“Back off,” my 15-year-old, Tess, recently barked at me from her room. I was standing in the hallway, asking her once again to stop leaving half-eaten bowls of cereal in her bedroom. “Oh, really?” I shouted back at her closed door. I could feel anger spreading like a heat rash. “You want me to back off?” I reminded her that my mother never let me slurp cornflakes for dinner, much less do so alone in my room. “We had to eat gross pork chops at the table!” I also told her if I ever talked back to my parents like that, I would get grounded or, worse, smacked. Maybe even both. “Trust, I know all about it,” Tess said in that bored “Yeah, yeah” tone teenagers are especially good at. I fantasized about breaking every dirty dish in her room. I pictured her miserably gnawing on a gray, grizzled pork chop like Cosette from Les Miz. I stomped my bare foot. Then I backed off.
This is not how I saw myself as a mom. I got pregnant in my early 40s after $50,000 and three IVF attempts. We really, really wanted this kid. Pregnancy tests became my scratch-off lottery tickets. After she arrived, we read books like The Optimistic Child and How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk. We grilled our mom and dad friends about sleep schedules and sturdy shoes for toddlers. I thought, How hard can it be to be a decent parent? What I should have considered was, How much of my own emotional well-being will I have to sacrifice along the way? And how much shame can I endure when I screw up?
When Tess still measured only slightly bigger than a sourdough loaf, it was all about keeping her alive. I remember reading mom forums and whispering panicked thoughts to my husband in bed at night about SIDS. Our child could just stop breathing in her sleep and we would lose everything that mattered. Looking back, that part was easy.
Parenting was a democracy, we’d told ourselves, and we wanted to be leaders, not tyrants. Even when toddler Tess had tantrums about leaving a playdate or the park, I didn’t want to shout in her face or tug at her tiny arm like my parents once did to me. Instead, there were fibs (“The swings are closing, honey”) and negotiations (“We can get ice cream on the way home”). I recall a group of older Russian men playing chess at the park laughing as they watched me plead with my screeching 5-year-old, begging her on my hands and knees to get off the slide so we could leave.
In my work and my friendships, I’m confident, socially graceful, and quick to make a tough decision. Confrontation and conflict don’t scare me. I look forward to thrashing out the nitty-gritty terms of a car lease. If a server gets my food order wrong, I speak up. But as a parent to a teen girl, I feel uncertain, like I’m always faltering. Our relationship is often a tug-of-war. She’s a gorilla; I’m a stressed-out chattering monkey. “What would you do if I smacked you for talking back?” I asked Tess one day after I picked her up from school. She rolled her blue eyes and snorted: “I would laugh.” What she meant is that would never ever happen. She’s come to realize that I’m a reluctant but resigned “permissive parent.” I thought I was a “gentle parent,” someone who validates my kid’s feelings. But it’s just a short block between the two. My husband and I have prioritized empathy, understanding, and respect for our child by agreeing with her that making your bed is impractical. “You’re just going to get back in again and mess it up. Am I right?” she asks rhetorically. We nod. Boundaries? Still working on them. When we tell Tess it’s time to get off her devices, she swats away our reminders with “One sec” over and over again. I’m not proud to admit that I sometimes implore my husband to take the lead: “I don’t have it in me tonight to deal.”
At least I’m not alone. One pediatrician recently told me some kids will agree to come see her only when they’re “in the right headspace” — when they’re in the mood, when they’re feeling up for it — so their physicals and vaccines are delayed; a millennial mother relayed that a child in her daughter’s preschool does not have to wash her hair if she doesn’t want to. “I’m sorry,” the mom said, “but she smells terrible.”
Autonomy was not an option when I was a kid. I couldn’t campaign for anything, much less a reprieve from hygiene. “My way or the highway” is how my mother describes the way she and my dad raised me. She downplays that she hit us occasionally, as did my father. My husband’s father, who raised him as a single dad, slapped him lightly just a couple of times when he was a kid, he says. “I would run to my room and cry,” my husband tells me now. I know my mother’s own mother wasn’t affectionate from what I saw during my childhood. My grandmother, who grew up in an East Village tenement, treated my mother like a burden as a kid. Decades later, when Grandma Mary visited us, she would stare at me without saying anything, almost daring me to ignite a conversation she could stomp out like campfire embers. My mom says, “The only time my mother talked to me was when she made fun of me. She called me ‘ugly.’ She said I was stupid. She laughed at me because I listened to classical music.”
My mother goes on to tell me that if she had grown up in a loving, supportive household, she would have enrolled in art school and lived in Greenwich Village, painting all day. I imagine my mom wearing paint-splattered overalls, tipsy on red wine and surrounded by bohemian friends; she lights a cigarette and puts on a scratched Erik Satie record. But where am I? “I would not have had kids,” she says flatly. If my own parents had been more warm, engaged, or empathetic, I probably would not have started drinking more than I should have at 14. I held so much anger inside as a teen. Everyone in my family was perpetually pissed off at one another. We slammed doors just to close them.
