F*ck Around and Find Out Parenting
Finally something better than Dr. Becky
I love all of you who have grabbed your copies of Everyone is Lying to You (if you haven’t what are you waiting for?) Everyone is talking about it!!!
If you have read it and loved it, please leave a review on the Amazon page. (you can do this even if you didn’t get it from Amazon). Reviews help, even though that is dumb. And keep spreading the word. Tell your friends and strangers and that chick reading the latest Freida McFadden next to you on the beach.
Hiiiiii from the PA Turnpike en route to Hershey Park. We have commenced the road trip part of the book tour and today’s journey to Midtown Scholar in Harrisburg (get tickets here…still a few left) involves a day trip to Hersey Park.
I got home from my Greenwich event at the incredible woman-owned Athena Books at midnight last night, but I’m doing OK…fueled with coffee and adrenaline.
I’d be lying though if I didn’t admit that this Hershey excursion is part of my own mom guilt over being on the road so much recently. It’s so silly that I even feel it, but I do. All those stupid Instagram reels about how you only have 18 summers with your kids don’t help. I mute them. I also have this feeling my kids may never move out. Do kids move out any more?
I’ve been talking a lot on the road about my feral kids, how they refuse to wear shoes, how they hand dead bugs to strangers, how they spit out my homemade Cinnamon Toast Crunch (from scratch!) on the kitchen floor on live TV. And whenever I talk about the realness of my parenting people nod right along because as we all know being a mom is hard, disciplining kids can often feel impossible, toddlers refuse to wear shoes or coats and other people judge us for that.
I’ve also never been able to get into the gentle parenting, Dr. Becky of it all. Maybe it works for some people, but not for my family. I am all about understanding and validating emotions and feelings, but I also think kids need consequences, time-outs, sometimes bribery and some yelling. I’ve talked to so many parents who have told me the Dr. Becky and gentle parenting approaches have made them feel like failures and that sucks.
This week the WSJ published a story about the opposite of this parenting approach and dubbed it Fuck Around and Find Out Parenting.
I created a gift link for it here.
This is the opening:
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.
The internet calls it “FAFO,” short for “F—Around and Find Out.” It’s a child-rearing style that elevates consequences over the “gentle parenting” methods that have helped shape Gen Z.
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.
While I probably won’t throw my kid in the pond (actually never say never OK, they can swim) I am here for most of this. When they don’t wear coats, they get cold and then they wear their coat next time. I’m not gonna ask them their feelings about wearing the damn coat. That’s just a waste of time. They don’t know their feelings about it. Their brains aren’t fully formed. A few minutes earlier they told me they were a koala.
And I also put toys in the donate bin when they don’t clean them up. And if they don’t eat breakfast, they can wait until lunch.
Carla Dillon added this in the WSJ piece:
She wants to teach her children to be responsible, persevere through hard times and treat others with respect. She adds that some children have different needs that might require gentle parenting. “My kids will walk all over me if I do that,” she said. “I’ve tried it.”
Same. Same. Same. My kids laugh in my face when I kneel down and say “let’s sit with the disappointment together and see what happens.” But they won’t laugh at a time out or getting TV taken away for a night.
As the Journal adds:
FAFO parenting goes by lots of names: Tough love, authoritative parenting, or, as Dillon once put it, a method to “out-feral their feral.”
I also just call it normal parenting. Being an actual human and raising actual humans who realize there are consequences in the world. Pinch your sister? I don’t rally care why, I don’t want you to fucking do it again because I’m not raising a predator and you’re going to your damn room. Also the reason why is usually as basic as “she told me I smell”…there’s no underlying emotional despair behind it that we have to dissect.
The article then goes on to get all political which is fairly annoying, hinting that gentle parenting is for liberal snowflakes and the other side of the spectrum is for MAGA.
To some, the parenting debate reflects a divided country. The paradigm of gentle parents vs. FAFO parents isn’t quite Snowflake Kids vs. MAGA Kids, but there’s a whiff of that. Not in actual politics, but in style.
Guys, I think we are well aware of my politics. I am wearing a vintage I’m With Her shirt in red PA right now and waiting for someone to say “but her emails” so I can say, “but the Epstein list.” There’s nothing political about this. Most of it is common sense and also a realization that most parents are actually parenting and a lot of the “gentle parenting” movement has been parental virtue signaling to prove you’re “better” than the mom next door. Show me a mom who doesn’t yell and I will show you a woman who is wound so tight that in the words of Ferris Bueller if you stuck a lump of coal up her ass in a week you’d have a diamond. I try to limit yelling, but it is also a part of life and no one should feel like they’ve failed as a parent when it happens.
I’m here for a lot of the fuck around and find out parenting. I am also here for a middle ground where we try to understand our kids and also teach them that there are consequences for their actions. All things can be true and everyone (mostly everyone) is just doing their best. This is hard. You’ve got it.
I would argue that "gentle parenting" is media created. Most of the parenting advice I follow, which people say is gentle, is about holding boundaries. And it's okay for kids to be upset. It doesn't mean kids don't deal with consequences. The WSJ article felt like another way to pit parents against each other v. a productive article.
The parenting advice that has served me the best and yet rarely/never appears in Dr Becky and other hyperverbal gentle parenting influencers? Talk less. Like 90% less, and 30% the speed if you want kids to listen. Measure your words to your children like precious gems and your kids will treat them with far more respect. Allow long reflective pauses and even very young kids will start to show you their own voices and critical thinking, too.