Is 'F* Around and Find Out' Really the 'Anti-Gentle Parenting?'
What the buzzword battle misses about boundaries, consequences, and connection.
“Sit right in your chair or you’re gonna fall.”
This refrain played on repeat at our dinner table for weeks. My perpetually distracted four-year-old couldn’t stay still—wiggling, leaning back, even sitting backward once or twice. Then one night, mid-wiggle, he was gone.
KERPLUNK. Then came the scream—more surprise than pain, but it couldn’t have felt good.
My wife helped him up. “Are you okay?”
Through sniffles: “Yeah.”
“We told you to sit right,” she said after a hug. Then, cupping his cheeks: “What did we learn?”
This is an idealized moment, but it’s exactly the kind of parenting we aim for. We practice gentle parenting — a term I’ve used before — but lately I’ve been watching a new label gain traction: F* Around And Find Out (FAFO) Parenting.
A recent viral Wall Street Journal piece explains it like this:
“FAFO 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.”
It lists examples like letting your kid walk home in the rain if they don’t want to wear a coat and throwing away their dinner if they don’t want to eat. It’s easy to see how this could go viral.
I see two reasons it’s catching on:
Flashy branding.
The promise of instant gratification—consequences that happen now, not later.
And I get the appeal, especially for parents of older kids. My oldest is four and a half. We haven’t been at this long, but even we’re exhausted by the constant stream of conflicting advice. Our son has gotten better at resisting rules, and our almost-two-year-old daughter’s independence and stubbornness have tested us in new ways.
So for parents of tweens or teens, FAFO parenting feels like an oasis in a desert of trial and error.
Parenting writer
recently summed up the frustration:“I’ve 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.”
It’s a fair critique. Gentle parenting does use natural consequences, but they’re not always immediate—like the chair example—and that delay can feel unsatisfying in the heat of the moment.
But some FAFO counterexamples in the WSJ piece are more unsettling than instructive. One parent describes throwing her 13-year-old into a pond, clothes and all, after he kept squirting her with a water gun.
The article closes with another parent suggesting that biting a child back is an appropriate response to biting.
These moments come from a basic parenting impulse: teaching lessons that land. But for me, they cross from letting reality teach into creating reality to make a point.
And science doesn’t back them up.
Child psychologist
, in a rebuttal, acknowledged that FAFO’s core idea has merit — but warned that these examples conflict with decades of research:“Research has consistently shown that physical discipline is always counterproductive since children simply learn that aggression is a way to solve problems.”
In our house, we don’t believe in physical discipline. But that doesn’t mean we let our kids do whatever they want. Gentle parenting is highly criticized due to a misunderstanding of what it is. It’s betrayed by the word gentle. That word, in some parents’ eyes, might equate it with “never say no, participation trophy, snowflake” culture that’s been demonized for decades. But that’s not what it is. Anyone familiar with my work knows that my wife and I pride ourselves on teaching our kids to deal with failure and build resilience. And this isn’t in tension with gentle parenting. The entire philosophy is built on a foundation of boundaries. Author
—widely credited with popularizing gentle parenting—sums it up this way (emphasis mine):“Gentle Parenting is not permissive parenting. Children do not always ‘get their own way’. Parents do not say ‘yes’ all of the time, because they are scared of the upset if they say ‘no’. In fact, often they can be more strict, with more boundaries in place than others ... There is no point in having boundaries if you do not consistently enforce them. These limits give children a sense of security, and they are vital. ”
I don’t know if we have more boundaries in place than others, but my wife and I do enforce the ones we have. We do this through the natural consequences in the chair example, but also through things like giving our children guided choices (“Do you want to turn the TV off now or in five minutes?”), redirection (“How about we do this instead?”), logical consequences (“You make a mess, you clean it up”), and sometimes even time-outs. My wife calls our version of time-out “time-ins” because instead of sending them to their rooms alone, one of us goes with them and discusses the problem. We want our kids to know they’re heard, if not understood. And we want to help them understand their actions.
These don’t always work. Nothing in parenting is perfect, and we’re adapting and evolving our strategy as our kids age. A parent of a 15-year-old might think we have it easy.
But one thing we’ll never abandon is one thing that descriptions of FAFO seem to lack: acknowledgment and recognition of emotions.
“Although consequences may be helpful, parents should never neglect emotional coaching and connection,” Goodwin writes. “Talking about and supporting your child’s emotions has so many benefits, including improving children’s emotion regulation and behavior.”
And yes, it’s exhausting. FAFO plays to that exhaustion—it’s the quick hit, the shortcut. But do we want to take shortcuts with our kids?
FAFO has caught fire on the internet because it sounds freeing. Parents often feel caught in this torture chamber of feeling like they need to be perfect. FAFO doesn’t only permit imperfection, it advocates for it. And that’s appealing. But, as I say over and over: Perfection isn’t possible. You will fail. But you can recover. The key is fostering healthy connections. Repair. Let your kids know that you screw up, too, and show them how you recover.
I’d be so happy if I one day lost it and yelled at my kid, and in the midst of my apology, he cupped my face in his hands and said, “What did we learn?”