Last year, gentle parenting was declared dead. “The helicopter parent has been grounded,” The Today Show announced last summer, as so-called “Fafo” (“Fuck around and find out”) parents surged into fashion.

Now, a Guardian report from last week has revealed how mothers on social media are championing the tough, no-nonsense approach designed to teach children hard lessons through consequences rather than negotiation. But is Fafo parenting a genuine shift in child-rearing, or just the latest online fad?

According to various mum bloggers, Fafo parenting is about letting kids experience the consequences of their behaviour. Your child doesn’t like what’s for dinner? Let them go hungry. They won’t get off the iPad? Chuck it out the window. It’s a “tough luck” approach.

It is also a backlash against what critics see as the creation of wimpy children, and the parental exhaustion that followed from it. Under the gentle-parenting model, the Guardian reported, parents found themselves drained by the constant demand to take cues from their kids: carefully explaining every decision, monitoring every move, naming every emotion their child might be feeling.

Instead, Fafo parents are willing to let kids suffer from their own decisions. Kylie Kelce, wife of former NFL player Jason Kelce, described the benefit of doing so on her podcast, Not Gonna Lie. In one example, Kelce’s daughter refused to wear a jacket outside. Kelce let her. “She’s like, ‘It’s cold out there’, and I’m like, ‘great, let’s put your jacket on.’ And then guess what? She put her jacket on,” said Kelce.

“If Fafo gives parents permission to stop trying to control everything, that’s welcome,” Lenore Skenazy of the free-range kids movement told me. “The biggest lie — and the reason parents are going most crazy in this era — is the idea that you can control everything in your child’s life.”

Technology makes that delusion easy to believe. One survey found that 80% of parents track their child’s location; more than half check it frequently. Parents travelling for business set home temperatures remotely and order kids’ dinner through Uber Eats. “We have omniscience without omnipotence,” as Skenazy put it, “and that’s making parents feel horrible pressure because if you have all this data about your kid, you think that you can make your kid perfect.”

Fafo presents a practical solution for a handful of scenarios, but it doesn’t appear to offer much past that. Neither Fafo nor gentle parenting addresses the fact that parents are constantly present to the point of hovering. “Parents today are spending much more time with their children than our parents spent with us,” wrote economist Emily Oster in December. “Time spent with children sharply increased starting in 1995, and the time moms spend with kids has doubled since the 1980s.”

For parents who want their children to be prepared for the real world, Fafo and gentle parenting are missing a take on how to develop kids to be independent and responsible. To do so requires parents not being there to step in, whether to say, “How does wearing that jacket make you feel?” or “I told you that you’d be cold.” Building in more explicit independence is a simple fix. For example, Skenazy suggested having kids, on a regular cadence, pick an activity — such as cooking dinner or walking to the store — and let them do it independently. The benefits are twofold: kids learn that they’re relied upon and capable of accomplishing things by themselves, and parents learn it too.

The method may seem simple, but the simplest things are often easiest to overlook. Fafo parents say they want their kids to grow up to be competent participants in society. So do gentle parents. To do that, parents will have to actually let them.

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Carolyn D. Gorman is a Paulson Policy Analyst at the Manhattan Institute.

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