Don’t Raise an Asshole: What the FAFO Parenting Debate Is Really About (Copy)

Parenting trends tend to show up when everyone is exhausted. The current rise of what people are calling “FAFO parenting” — shorthand for fuck around and find out — feels like one of those moments. It’s been popularized on social media through videos of swift, no-nonsense consequences, and it’s often framed as a response to what some people see as the excesses of gentle parenting: too much validation, too much negotiating, not enough authority.

I found myself thinking about this more after reading an article by Emine Saner in The Guardian titled “The rise of FAFO parenting: is this the end of gentle child rearing?” What stuck with me wasn’t just the parenting angle, but the language itself. FAFO is a phrase that, until recently, I mostly associated with politics — a blunt way of saying actions have consequences, often delivered with a little smugness, sometimes outright glee.

Seeing it applied to parenting felt familiar and unsettling at the same time. It made me wonder what, exactly, we’re trying to teach kids right now — and how much of this conversation is really about adults working out their own stuff.

Because the appeal is obvious. Parents are tired. We’re juggling work, kids, relationships, and the added pressure of doing all of it “right” in public. FAFO parenting offers something refreshingly simple: stop hovering, stop explaining everything, let consequences do some of the heavy lifting.

In theory, that’s not new. Natural consequences have always been part of parenting. The discomfort creeps in when those moments turn into content — filmed, stripped of context, and rewarded with likes. At that point, it’s worth asking who the lesson is actually for.

What often gets lost in the gentle-versus-tough debate is something pretty basic: kids don’t experience parenting philosophies. They experience people.

This is something my partner, Chris, and I talked about long before our son was born. Late at night, lying in bed, before parenting stopped being hypothetical. We went back and forth on values and approaches and eventually landed on something much simpler. Whatever else we messed up, we didn’t want to raise an asshole.

That became the guiding principle.

We also agreed on something else: we wanted our son to see the beginning, middle, and end of an argument. Not because conflict is good, but because it’s unavoidable — and how it ends matters.

That part came straight from our own histories. In my childhood, conflict often escalated until it got physical and then just… disappeared. The next morning there were pancakes. Everything was “fine,” even though nothing had actually been addressed. For Chris, it was the opposite kind of rupture. When things blew up, you didn’t wake up to breakfast. You woke up in a different house, in a different life, with no explanation and no resolution.

Both experiences made us conflict-avoidant, just in completely different ways. One of us learned that conflict was dangerous and needed to be smoothed over. The other learned that conflict was catastrophic and best avoided entirely.

Realizing that mattered. Because left unchecked, those instincts would absolutely show up in how we parent. To get ahead of it, we had to do the work — individually and together — to understand what was underneath those reactions.

Do we get it right all the time? No.

Do we still screw it up? Obviously.

Do we circle back when we fuck up? Yes. Because repair is part of the lesson too.

What’s funny — and humbling — is that when our son now reflects back some of what we’ve been trying to model, my first reaction is sometimes deeply uncharitable. When he pauses, names a feeling, or navigates conflict with more thoughtfulness than I’m prepared for, a part of me thinks: Is he being an asshole right now?

He isn’t. He’s doing exactly what we hoped he would. But it turns out emotional maturity can feel suspiciously like being challenged. Watching your kid handle something well can make you realize how often you didn’t.

That discomfort, it turns out, is part of the work.

A calm adult allowing a child to experience a manageable consequence teaches something very different from an adult acting out their own frustration under the banner of “real-world lessons.” The same consequence, delivered by two different parents, can land very differently. One builds responsibility. The other builds shame.

This is where parenting stops being about methods and starts being about self-awareness. Before deciding how firm or flexible to be, parents have to contend with their own triggers and habits. Without that, even the best-intentioned approach turns reactive.

This is also where things like yoga, meditation, and breathwork actually earn their keep. Not because they make anyone enlightened, but because they create a pause. They help you notice what’s happening in your body before you react. Sometimes that pause is the difference between teaching accountability and passing down unresolved history.

There’s a broader cultural layer here, too. Parenting debates tend to mirror political ones: empathy versus responsibility, care versus consequence, structure versus freedom. Gentle parenting often gets linked to progressive values, while FAFO parenting aligns more easily with ideas about self-reliance and accountability.

As with politics, the extremes don’t hold up very well. Parenting without boundaries can leave kids unprepared for frustration. Parenting without empathy can leave kids confusing authority with power. Neither reliably produces the outcome most parents are quietly hoping for.

Which, if we’re being honest, isn’t perfection.

It’s raising someone who can handle conflict, repair when things go sideways, and understand that their actions affect other people.

In short, the goal isn’t to win the parenting culture war.

It’s to not raise an asshole.

And that work, inconveniently and repeatedly, starts with the adult.