FAFO parenting is the trendy way to let kids 'find out' consequences. But is it cruel to let them fail?
It stands for 'fool around and find out' ... except it's the other F-word
Picture it. It's a crisp and cool winter day. You're on your way out the door.
And your stubborn kid? Refusing to put on his coat, of course. You've tried every trick up your own coat sleeve. Explained they'll be cold without one. Obviously, you're also already late, because that's when children tend to be most uncooperative. It's science.
What you do next is a not-at-all official test of your parenting style.
If you:
- Acknowledge your child's big feelings about coats, validate their frustration, but remind them we must wear a coat in winter in order to stay safe outside — you might be a gentle parent.
- Wrestle your kid into his coat while he shrieks so loudly the snowplow driver on the next block shakes his head and mutters, "kids," you might be an authoritative parent.
- Shrug and say, "OK. Good luck playing Minecraft after your arms fall off," you might be a FAFO parent, and congratulations, you're trending!
FAFO parenting, which stands for "f--k around and find out," is the latest trend parents are buzzing about right now. FAFO parenting encourages parents to let their kids "find out" the natural consequences of their actions, within reason. Like feeling hungry if they won't eat dinner.
Or "finding out" just how miserable it is to play outside in a T-shirt in February, turning back around and pulling on their coat. Quickly, hopefully.
"Natural consequences are exactly that — natural, not parent-created," Julie Romanowski, a parenting coach and consultant based in Vancouver, told CBC News.
It's the difference between warning a child that wiggling around on a wobbly chair might mean they fall off it, and letting them decide whether it's worth the risk, or warning your child that if they don't stop wiggling there's no dessert, she explained.
Natural consequences are healthy, she added, as long as parents truly understand the difference between a true natural consequence and a hidden threat. Threats, or "false natural consequences" — like saying "no dessert if you wiggle in the chair" — appeal to some parents because it allows them to feel like they have control over the situation or child, Romanowski explained.
"Which may be true but at the cost of the child development or relationship."
Why is FAFO parenting appealing?
"F around and find out" has become a staple of modern internet culture, with more than half a million posts on TikTok taged #fafo. The slang term is typically used as a warning that actions have consequences.
FAFO parenting may be rising as a counterpoint to some of the more modern parenting styles, like the constantly hovering helicopter parents, or gentle parenting, the extremely popular modern style that centres on acknowledging a child's feelings and the motivations behind challenging behaviours.
Gentle parenting has been facing a growing resistance lately, with experts and influencers pushing back, saying it's too easy on kids and tough on parents.
Some of the comments on FAFO parenting posts online say it gives people hope for the next generation of kids, or that it harkens back to how they were raised. This is especially true for Gen X, who have been called the "f around and find out generation" or the "latchkey generation," raised by working parents who, for better or worse, may have helped foster resilience.
"Part of the challenge a lot of children are facing is they have these kind of snowplow, helicopter, lawnmower parents who are not allowing the child any sense of self and autonomy that they need to move through the world," said Vanessa Lapointe, a parenting consultant based in Surrey, B.C.
"But I think as with most things, there's a balance that needs to be struck."
For instance, some of the FAFO parenting videos circulating online could be also considered cruel, including one where a man appears to shave his kid's head for bullying a classmate with cancer, or dangerous, like the one that implies being burned by a boiling pot of water would teach a child not to touch anything on the stove.
The first example is a parent-imposed consequence; the second is just dangerous. Neither is a true, developmentally appropriate natural consequence.
As one of the first influencers to specifically call her parenting style "F around and find out" says in her viral video, she doesn't let her kids FAFO if "finding out" could involve risk or danger.
'A subgenre' of authoritative parenting?
A TikTok creator who goes by "Hey I'm Janelle" first posted about FAFO parenting back in 2022, and her video recently gained more traction, with some 350,000 views.
She describes a rainy day at camp where her child wanted to take off his jacket, and added she doesn't fight her kids on coats unless it's dangerous to go without one. She did explain he would get wet, she said in the video, and her son insisted he was fine.
And when he wasn't fine? "He got to decide for himself when he'd had enough," she explained.
"I practice authoritative parenting but within what I would consider a subgenre that I would call 'f--k around and find out' parenting… [kids] get their natural consequences and get to figure out the way through them."
Romanowski argues, however, that natural consequences done properly are actually part of gentle parenting, unless the consequences are actually parent-imposed threats.
The idea of letting kids learn natural consequences also aligns with the trendy "let them" theory of parenting popularized by author Mel Robbins' best-selling book, The Let Them Theory, which topped Publishers Weekly's bestseller list for this week.
"Let your kids fail, let them be rejected, and let them live their lives," Robbins wrote alongside a Dec. 2024 TikTok video with more than 507,000 views.
More recently, the term has taken off thanks to media personality Kylie Kelce. In the Feb. 6 episode of her podcast Not Gonna Lie, Kelce said she discovered the term while scrolling Instagram. Eventually, she saw the video by "Hey I'm Janelle."
"Her bringing up jackets hits close to home," laughed Kelce, who has three kids and a fourth on the way. The video has been viewed almost 234,000 times.
When is 'finding out' inappropriate?
Issues of child safety versus independence are hotly debated in the parenting community. In parenting literature, the term "safetyism" has been used to describe the modern culture of overprotecting children.
But does letting your child learn from the natural consequences of their own actions swing too far in the other direction? If you have a highly sensitive and intense child, for instance, letting them fail "is going to feel like death to them," said Lapointe.
She added that the approach also doesn't necessarily work for every family and the realities of their everyday lives. For instance, most parents can't just send their kids to school without a jacket, so will have to step in and be reasonable "just to get stuff done."
Plus, setting the bar too high and allowing your kids to constantly trip over it could be physically dangerous, on the one hand, but also affect their emotional well-being, she said.
"We don't want to hang kids out to dry," she said.
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