TikTok Is Not the Place to Go for Sound Parenting Advice

One of the best decisions I may have ever made as a parent was to ignore “professional” parenting advice. The plethora of books and theories overwhelmed me when I first became a mom; instead, I chose to skip it all. Five children later, I have no regrets.

But today, even I can barely escape bad parenting advice. It bombards me on social media in the form of what has loosely come to be known as “TikTok parenting.”

As if TikTok wasn’t insidious enough, it and other social media platforms are increasingly becoming sources of parenting advice largely skewed toward Millennials and young parents who are understandably flailing in an ocean of pop parenting guidance, most of which ranges from confusing to trash. The internet has taken the already dizzying glut of parenting advice and multiplied it exponentially, all while ensuring that parents are unable to avoid it, as it scrolls across their feeds in the form of reels, memes, or shorts. 

“Gentle parenting.” “Responsive parenting.” “Sensitive parenting.” Couched in appealing language, most of what passes as “expert tips” is some of the worst advice and gaslighting I have ever seen. 

In one reel that came through my Facebook feed, a woman named Ishinna B. Sadanna, a self-described “self-employed parenting expert” in India with one million followers, scolds, "When we correct our children a lot” (her examples include saying “stop running” and “don’t sit like that”) … "they rebel and start throwing more tantrums. Because they stop feeling good about themselves." 

A meme from the responsive parenting handle on Instagram stated in soft pastels: "Parents who make the choice to empathize with their child, instead of criticizing them, are helping to create a society where we empathize with others, instead of judging them."

In perhaps the most alarming example I’ve seen, a mom asked on a parenting blog I follow, “[I]s 9 pm acceptable bed time for a 7th grader? Should it be way later like 10 or 11 for bedtime, since some TIKTOK parents are calling [for] an end to bedtime”?

Bedtimes—bad? Discipline—bad? Correcting our kids—bad?

No, TikTok parenting is bad!

Parents looking to raise happy kids and keep their sanity should run, not walk, away from TikTok parenting pages and trust their instinctual ability to assert firm control.

The trendiest internet parenting fad might be the so-called “Gentle Parenting,” which boasts nearly 300 million posts on TikTok. A google search will tell you that gentle parenting is all about “empathy,” “warmth,” and “respect.” But a number of parents—who have tried this approach and found it produces children who are unable to regulate themselves and puts parents on the brink of insanity—are coming forward. 

As one such critic wrote for The New Yorker, “Under the gentle-parenting schema, a child’s every act must be seen through a lens of anxiety and threat-detection—which heightens the parent’s dual role of child psychologist and emotional-security guard.” 

Another mom who tried it said,

The mild-mannered parenting style popularized by millennials—which means never saying ‘No’ or raising your voice—is facing a backlash from exhausted and confused mothers, worried they’re producing a generation of indulged and self-obsessed brats.

Gentle parenting, like other parenting fads popularized by TikTok and social media, treats children as fragile and essentially eschews parenting basics like punishment and apparently even bedtime, under the guise that this gentle approach somehow reduces childhood anxiety because children acting out stems from trauma or stress rather than lack of discipline. Worse, they gaslight parents into feeling almost abusive if they do flex their authority by using firm and traditional methods, and suggest these parents are feeding a vicious cycle of misbehaviour. 

Instead, the anxiety seems to fall squarely on the parents, who share a deluge of these posts almost neurotically on their own feeds and pages. As one mom wrote in a piece for The Cut, "There is a staggering number of parenting experts on TikTok, and many of them drum up engagement by preying on parents’ insecurities." And they imply that if you just adopt one guru’s lingo (think, 'No thank you!' in lieu of 'no'), or use these words with your tantruming toddler, you will crack the code.

As another mom wrote in the article, “TikTok’s Version of Parenting is a Nightmare Fantasy,” 

What I find so insidious about this new version of online mom life is how it pretends to be the opposite—a raw, real look at the state of motherhood—yet ultimately pushes the same narrative that parenthood is unattainably hard but that if you buy the right product or follow the right influencer, you might just be able to push through.

Meanwhile, research published here at IFS  has found that children fare best with traditional parenting approaches that are discipline based. When examining positive teen mental health, for example, Dr. Jonathan Rothwell points out that, “Political ideology is one of the strongest predictors.” Conservative parents are raising teens with the lowest levels of mental health problems, not because of their politics per se, Rothwell notes, but because:

conservative and very conservative parents are the most likely to adopt the parenting practices associated with adolescent mental health. They are the most likely to effectively discipline their children, while also displaying affection and responding to their needs. Liberal parents score the lowest, even worse than very liberal parents, largely because they are the least likely to successfully discipline their children.

Rothwell cites decades of research showing that children raised in homes with “authoritative parenting” are more likely to “exhibit self-control, social competence, success in school, compliance with rules and reasonable social norms, and even exhibit more confidence and creativity.” 

This didn’t surprise me, as it echoes findings in one book about child-rearing that I did actually read, the now cult-classic, half-satirical Bringing Up Bebe by Pamela Druckerman. After comparing French and American children and child-rearing techniques in both countries, she found that the basic difference was that American parents lack authority and boundaries in their homes. The French set firm, clear boundaries, and it’s clear who is in charge. “Strict rules and controlling one’s emotions, it seems, are important components of a child’s life in France,” one reviewer wrote for The New York Times. “For mothers, so is refusing to make child-rearing an all-consuming vocation.” The result is a culture where children sit quietly at restaurant tables, aren’t picky eaters, and don’t interrupt adults every five seconds, all without a bunch of pop psychology found littered across the internet. 

Raising children is hard enough without an endless stream of iPhone psychologists gaslighting parents into letting go of their basic parental duties to lay down the law in their homes. Parents looking to raise happy kids and keep their sanity should run, not walk, away from TikTok parenting pages and trust their instinctual ability to assert firm control—even when it means telling their kids to “stop running!” 

Ashley E. McGuire is a Contributing Editor at the Institute for Family Studies and the author of Sex Scandal: The Drive to Abolish Male and Female (Regnery, 2017).