After my siblings and I grew up, we became periodically estranged from our parents and one another at various times. I can’t remember a moment when all five of us in my immediate family were on good terms. There was always some rift. On TikTok, they call it going “no contact.” Talk to most moms and dads today and they are terrified of this happening to them, of making a profound misstep and ending up like the Beckhams. One parent, Rebecca, who shares a 5-month-old boy with her wife, tells me, “The worst outcome ever of being a parent would be if our kid grew up and was like, ‘I don’t like you, and I don’t want a relationship with you.’” I suspect my husband and I parent Tess more gently and permissively because we want our daughter to like us. She’s our only child. We made it past the dreaded SIDS window. We can’t even think about losing her because we parented all wrong.
For more and more parents like us, what started out as a well-intentioned rebuff of how we were raised has become the reason we fear our kids will one day resent us. We smother them. We cater to their worst whims. We try to be cool around them, so we become allies instead of authority figures. “What’s crazy is that we complain, but we created these monsters,” one stay-at-home dad tells me at a school function when we get to talking. Is there still time to deprogram them — and ourselves?
In early November this past year, Jaclyn Williams, a Wichita-based mom to two sons, one 12 and the other 15, posted a video on Instagram about her own “gentle parenting.” She wrote in a caption, “I can spot ‘gentle parenting’ kids because I raised 2 of them … 10 years later … I’m having to undo it …” The video went viral — with more than 13 million views — and kicked off a nuclear war about the child-rearing philosophy. One faction accused her of being soft on follow-through and veering into permissive parenting; the other side agreed that they, too, were trying to undo their tender tendencies. I called Williams, who’s working on a master’s in child therapy at Northwestern, to talk about the fallout. “My point about having to instill boundaries resonated with a lot of people,” she tells me. “But others were like, ‘No, you did it wrong. You’re stupid. Your kids are terrible.’”
I’m not shocked by these big feelings. Around a third of us rank our stress from eight to ten on a ten-point scale, according to a 2023 American Psychological Association study that surveyed around 1,000 parents of children in the U.S. And while we can fault social media, COVID, the higher cost of living, gun violence, or the shambolic state of the world, the bottom line is still this: Modern parenting has become a messy morass of judgment and confusion, so much so that in August 2024, the U.S. Surgeon General’s Office issued a 36-page advisory titled “Parents Under Pressure,” which called for relief for caregivers who feel “exhausted, burned out, and perpetually behind.” Did it make a dent? “Unfortunately, I feel like it ended up being a blip,” says professor Erin O’Connor, director of New York University Steinhardt’s Early Childhood Education program. She thinks the job is even tougher now: “Parenting has become so focused on the child’s outcome. And there’s this feeling that you’re solely responsible for how your child does in life.”
I ask my mother if she ever felt accountable for how I would turn out as an adult. She pauses. “I cared, of course, but that was your job,” she tells me, “not mine.” She’s not wrong. Ever since “helicopter parenting” became the preferred approach for boomers determined to raise high-achieving millennials, we’ve embraced myriad variations on coddling and intervention. Demographer Neil Howe coined the term “stealth-fighter parents” for Gen-X moms and dads, who swoop in on behalf of their Gen-Z kids like murder hornets instead of hovering like mosquitoes. According to a 2023 survey of 1,000 millennial parents conducted by the Children’s Hospital of Chicago, three out of four respondents with kids practice gentle parenting. They prize open communication and emotional intelligence. “In my day, you were either a good mom or a bad mom,” my mother says, delicately adding that I could be more firm with Tess. In her mind, “gentle parenting” is an oxymoron.
“The biggest problem with parenting is not gentle parenting versus strict parenting or any other style; it’s that we do everything for our kids. We clean their rooms, do their laundry,” says Lenore Douglas, a mom who grew up in Staten Island in the ’80s and now lives in Darien, Connecticut, with her husband and their two children. “When I was 12 and we moved into a new house, I had to strip paint off the wood trim with chemicals. My mom, who was pregnant, put gloves on me and a mask. But, shit, it still got on my hands and burned.”
I agree: We do too much for our kids, in part to overcompensate for our own parents, who did too little. One of my friends says her approach to parenting is to simply do the opposite of what her “narcissistic and neglectful” mom did. “The pendulum shifts generation to generation, and we’re always grasping wildly for a style that works,” says University of St. Thomas teaching professor and developmental psychologist Annie Pezalla. “But too bad parenting is super-messy. There’s no A-to-B directional process for creating a nice human.”
Nor are there any guarantees you won’t screw up that human. On Reddit, someone recently asked, “What is one thing parents do that they don’t realize is actually harmful for their kids?” Over 1,000 people responded with answers that ranged from “coddling” to “constantly telling them how smart they are” to “my parents always mocked me and called me dramatic whenever I cried, which taught me not to show my feelings and not to let anyone know if I had gotten hurt.” That user ends her comment with “I’m nearly 30 and still struggle.”
