by Nicholas Hamner
Investment Advisor Representative
[email protected]
I’ve mentioned her enough in my articles that most—if not all—of you are aware that I have a 13-year-old daughter. You may have met her yourself at one of our ice cream socials. She’s the last year of Generation Z, so she’s a Zoomer. And now that the media has finally quit blaming Millennials for killing everything from department stores to decorative soaps, Zoomers are the new target of the media’s ire. The big knocks against Gen Z? They’re too entitled, they’re too focused on themselves, they’re too soft.
Who’s to blame? The parents, of course. Gen Z was the generation being raised when terms like “helicopter parenting”, “positive discipline”, and “validating feelings” came to the forefront. The perception is that Zoomers were raised with parents tiptoeing around their feelings and never had to settle a problem themselves because their parents jumped in and immediately fixed it. This is, the older folks argue, a far cry from how they were raised. Well, it seems as if the parenting pendulum is swinging back towards the old ways if a Wall Street Journal article is to be believed.
In an article titled, “Goodbye Gentle Parenting, Hello ‘F-Around And Find Out’” (read it here), the WSJ makes the case that modern parents are starting to ditch the softer approach to child-rearing that gave the world Millennials and Zoomers and are starting to take a harder line. This has been called FAFO parenting, with FAFO meaning… uh… Mess Around & Find Out. It sounds like the kind of parenting most of us either grew up with or raised our kids with. They’re letting their children deal with the consequences of their actions and behaviors. Refuse to wear a jacket? Deal with the cold. Don’t like what we’re having for dinner? Starve until breakfast. The Journal presents this change as a sort of counteraction to better educate kids on how the world really operates and to counteract the problems Zoomers are facing in the workplace now that the early Zoomers are becoming established in the office.
Researching the trend further—it’s amazing what pops up for “FAFO parenting” once you get started—it starts to become harder to separate parents letting children learn lessons from parents being a little bit cruel. Letting your kid walk around without a jacket is one thing, willfully sitting back and letting them hurt themselves is another. Also, the complaints against Zoomers in the workplace—they’re too soft, they’re too expectant, all they care about is money and moving up—are the exact same complaints that were levied against Millennials, and the GenXers before them, and so on and so on. The psychology and mental health experts interviewed by the Journal and in other publications offered a more cautious, mixed view of the FAFO parenting trend. The general consensus there is that while parents don’t need to kowtow to children’s feelings, that doesn’t mean they should ignore them completely. But they do acknowledge some benefits to FAFO parenting: encouraging problem-solving and independence, better preparation for the real world, and reducing parent-child power struggles.
As a GenX kid raised by Boomers and currently raising a Zoomer, I’m really curious how far back the pendulum will swing and what the long-term impact will be. As a GenXer, I don’t think we ever saw a lick of gentle parenting. Likewise, I think there was a reason we were so quick to incorporate the more proactive, kinder concepts when we started raising our own kids. I think we tried, and still try, to be the parents we wanted when we were growing up.
Helicoptering? We didn’t have that. Once we were old enough to ride a bike our parents had zero clue as to where we were. Stepping in and helping kids with problems? None of that. Maybe you guys raised your kids differently but from what I saw back then—when a kid came home with a black eye or skinned knee, it was “What happened?”. When a fork headed towards the light socket, once the lights were back on it was “What’d you learn?” There was no attempt to proactively prevent any of it, nor was there any remediation after the fact unless a bone was properly broken, someone was bleeding on the carpet, or they were hurt bad enough that the school might call the state the next day.
Now we’re going back in that direction. How will this all play out? As with anything, time will tell. And maybe the pendulum will swing back the other way after a while.