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A coworker, a woman, had to leave a bit early because of something she had to take care of back home, an issue with one of her kids. After she left the room, her boss, another woman, clearly annoyed, just like, shook her head and said, Unbelievable, don't make your kid my problem. I spend a lot of time hustling around, trying to make sure my kid is no one else's problem, even though they'll grow up to become someone else's coworker, partner, neighbor, a voter. I spend a lot of time online watching stories and reels and TikToks and YouTubers who seem to have the whole parenting thing figured out. They know how to get their kids to eat their vegetables at every meal using cookie cutters and toothpicks. They know how to manage tantrums with careful full explanations and fights with their teenagers with well-tim talks in the car. I googled the word parenting today, and the headlines included Kim Kardashian's tough love parenting as she celebrates daughter Chicago's birthday. Megan Markle's relaxed parenting style pulls apart from Kate Middleton. Parenting, it's done privately. It's judged publicly.

Especially coming off of these last few years, it's just made a very stark picture of how much is on us as parents without a safety net, without paid leave, one of the only countries without some leave for parents. The pandemic, COVID, we were on our own, teaching our children from home while trying to have a job and a career. Parents are tired. The pressure is just relentless.

Today, on the assignment and an interview with a longtime parenting editor and columnist, Amy Joyce of the Washington Post. What she's seen and learned from the mommy blogs, parenting fads, and the people raising their kids who mostly ask, Am I doing this right? I'm Adi Cornish. We want to talk more about the issues that affect parents and kids because, frankly, so many modern day debates over mass shootings, LGBTQ rights, race, and history are being fought and talked about over kids. First, we want to invite you, kids and parents listening, to weigh in more with your ideas and questions and the people you'd like to hear from. You can text or send a voice memo. The number is in our episode notes. In the meantime, our guest, Amy Joyce, has thought about parenting nonstop for about a decade. She's a parent of two teenage boys, and she was the Washington Post Deputy Editor of their On Parenting section. Throughout those 10 years, she's seen parenting trends come and go. When you started out, the dialog in talking about parenting, there were a lot of books out, I assume. There was a lot of magazine covers, probably, about helicopter parenting.

How old are your kids at the time? Where are you in your own parenting story?

Let's see. My oldest one would have been about six, and the younger one would have been about four. It was a time, too, where I was still feeling very torn as a mother, working as much as I did, not knowing what they were doing all day, trying to remind myself I didn't need to be that helicopter, that it was good for them. That was hard. You were always questioning, and I think moms especially still do, what you're doing and how you're managing it all. It's like I didn't have a chance to be a helicopter parent, even though I was covering parenting during the day. I found that with a lot of my friends and colleagues.

What were the kinds of questions parents would write in with?

I mean, it's the same questions that they write in with today. I'm trying my best. They're still tantruming. I'm doing everything I can to get them out the door. They won't get out the door. How do I connect with my child? I feel like I'm so busy all the time that I'm not really present. That comes up all the time, and that came up then all the time. How can I be present when I'm trying to do so much? I think that was the trickle down of the parenting bloggers and the trickle down of the helicopter parenting and that idea of being around for your children all the time. It put a lot of pressure on people. Maybe made people feel like they weren't necessarily doing it right.

How did social media affect that?

Oh, gosh. Like all things social media, there are pluses and minuses. But I think the problem was parents saw other parents supposedly doing it right, and they saw the perfection, and they saw the beauty and the seeming ease with which these other parents were parenting.

And it's interesting because if it's on a TikTok or an Instagram or a Facebook, now it feels like it's just your peers, especially a TikTok. But if there's just people who look like you, there's no shtick, and yet they're telling you, well, you don't want to yell. You don't want to raise your voice. You don't want to do X, Y, and Z, you do feel like, Oh, wait, everyone is figuring out a way to do this, and I'm struggling.

Yes. I think the other issue with that is once you start seeing these TikToks and how other people are doing it so supposedly well, it's like you lose your own parenting instinct and you think, okay, I need to be that gentle parent. I can't yell when my kid spills milk, when he's trying to pour it, I have to be not freak out immediately because he's learning. That is a great thought, but that's not reality. But then as we are watching this on TikTok or Instagram reels for the older folks in the audience, me, we start to wonder what we're doing wrong. We think, Oh, she's doing it right, or he's got the good advice there. It just makes it really, really difficult. You start... I think other generations, maybe they felt judged by their parents or their aunts. Now, I think it's easy to feel judged while you're staring at your phone.

Oh, interesting. Say more about that.

I just feel like, and I do it myself, I'm following a ton of parenting influencers, and I'm reading a lot of parenting advice from the experts and whatnot, and they are. So sometimes it makes so much sense.

