Lately there’s renewed friction between parenting styles. One school of thought models gentle parenting, the other an authoritative mode now sometimes called #FAFO (f**k around and find out). Gentle parenting ranges from acknowledging a child’s feelings to more radically child-centred philosophies that argue the word ‘no’ can trigger a stress response in little ears.

Videos of authoritative parenting, meanwhile, feature satisfying reels of crying children put out on the side of the road during long car journeys, but the gist is that parents are in charge, and there will be consequences. Like everything on the internet, extremism wins. “You’re leaving to a different house because I won’t let you sleep in our room?,” a mom says to an adorable toddler in a reel labelled #FAFO. “See ya”. She slams the front door.

Both styles promise that if you do the right thing now, you can shape the grown-up later. That promise is seductive because parenting involves decisions whose consequences we can’t know for years, if ever.

I love nothing more than seeing what cursed rod another parent has fashioned for their backs out of internet wisdom and failed willpower. On the parenting podcast Stop the Madness, hosted by Jen O’Dwyer and Sophie White, one poor mother wrote in to say that her child could not fall asleep without thumb sucking. Tame, you think, until the listener reveals that the thumb was hers, squeezed through the bars of the cot each night as her baby lulled himself to sleep.

Ireland will be........

© The Irish Times