Modern Parenting Is DESTROYING Childhood - Nancy McDermott (#20)
3 July 2025
With Nancy McDermott
Global
Nancy McDermott argues that decades of intensive, anxiety-driven parenting have eroded children's resilience and prepared the ground for identity confusion. Tracing a path from the 1970s divorce revolution through the self-esteem era to today's self-identification culture, she makes the case that gender ideology did not create the dysfunction it exploits — it found an already-fragile culture and moved in. The conversation has direct relevance for Irish parents navigating schools and clinical services that have adopted therapeutic language wholesale.
Nancy McDermott spent years at the centre of one of America's most intense parenting communities — Brooklyn's Park Slope — and what she witnessed there shaped a decade of research into how child-rearing in the English-speaking world has fundamentally changed. Her book The Problem with Parenting traces a shift to the 1970s: the collapse of the family as a stable social institution and its replacement by a far more fragile arrangement — a vehicle for adult self-expression and self-fulfilment. In this conversation she brings that cultural analysis to bear on a question pressing for parents across Ireland and beyond: why are so many children struggling, and why do adults find it so hard to say so plainly? McDermott locates the roots of contemporary parenting anxiety in the divorce revolution of the 1970s, which produced a generation who grew up experiencing family as emotionally precarious. When that generation became parents themselves, many overcompensated — hovering, curating, protecting against every possible disappointment. The self-esteem movement of the 1980s and 1990s compounded this: children were praised not for what they achieved but for who they were, which sounds affirming until you ask what happens when a child's inner sense of self becomes the central project of the entire family. This focus on self-esteem gradually became a focus on self-identification. If the most important thing about a child is their inner sense of themselves, and if adults are supposed to validate and protect that inner sense at all costs, the cultural ground is prepared for ideologies that place self-declared identity above observable reality. McDermott is careful not to reduce gender ideology to a parenting failure, but she argues persuasively that the cultural dysfunction was already present long before the ideology arrived to exploit it. Schools feature prominently in this analysis. McDermott describes a trend recognisable to many Irish parents: education taking on functions that once belonged to families, communities, or qualified clinicians. When schools adopt the language of trauma, wellbeing, and therapeutic intervention as core to their mission, the boundary between education and therapy dissolves. Children are taught to understand themselves through a lens of vulnerability, and institutions designed to challenge and develop them become instead engines of validation and diagnosis. The episode returns to the figure of the adult who refuses to act like an adult — who cannot tell a child that difficulty is a normal feature of growing up rather than a sign that something is clinically wrong. For anyone watching the rapid uptake of gender identity frameworks in Irish schools and clinical settings, McDermott's analysis offers a broader cultural account: this did not arrive from nowhere. It arrived into a culture already struggling with what adults owe children and what children are actually for. The remedy she points toward is neither complicated nor new: adults who can tolerate their children's distress without immediately pathologising it, and institutions that treat children as developing people rather than fragile identities requiring constant management. That sounds simple. McDermott's value is in showing why it has become so difficult.