But in practice- Wait, even now with your teenagers, you're doing this?

Oh, yeah.

Wait, even now as you exited the job of parenting columnist, you're up on TikTok clicking, the algorithm is giving you advice on raising teens?

It's only been two weeks. We'll see how that plays out.

Well, give it a minute. They're fast moving.

I But also raising teens is a whole different story. It's a whole different transition, and I do. I still seek out the advice. The benefit of this job is I feel like I know who the good experts are who are really doing the research and understand things. But at the same time, when I see these little bites or when I saw these little bites of how to do things the right way, it's easy to feel judged, even though they can't see you. You start judging yourself because you can see all these other people who seem to have it all under control or they know how to manage it.

What is the current parenting debate in online spaces? What's the style and what's the argument over it?

Gentle parenting, I think, has been a big one.

It sounds so good. What's gentle parenting? It does.

There are very good parts to it.

That's not a good sign, right? I'm like, What is that? But what does that actually mean in practice?

It My take on it means just extreme patience and letting your kids have their big emotions, letting them make mistakes, but being patient enough to let them have those mistakes without yelling and screaming and putting them in their room or in a time out. Instead of a time out, you hug them and you sit with them and you let them have their big emotions. But what's happened is it's gone to the extreme with a lot of parents. I'm seeing this backlash now where the gentle parenting has moved into, in many people's minds, a lack of discipline or no boundaries. If there's one thing that I think I always want to impart is boundaries actually are good. Our children actually crave them. I think there are parts to gentle parenting that a lot of parents have taken on and it's beautiful and brilliant and a great way to live. But in the extreme, it can go awry, and there is a lot of backlash to that.

But this is a good example of watching a trend rise and fall. I think even I, now that you describe it, encountered this language of gentle parenting. You'll be scrolling through and all of a sudden, something will say, How to tackle a tantrum? How to de-escalate? All of this language that really sounds like it's for adult situations, de-escalating and moving people off to The gentleness has a language to it that's actually, it sounds like HR, which seems weird for a kid.

Yeah. It's important to remember what level they are at and how to speak with a child. I've heard from so many parents. I've tried to explain to my three-year-old why we need to put our code on and get out the door on time. That's nice, but three-year-old isn't up for that. That's not how they communicate and learn.

What's the argument over gentle parenting now? Other than the permissiveness, what does backlash look like in a parenting movement, and how does it play out?

It plays out in the comments online and social media. It plays out in a lot of judging, but then it also plays out in people just wanting to go the absolute opposite direction, which is like our country in many ways, this division, and you see it in parenting as well. You've got the parents who practice gentle parenting, and then you have parents who take it to the other extreme and want to do the exact opposite or preach the exact opposite of every bit of that. I think in general, parenting trends are like a rubber band. They stretch one way really far, and then they come back. But there are things that people can take from it and that do actually stick. But I think we are in that stretching with gentle parenting right now, and I just see a lot of negative reaction to it I do worry that that means that the good parts of it will go away as well. There are good parts of, I think, almost every trend.

We'll be right back after the break.

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This is The Assignment. I'm Audi Cornish, and I'm talking with Amy choice. She just concluded her decade-long stint as a writer and editor of the Washington Post column on parenting. What is the nascent parenting movement you're seeing develop now?

A lot of hands-off.

Full free range? Or what does that mean?

Some people call it sloth parenting.

Oh, wait, what? Have you heard that phrase? I have not heard this.

No. Sloth parenting. So you're slow. You let your kids do what they want to do and see what happens. But that also has its benefits because a lot of kids, people argue, are not learning adversity or how to deal with adversity because their parents have been so gentle with them or allowing them to have their big feelings. And so I I think a lot of parents now are answering that by letting go a little bit and not hovering and not making it say, Oh, well, you have to do your own laundry, or, You can make your own breakfast. It's going back in that direction instead of the more coddling parenting.

The idea of independence has many more meanings now than when you and I might have walked down the street as kids by ourselves to find another friend. So much. Someone on the phone can meet a friend in another country when they're 10 or 14. I don't mean to go straight to the danger, but can you talk about how does that play in? What advice do you think about when people come to you with that question of how do I help them learn for themselves, but also- Keep those boundaries.