My mom says she never once worried about fucking me up. “Kids are strong,” she says. “They can handle more than you think.” In the U.S., almost a third of adolescents report that they have been diagnosed with anxiety at some point in their lives. Nearly 10 percent of Americans age 12 to 17 have dealt with depression. ADHD and autism diagnoses are soaring. According to a 2023 CDC survey of more than 20,100 high-school-age kids, 14 percent of boys and 27 percent of girls reported seriously considering a suicide attempt in the previous year; almost 700,000 adolescents in the U.S. attempted suicide in 2024.
During the pandemic, when she was 10, Tess withdrew into a deep depression. Terrified she might hurt herself, my husband and I tiptoed around her, slacked on discipline. She stopped making her bed and we said nothing; we relented on curtailing her screen time. Even though she is emotionally stable now and has since tested as mildly neurodivergent, we’ve never fully rebounded in terms of upholding rules and consequences. My husband and I talk about reverting to our former approach. But it feels too late — and, frankly, too exhausting — to backtrack.
In the mid-’60s, before my mother had me, developmental psychologist Diana Baumrind was studying the effects of different parenting styles. She defined three approaches that are still widely referenced: the “permissive parent,” who lets kids do what they want; the “authoritarian parent,” who operates like a drill sergeant; and the “authoritative parent,” who encourages and empathizes but also enforces boundaries. (Baumrind believed light spanking was no more harmful than scolding or a time-out.) “All of these new styles like the ‘gentle parent’ and ‘tiger mom’ actually come from Baumrind’s matrix. It’s like a rose by any other name,” says Pezalla, who conducted the first academic research on the effects of gentle parenting. The parenting philosophy, which encourages indulging little kids’ big feelings to validate them, was popularized by Sarah Ockwell-Smith, a British parenting expert and author who, critics will remind you, has scant psychological training. To date, she’s written 18 books, including The Gentle Eating Book and The Gentle Potty Training Book. I once clocked a mom commune with her 6-year-old son’s shit fit over a stolen balloon during another kid’s birthday party. Ockwell-Smith teaches parents “emodiversity,” or embracing and accepting all emotions without judgment. That mom at the party was still gently commiserating with him as I left. I was tempted to tap her on the shoulder and say, “You’ve done enough.” But deep down, I knew I likely would have done the same thing.
Pezalla, along with her co-author Alice Davidson, found in their research that this “gentle” approach, with an emphasis on soft skills, frazzles parents: “We heard, ‘I confess I have no idea what I’m doing,’ and ‘I’m tired all day, every day.’” I can attest to that. Apparently, it can confuse kids, too, because they expect everyone to indulge their emotional needs. Pediatrician Benjamin Spock opened The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care with this line: “Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.” Sorry, Dr. Spock, but we mostly can’t help but think we know less than we actually do. Adrienne Arieff, a working mom to twin teen girls, doubts herself at times. “My mom friends and I text each other, ‘Does your kid do this?’ and ‘What would you do?’ I don’t remember my mom talking to her friends about how to parent,” she says. Douglas adds, “It’s almost in style right now to admit, ‘Look, I have no clue.’”
I get that attitude. It frees you up to make mistakes and absolves you from guilt. But I also worry about how Tess will fare in adulthood. How does a kid who gets her way most of the time cope with challenges? Gen Z already has a bad rap in the workplace. “They take everything personally because they can’t handle criticism,” says one media executive. “If I reject an idea for a campaign, even in the nicest possible way, they get hurt and go to HR.” Their workplace etiquette is questionable, too, she says. One of the company’s new hires recently vaped on a Zoom with her. “I’m his boss’s boss, and we were meeting for the first time,” she says. “I was so shocked that I haven’t even talked to him about it. What do you even say?”
Like most of Gen Z, Tess is already cynical about her future. She tells me she anticipates moving back in with us if she can’t find a job or if she can’t afford her own place. “I’m not thrilled, but it wouldn’t be the worst thing ever,” she says. “It’s not like we don’t get along.” Gloria Strettell, a sophomore at Vassar College, expects to land back at home in her parents’ East Village brownstone for a spell, too. “We joke that there are no jobs and we’re all art-history majors,” she says. “But growing up with my mom and dad was a pleasant experience. They were, like, friendly figures, not authoritarian parents.” Jett Ulysses, a School of Visual Arts student, sees another upside: “My parents gave me the freedom to set my own limits, so I never felt the need to rebel against a structure.”
Ultimately, I know I will feel better about my soft, squishy parenting style in hindsight. Tess probably won’t resent me or desert us. But right now, as a working mom, I can’t help but begrudge all the time and energy I pour into parenting. Does she even know how hard it is to make it look easy and enjoyable? “You and Dad can be annoying, but I think you’re doing a really good job as parents,” she says. “You’re good role models. If I have kids, I would do what you’re doing.” Part of me wants to shake her shoulders and say, “No! Give them chores. Make them follow rules. Be harder on them.” But the other part of me reaches for a hug that I so fucking deserve — and need — right now.
More From The Cut Spring Fashion Issue
- It’s Probably Time to Rethink Your Type
- They Thought It Was Burnout or Aging. It Was ADHD.
- Actually, That’s a Wig