Modern Parenting Is DESTROYING Childhood - Nancy McDermott (#20)
3 July 2025
With Nancy McDermott
North America
Nancy McDermott, author and researcher affiliated with the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies at the University of Kent, argues that modern therapeutic parenting culture has produced a generation of identity-anxious young people ill-equipped to weather ordinary difficulty. Tracing the shift from self-esteem culture to self-identification culture, she contends that hovering, validating adults have transferred emotional responsibilities onto children who cannot yet carry them — creating the precise psychological conditions in which gender-identity distress, and the ideologies that exploit it, find their most fertile ground.
Nancy McDermott has spent years studying American parenting culture from the inside, first as a participant in Brooklyn's intensely competitive parent networks, then as a researcher and advisor. Her book The Problem with Parenting (Praeger, 2020) documented how the family shifted from a relatively stable social institution into something more precarious — a vehicle for adult self-expression in which children carry disproportionate psychological weight. In this conversation she applies that analysis to a question now pressing on clinicians, judges and policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic: why are so many young people struggling to form a settled sense of themselves, and what role has adult behaviour played in creating that difficulty? McDermott locates the origins of the problem not in recent years but in the 1970s, when rising divorce rates and a broadening cultural emphasis on individual fulfilment began to reshape what parents believed they owed their children. The response, she argues, was an intensification of parenting itself — more deliberate attention, more emotional attunement, more careful curation of experience. Approaches that present themselves as gentle or child-led have, in her reading, transferred responsibility for emotional regulation away from adults and onto children who are developmentally unprepared for it. The result is not resilience but its opposite. One consequence, she contends, is a generation of young people whose sense of self is unusually fragile and who have been trained to locate the source of their distress in their own identity rather than in the ordinary friction of growing up. The cultural move from promoting self-esteem to promoting self-identification is not, she insists, a neutral evolution. It creates conditions in which persistent discomfort — social, emotional, bodily — is readily reframed as evidence of an unmet identity need requiring external affirmation and, potentially, clinical intervention. Gender ideology, on this account, does not create the vulnerability it exploits; it finds it already present. The episode also examines what happens when schools absorb therapeutic modes of operating that were once confined to clinical settings. When education is organised around emotional processing and the acknowledgement of vulnerability rather than the building of competence and the transmission of knowledge, the institution loses its capacity to help children encounter difficulty and move through it. McDermott sees this as a structural problem rather than a matter of individual teachers or curricula, and one that compounds the anxieties children bring from home rather than counteracting them. From a UK evidence perspective, these arguments carry particular weight. The Cass Review, published in April 2024, described a clinical cohort characterised by complex mental health presentations, social difficulties and, frequently, histories of family disruption or adverse childhood experience. Its core recommendation — that gender distress in children and adolescents should be assessed through holistic, psychologically informed care, not resolved prematurely through affirmation and medical pathways — depends on practitioners being willing and able to hold that complexity. McDermott's account of how contemporary culture systematically erodes that capacity, in homes, schools and consulting rooms alike, sits directly alongside the evidence base the Cass Review assembled. The cultural and the clinical are not separate questions.