Right. That's the tough balance of being a parent, right? They have to... You're trying to teach them how to learn for themselves But now, especially with phones and devices, you still have to keep those boundaries, and they're going to make mistakes with those phones and devices. Unfortunately, those mistakes, they can stick with them. So a piece we did, I I think it was in October, was about sextortion online. It's a high, high number of tween and teen boys who think they've met a girl online, but it's somebody posing as a girl, and they send pictures, incriminating pictures, and then the person reveals themselves to not be this teenage girl and demands money. It's been happening to a ton of kids, and it's a mistake. It's hard because they're on these devices. Parents cannot be watching them 24 hours a day on these devices, and bad things happen. While we're trying to teach our children to be independent, it's important to remember they're going to make mistakes. It's important to keep up the guard sales to make sure those mistakes aren't going to harm them forever. It's just a terribly difficult balance because who knows what they're doing on their devices if they're not right there in front of you and you're not seeing exactly what they're doing every minute of day, which we can't and we shouldn't.

But to carry on with this story a little bit, it feels like it comes back to the overall lessons you've written about, which is kids have to feel they can come to you with things. Yes. And this is the hardest thing, your own, in that case, sexual exploration, right? Or your own whatever. Whatever your private space is, all of a sudden, the idea that you have to bring your parents into it is terrifying. And is there a way that parents can build that relationship? Because that seems like something you've written about.

It's so important, and it's so hard because you don't know. You don't know in that moment that your son or your child is going to come to you and fess up and tell you what happened.

It's horrifying. But they're thinking of all the reactions you've had to them for all kinds of things for years, right? Like, the way you react. This is how a crazy modern parent thinks. I'm giving you my modern parent thing. The way I reacted to the spilled milk is the the way they're going to assume I'm going to react about everything for the rest of our lives, and it may determine whether or not they do come to me when they need help or there's a problem or et cetera. If I don't create that scenario, I've failed.

Oh, yeah.

Welcome to my New Year's resolution thinking. Like, me just going down the rabbit hole about this.

I do this myself all the time. I question myself all the time with this. The other night, and my son's going to love hearing this, but my son and his friends play FIFA soccer online. He's 16, and I went to bed and I fell asleep. It was Saturday night. They were doing this. I woke up when he came to bed and I looked at my clock, and it was 2:00 in the morning. I got really upset the next day, and I said, You can't do that. I'm trying to put boundaries on him. But in my head, I'm thinking, so if I demand that he not do that and I get upset about that, then is he going to sneak? Is he going to do things that are more dangerous and not tell me because I'm telling him not to do this, and he's afraid to tell me later. So it is a hard, hard balance. But then I think the other parts of this piece come into play with that. If you have a connection with your child, with your teenager, if they have moments with you where they can just talk to you, then when things go awry, they will most likely be able to come and talk to you.

And I think you just They'll have to keep that narrative going throughout their lives from the time they're your children's age. You can always talk to me. I am always here for you. I am always going to love you, unconditionally, and just let that be in their head. But It is hard because you start to question like, Okay, if I get upset with them or mad at them for this, does that mean they're going to hide it from me later when they want to do it? They may. It's impossible.

What I feel when I think about all these things is pressure, just an enormous amount of pressure. It makes everything feel weirdly high stakes. Everything. Where they go to school, how you talk to them, their friends, their social media use. A lot of it just feels like this never-ending pressure. In a culture where people aren't that interested in supporting parents, if that makes sense. Absolutely. Child care is very expensive. It feels like a very weird moment where we had a taste of this hybrid life post-pandemic, and we've come out of it. Culturally, we're all trying to figure out together what does work-life balance mean. In this case, you and I talking, what does it mean for families?

Especially Coming off of these last few years, it's just made a very stark picture of how much is on us as parents without a safety net, without paid leave, one of the only countries without some leave for parents. The pandemic, COVID, we were on our own. Teaching our children from home while trying to have a job and a career. Parents are tired. The pressure is just relentless. At the same time, it's important to remember, if you're trying and if you love your kid, they're probably going to be okay. That's a generalization But if you're aware of it and you're connecting with your child in some way every day, the odds are good that they're going to be okay, even if they're in the wrong school, even if they're on Instagram or TikTok too much. It's just important to know where they're coming from and who they are.

That's Amy Joyce. She's the outgoing editor for On Parenting. That's the newspaper Parenting Vertical at the Washington Post. That's it for this episode for The Assignment. Of course, we always want to know what's on your mind. We'd love to get your feedback on our shows, and the number to call is 202-854-8802. The Assignment is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Lauryn Galloretta. Our Senior Producer is Matt Martinez, and our engineer is Michael Hammond. Dan DeZula is our Technical Director, and Steve Ligtai is the Executive Producer of CNN Audio. We got support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manisari, Robert Mather's, John Dianora, Lenny Steinhart, James Andress, Nicole Pessereau, and Lisa Namaral. Special thanks, as always, to Katie Hinman. I'm Audi Cornish. Thank you for listening.