The Current Backlash Era Against Positive Parenting
Fear-based pushback against progress in parenting models
An article headline this week reads: “TV in 2025 has a message for parents: be very afraid.”
In discussing the relationally themed storylines in several trending dramas such as “Adolescence” and “The Last of Us,” the author warns:
“Together, these stories paint a bleak — but deeply resonant — picture of parenthood in 2025. One where love exists, sure, but it’s shaped by fear. Not just the fear of physical loss, but the subtler, quieter fear that we might get it wrong. That the people we raise might one day pull away. That we won’t know how to reach them when they do. Because sometimes, parenting doesn’t look like hugs and bedtime stories. Sometimes, it looks like reaching out for a hand that’s no longer reaching back.” —
There it is: the threatening undertow resulting from the increase in media articles on “the no contact trend” subtly infiltrating a story on television programming trends. The message: there is a bogeyman lying in wait around a parent’s worst fears of how they, as “good parents,” could still lose their child — and its name is estrangement.
This type of headline and story are part of clickbait sensationalist and solutionless fearmongering in response to content that highlights uncomfortable topics that society does everything it can to look away from in deflection of any true conversation. Stoking anxieties and fears without providing anywhere to go for relief. It is the current state of society that is the problem, these articles suggest, and good parents are helpless against it.
Ever since Taylor Swift made concert history with her Eras tour, there seems to be an adoption of the term “era” to highlight cultural shifts and trends.
Culturally, politically, societally, we seem to be in an international “backlash era.”
A devastating watershed period where all that has been fomenting beneath the surface within all of what are considered “traditional” spheres are experiencing eruptions of pent-up fear and anger over perceived loss of the ways things have been and, in their minds, should still remain. A massive sustained detonation of outrage and resistance against progress.
Parenting is far from immune. Within all of these areas of progress, the resistance to them are after all, of the same foundation: control and the hierarchies that claim authority over it.
In the “traditional” parenting model, all authority is from the parent. It’s the “honor thy mother and father” mentality where “respect” (i.e. deference and obedience) is purely one-directional. There are rules and expectations for the children to abide by — no exceptions. Parents maintaining control is how the traditional family model is supposed to reliably work.
Those that cling and adhere to this model decry as being “weak” or destructive the seemingly newer “positive parenting” model that is characterized by following the lead of the child’s developmental needs. There is a false belief that “positive” or “gentle” means “permissive” — as in the parent rolls over and allows the child to dictate their needs and wants.
There are generally understood to be four main parenting styles:
- Authoritative — Provides warmth, support and structure while setting clear expectations and encouraging independence. Responsive to their children’s needs and developmental stages.
- Authoritarian — Prioritizes strict rules, obedience and discipline. Characterized by little flexibility or negotiation. Highly demanding and minimally responsive to children’s needs. Guided by “tradition” and/or religion versus formative foundations.
- Permissive — Lenient and nurturing while providing few guidelines or rules.
- Uninvolved/neglectful — Detached, showing little interest in their children’s lives and offering little guidance or support.
Perhaps because “authoritative” — the style most endorsed as being healthy — sounds too close to the harmful and overly strict “authoritarian,” there has been the adoption of different terms such as “gentle,” “mindful,” “positive,” “respectful” or “intentional.”
So many terms, so little understanding of what they really mean and so confusion abounds.
Those seemingly “soft” terms and a child-centered focus seem to be triggering to those who maintain rigid adherence to the “parents know best” mentality. It does so for the same reason that emotionally immature parents cannot self-reflect: it shames them with highlighting the harmfulness of the practices they adopted and leaned on when parenting their own children and highlights all that has since been learned about what constitutes healthy vs unhealthy parenting.
It requires those engaged in parenting young children now to take initiative to learn something different than what they were raised in. It isn’t easy. It requires work, re-educating oneself and facing what was harmful in how they themselves were parented. It is not for the faint of heart.
Take the “time out” for example. It has long been a relied upon tool for discipline and behavior modification — one not only used by parents but within schools and day care settings as well. An unruly child that is being disruptive, has engaged in destructive actions such as throwing or hitting, or failed to “play nice” with others is given a time out. The patently false presumption behind it is that the child, when in time out, will “think” about the behavior that prompted their sentence to temporary isolation and learn to behave more cooperatively.
Implementing it is easy. The child “acts up,” and gets sent to their room, a chair or some designated space of solitary confinement for a period of time. After the allotted time is up, the child gets to return and is asked if they know what they did wrong and what they won’t do again. Action, consequence, behavior modification. A gold star for the parents or teachers for their decisive, take charge action.
The reality is a far different story. The genesis of time outs comes from operant conditioning animal behavioral studies initiated back in the 1940’s by psychologist BF Skinner. The term is an abbreviation for “time out from positive reinforcement.” Devising experimental models with pigeons, rats and chimpanzees, the goal was to see if either rewarding or punishing them after subjecting them to certain stimuli would impact learned behavior. After some time elapsed from the publishing of various academic articles on the topic, the experiment that started with lab animals migrated to application with institutionalized children and then into common parenting practice.
What has been learned since then is that children experience time outs as a form of love withdrawal. Their brains are not developed to be able to logically use that time to “think about” or reflect on their behavior. Instead, they are made to feel shamed over normal developmental expressions. They feel angry. Hurt. Confused. Scared and alone.
