Before I had children I read one parenting book: French Children Don’t Throw Food. I read it because I liked the gingham cover and the prospect of being able to enjoy a long lunch. After finishing it, having absorbed very little of its message, I then did basically no further research into how to raise children and everything I have absorbed via the internet has been entirely against my will.
But apparently, despite my lack of intention, I have accidentally adopted a trendy new parenting style that I didn’t know existed. It’s called “Fafo” parenting – the letters standing for “f**k about and find out”.
Fafo parenting is basically the childrearing version of the popular self-help book, Let Them. It’s about allowing your children to make whatever stupid decision they want to make, then experiencing the consequences of their actions. And while I didn’t realise it had a name, it’s the policy I’ve been following for years.
Around the time my daughter turned two she decided she didn’t like wearing a coat, which turned leaving the house into an absolute battleground. I tried to convince, persuade, coax and bribe. When I googled it I was told by smug experts to offer her a choice.
“‘Do you want to put your coat upstairs or downstairs?” or “Do you want to wear your yellow coat or your green one?” The experts claimed that this would result in her feeling empowered and therefore willing to do as she was asked. It actually resulted in her looking at me like I had a head injury and just saying, “..No.”
So I just gave up. We left the house without a coat. She was cold. We went home to get the coat. It was annoying. The next time she didn’t want the coat, I did the same thing. Eventually she grew tired of being cold or coming home to get the coat and just started wearing one. A decision entirely motivated by my being too lazy to put up a fight yielded a result so impressive that it changed my attitude to pretty much everything.
These days I am 100 per cent Fafo, 100 per cent of the time. If you want to wear sparkly party shoes to the park, fine. They’ll get muddy and you’ll be pissed off. You want to run around when I’ve told you it’s slippery? You’ll fall over and you’ll be pissed off (are you sensing a theme here?) It’s amazing how quickly children can learn to listen to you when they are allowed to see what happens if they don’t.
Sure, if we encounter live electrics, open bodies of rough water or an XL Bully, I will intervene. But otherwise I’m like David Attenborough. I watch calmly as nature takes its course.
Occasionally I encounter people who think that Fafo parenting sounds a bit cruel. But that’s not the case. Because the “find out” portion of Fafo pertains to two different things. Children “find out” that they will break a toy if they play with it carelessly, or hurt themselves if they ignore safety instructions. But there’s another, arguably more important aspect, and that’s when my children “find out” I’m there to help them with a big hug and a lot of loving reassurance no matter how silly they’ve been. I’m still there and I still love them. I don’t need to be punitive because the consequence of their action has already taught the requisite lesson.
Fafo parenting is apparently set to replace the much maligned and yet extremely popular gentle parenting ethos. Gentle parenting gets a bad rap. It’s often parodied and sneered at because lazy or permissive parents will often claim to be gentle parenting when what they’re actually doing is ineffectually shouting “gentle hands!” from the other side of the library while their child pulls dozens of books off the shelves and flings them at other children. At its core, gentle parenting is a reactionary move away from previous generations who used methods like smacking and shouting, which are unquestionably worse.
The real issue with gentle parenting is that (as well as being extremely annoying) it’s cumbersome.
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Gentle parents say things like “I need you to use your kind hands” when their child is hitting. They say “I need you to use your listening ears” and inexplicably like to talk about “your body” as if it’s a different entity from yourself – “let’s take some breaths to calm your body”. Lovely instincts but time consuming and possibly a bit verbose for a child who is still calling a spoon a “poon”.
Other parents often talk about how tired they are, how burned out and bored and frustrated they are by the whole experience, that they haven’t had a private wee or a hot cup of coffee in years. And I can’t help thinking that if more of them took a leaf out of my book, they might enjoy the entire thing.
Fafo parenting is doing it on easy mode, but also happens to yield more sensible, risk aware children. It’s a win-win tactic (assuming they don’t accidentally break any bones) and I can’t recommend it enough.
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