The past few months, there’s been a new parenting trend on the scene. It’s called FAFO parenting. The first letter of the acronym stands for something you can probably figure out, but we’re going to call it Fool Around and Find Out.
annnnd….the pendulum continues to swing.
The gist of this movement has been said to be out-feraling your feral children. For about a dozen years now, parents have been trying conscientiously to get it all right, be the perfect emotionally-attentive, 100% regulated, available, and aware parents who give total free expression to their darling children. They’ve been doing this to SUCH and extent that they’ve overcorrected the gentle parenting trend and gone into full bore permissiveness in many cases and have looked around to find they’re exhausted and living in chaos. They’re ruled by 4-yr old tyrants whose worlds they’re just living in (& footing the bill for).
Refer to our last episode on gentle parenting, where we talk about this overcorrection and what gentle parenting may have been AIMING FOR. In our opinion, it’s been mishandled & overdone, and we may have missed the forest for the trees on that front.
So, surprise, surprise, there’s a reaction taking hold because parents have been-there/tried-that and are feeling DONE.
With FAFO parenting, parents can sit back in their chairs smugly and chuck the careful emotional monitoring out the window. Instead, they might ask or warn, but if a child breaks rules, they’re left to figure it out. They forget their raincoat, walk home in the rain. They don’t want lasagna for dinner, NMP (not my problem). Be hungry until breakfast.
As far as that goes, we’re kinda ok with that. That’s really just parents deciding to quit rescuing and saving and doing for their kids and letting them experience some NATURAL CONSEQUENCES. Natural consequences can be an effective way to give them some autonomy AND let them learn some life lessons.
If you tell them to watch the cat’s body language…you’d better stop teasing it and touching it on its belly or it’ll get mad…and they keep it up: the cat scratches them and runs away. Our response here should NOT be to rush in to baby our child, (who should not be surprised by the scratches down their arm). We should NOT be yelling at the cat, throwing it outside for “being bad.” We warned, we were teaching. The child chose to ignore and voila! Natural consequences. Lesson learned.
That part of FAFO parenting is not out of line.
The thing about it that gives us pause is an underlying attitude that seems to lie behind it. There’s almost a smug kind of pleasure (as it’s described) in watching a child get caught out, or flail and struggle through something that a parent has warned them about.
Almost as if the parent has built up all this resentment and in letting the child FAFO, they’re parenting FROM that resentment, there’s a small part of them that’s ENJOYING the child getting a consequence. HA. THAT’LL TEACH YOU. A rubbing it in sort of I-told-you-so.
In our view, our goal as parents should be to mirror our Father. Our hands and speech should mimic HIS, and as far as I can tell, God never delights in our folly. He’s not smirking about our mistakes, setting us up for failure and then being smug about it when we mess up.
We’re always aiming for the middle ground. There should be no doubt in our kids’ minds that we are always FOR them. We want their best. We set them up for success and yes, tell them many many times about many many things before they catch on and learn.
If they consistently forget to put their work (or lunch) in their backpack and we have had to run it up to them at school, first we need to be SURE they KNOW what they’re supposed to do. If we want to teach them responsibility and accountability (which we DO), then we explain why they need to keep up with their work and make sure they have what they need ahead of time.
We might ask them to come up with a system that would work as a reminder in the mornings. Would a post-it note by the door work? A reminder alarm? Maybe a note in your shoe or something you know you WON’T forget? Go do that right now while you’re thinking of it. The next time they forget it, THEN we don’t rescue & run it up to school. They take the lower grade; they figure out lunch by sharing with a friend. That’s setting them up for success and using natural consequences to help with the lesson.
Life of Pi… there’s a scene in this book where the zookeeper father gets his sons to tie up a goat in an enclosure. Then, he makes his sons watch as the zoo’s tiger comes out and attacks/eats the goat. His point was: this is life and death dangerous. You cannot let your guard down around a beast like that.
The lesson was gruesome but not as gruesome as if the sons had tried to reach between the bars themselves or fool around near the enclosure.
We have to do a kind of dance in parenting—how much is enough for them to learn the lesson but not too much because we’re angry or reactive? Not too little because we DO WANT them to be resilient and feel capable and confident.
When I was young, I spent a lot of hours at a horse farm. This family came for one of their kids to have a riding lesson, and while she was getting ready, I watched the dad and his 5-yr-old son interact. The dad apparently decided he should “teach the boy a lesson” and laughingly instructed him to grab hold of the wire fence nearby. Which the boy did, wanting to please his father (and this was not the sort of dad you disobeyed). He fully grabbed hold and you probably know the result. The fence was electric, and the boy fell to the ground, surprised and screaming. The father found it hilarious, and even at a young age I knew that was not the sort of father a kid would want—he found his child’s flailing amusing. He was not to be trusted.
We want to be our children’s MOST trusted resource. We want their success. We hurt with them when they struggle and make mistakes, yet sometimes we allow them because it’s the fastest and more sure way for them to mature/learn.
While we TOTALLY GET how today’s parents can be over-committed, over-stressed, and exhausted from the volume of info the interwebs are flooding you with, there’s a sturdy, trusted middle ground of parenting, one where you –the parent—have authority and are in charge and where you can ALSO be your child’s advocate, teach them to regulate and raise them to be capable, confident young adults.
Don’t give up and give in to FAFO parenting. Your job –and your kids—are WAY more important than that.