playing older brother, feelings swallowed for the sake of getting there on time. No wonder my daughter’s resistance feels so unsettling; my inner child never got the chance to wriggle about.
Tomorrow, she’ll probably roll around again, and I’ll probably sigh. But instead of reaching for a label or script, I’ll reach for meaningful connection. Either way, we’ll get there – not as archetypes of a singular parenting philosophy, but as a mom and kid figuring it out together.