The immediate impact of love withdrawal may result in compliance, but over the long term, the emotional pain continuously and, to the child, unfairly inflicted often creates more problematic behaviors that lead to further needs for discipline. A vicious cycle.
“Although it poses no immediate physical or material threat to the child, love withdrawal may be more devastating emotionally than power assertion because it poses the ultimate threat of abandonment or separation.” — Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting
It has been observed and reported that relational pain from isolation techniques registers on brain scans the same way as does physical pain. Yet the practice of time outs continues.
In fact, an published in January of this year from a child-focused institute indicates that “experts” are still saying that time outs are not harmful and should have a guideline of one minute per year of the child’s age. Their argument is that there is a “right way” to execute a time out that isn’t harmful. Just as there are still proponents of the “cry it out” method of sleep training, there remain advocates for parenting based upon abandonment.
Proponents of gentle or positive parenting, however, advocate a different approach: time-ins.
The similarity of time ins versus time outs centers around the removal of the child from the stimulating situation. An opportunity to introduce calm from conflict. However, only in the time-in scenario is there the possibility to achieve calm through the presence of a loving, supportive care-giver while the child is in emotional distress.
In a time out, the child is left alone with their anger and dysregulation over both the inciting incident and the compounded sting of rejection and shaming by caregivers. The child doesn’t feel bad about what they did, they feel bad about themselves. If the parent engages in corporal punishment as well, there is fear and dread over what may be further in store. A common threat in such homes where mothers rely on this might be, “wait ‘til your father gets home.”
Time outs harm self esteem, break the child’s trust in the caregiver and set up power struggles down the line.
In a time in, however, the parent has many options to be with the child as they experience big feelings they don’t know what to do with. They can simply sit with or near them as they express their hurt through tears, encourage alternate ways to release anger such as venting their frustration verbally or engaging in deep breathing exercises. When emotions have been expressed and a regulated calm is achieved, then there can be reflection around what happened and guidance provided on alternate behaviors or coping strategies.
Only after the child feels seen, heard and understood can there be any productive guidance. Throughout the experience to get to that point, the child feels supported and connected. Children are wired for connection with their caregivers and cutoffs from that are highly distressful. When all behavior is communication, it is the parent or caregivers job to be the reliable and safe facilitator to bring forth what needs to be communicated and released through expression.
These things require the parent to be emotionally and mentally present. To be attuned to their child, putting aside their own reactivity to the situation in order to focus on the needs of the child in that moment — not on their outwardly manifesting behavior, but what is underneath it. It requires an awareness of a child’s developmental stages, personality and temperament and emotional capacities. It takes emotional maturity and emotional intelligence on the part of the parent or caregiver and the dedication to spend that time and effort with their child.
Through consistency of implementing practices like time ins, a parent establishes emotional safety for their child where they come to understand and deeply know that they can share their true feelings and frustrations and still be supported and loved. True unconditional parenting.
Time outs are easy. Time ins are hard.
“Traditional” authoritarian parenting is easy. It’s prescriptive, rigid and inflexible. Obey or be punished. Do what was done to you by your parents. Learning new ways of parenting is hard. It requires self awareness and reflection. Honesty and accountability. And a continuous growth mindset to always be learning and adjusting.
“Research suggests that people’s basic parenting styles are already in place before they gain direct experience with their own offspring. These styles are deeply rooted in experiences they had long ago.” — Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting
To consciously take a different route than what one experienced themselves is simultaneously reparenting oneself while also parenting one’s own child.
One of the reasons it is speculated that it is hard for people to break the pattern of how they were parented is because to do so requires them to question the deference and loyalty they have to their parents. It becomes threatening to established bonds and requires deep self reflection and reinterpretation of experiences long accepted as having been done by parents who have always claimed to have their best interests at heart.
The backlash era doesn’t want self reflection. It doesn’t want accountability for the sins of the past — theirs or their parents — or to learn how to be better in the now or to build a better future. It wants stasis.
Those of us who have gone the route of estrangement with our families and have been brave enough to walk away from what no longer served us understand that stasis is not only stagnant, it is destructive.
It is easy to decry that which reflects newer ways of thinking and operating and goes against what is accepted as the norm. Progress is easy to push back against.
However, what should be understood is that, “positive parenting is a concept that is more than a collection of parenting techniques. It requires a child-rearing orientation that is more child centered than parent centered with the constant goal of promoting a close, positive relationship rather than a focus on controlling the child’s behavior.”
Those of us who chose to walk away from dysfunctional families and are parents now ourselves, understand that if we want to cultivate a relationship where our children will want to continue to reach their hand back towards ours, we have to have been extending that hand to them consistently, attentively and supportively. Putting the type of sustained and truly loving effort into the relationship with them that our parents failed to do with us.
We well know that we don’t dodge the bogeyman by pretending the fears represented don’t exist, that they can be averted by denial or that known to be harmful approaches will keep it at bay. Or by avoiding the conversations around them.
We can brave the backlash — as we are quite used to that type of scrutiny — and can give our children what we never had from our parents. We understand that the quality of the relationship with our children is our responsibility and that requires vastly different tools than what were modeled for us.
