How To Respect Your Child’s Autonomy

And teach them to respect yours

My most popular Substack article to date, published about a month ago, was a snarky take-down of hyper-verbal Gentle Parenting. I still don’t like Gentle Parenting, for the same reasons I outlined in that article, but I’m not exactly a disciplinarian either. I think a lot of people (wrongly) assume that if you are against Gentle Parenting then you must be pro-hitting-the-shit-out-of-your-kids (or AT LEAST in favor of a good, long time-out). I’ll admit that I go back and forth on the time-out thing, and I do YELL a lot, not because I think it’s an optimal parenting strategy but because I am a human being with a full spectrum of emotions who happens to get angry with my children quite often (see: my piece on mom rage). But the parenting style that I ASPIRE to–the one that I think is actually best for kids and parents–is neither disciplinarian nor the brand of Dr-Becky-Gentle-Parenting that is so popular with millennial moms. No, the parenting style that I aspire to is…

PERMISSIVE PARENTING!

Here I am picturing gasps of shocked astonishment echoing across the internet followed by a frenzy of unsubscribing. I know I’m going to lose some people on this one. That’s okay. But stick with me and I’ll try to make it worth your while.

You see, Permissive Parenting is undoubtedly the MOST unpopular kind of parenting strategy in Western Culture in 2025. Whenever I mention on social media or Substack that I dislike Gentle Parenting, there is immediately a litany of comments from people telling me that I am confusing Gentle Parenting with Permissive Parenting, and that if I only knew the difference, I would be a fan of Gentle Parenting. Indeed, Dr. Becky (who is, in my opinion, the queen of Gentle Parenting whether she likes it or not), is exceedingly aware of the unpopularity of Permissive Parenting and has actively sought to distance herself from it by changing the moniker for her brand of parenting from “Gentle” to “Sturdy.” She has gone so far as to say, repeatedly, on social media, that she “hates” or “cannot take” this “soft, permissive parenting stuff anymore!”

I mean, REALLY, who ARE these people who just let their kids DO WHAT THEY WANT?

Well, it turns out, everyone, for most of human history before the rise of the patriarchy. There’s pretty compelling evidence to suggest that hunter-gatherers are very permissive parents (at least on most matters, as we will get into in the next sections) and somehow, their kids are growing up with better mental health outcomes than most Westerners. Is it possible, then, that they are actually onto something?

But it’s not just about kids’ mental health. I do think that giving children more autonomy is good for them, but I also think that policing children’s behavior is exhausting and, for the most part, it doesn’t work. If hunter-gatherers were permissive parents, it’s also because they simply didn’t have the resources to be able to micromanage their kids. They were busy foraging, fetching water and fire wood, repairing leaky roofs, mashing up baobab pods into paste, etc. Kids, once weaned from the breast, mostly looked after themselves, largely because they HAD to.

The thing is, I’m busy too. I don’t have any baobab pods to mash at the moment, but I do need to churn out at least one decent article per week to keep this operation running, and I don’t always have a full roster of nannies lined up to cover all of my writing hours. I think one of the ways in which modern parenting advice really falls short is that, collectively, no matter what your preferred brand, they all somehow fail to mention the COST of saying NO to a child. It’s not that I think you should NEVER say no (we’ll get into this later) but, objectively, saying no creates more work. If your kid is begging you for an ice cream sandwich and you are in the middle of writing an article, which is the easier thing to do? Say yes or say no? It will take you 2 minutes to get them what they want from the freezer versus up to 30 minutes of trying to calm them the fuck down if you tell the to wait until after dinner. Again, I am not saying you should give your children unlimited ice cream sandwiches, but I am trying to call attention to the fact that setting lots of boundaries and rules is an effortful and time-consuming way of parenting.

The problem is, in modern society, the deck is stacked against us. There is a lot more danger: think cars, cars, and well, cars. There is a lot more temptation: soda, junk food, TV, video games, cheap toys positioned right at kiddo eye-level in the supermarket checkout lane (it’s moms versus unregulated capitalism, and it’s not a fair fight). And then there are all of these things that we need our kids to do, like go to school and brush their teeth and put on a diaper before bed, that hunter-gatherers never had to worry about.

So if you interpret Permissive Parenting to mean, “just let your kids do whatever they want whenever they want,” then you are in for trouble. No doubt about it. This is not what the hunter-gatherers did either. The truth is, Permissive Parenting is not really the right term. Hunter-gatherer parenting is MORE like Permissive Parenting than Gentle Parenting, but a better name would be something like “Autonomy-Building Parenting,” or, “Letting Your Kids Figure Shit Out For Themselves Parenting”, or even “Leave Me the Fuck Alone From Time to Time and I’ll Let you Do What You Want Parenting” (although I’ll admit none of these have the same, two-word alliterated ring).

To make matters worse, there’s a lot of confusion in our society today about what it really means to be “autonomous.” We tend to confuse autonomy with freedom and to juxtapose it with sharing, equality, and community-oriented responsibilities. Yuval Noah Harari falls into this trap in his blockbuster book Sapiens, when he says, “Ever since the French Revolution, people throughout the world have gradually come to see both social equality and individual freedom as fundamental values. Yet the two values contradict each other. Equality can be ensured only by curtailing the freedoms of those who are better off.” He goes even further by claiming that there is nothing in nature that makes these values fundamentally correct or true: meaning they are purely human cultural constructs (and recent ones at that).

He’s wrong. And frankly, he should have read a bit more about hunter-gatherers before writing the definitive book on Homo Sapiens (I otherwise quite enjoyed the book, FYI). You see, hunter-gatherers value both autonomy and equality, and for hundreds of thousands of years, humans lived in societies in which these two values coexisted and reinforced one another. I would go so far as to argue that the human mind is primed to value both autonomy and equality, and that the French and American Revolutions represented a re-discovery, or correction, to the previous ten-thousands years of coercion and oppression; a positive shift back towards the type of communities in which humans evolved to thrive.

What does this have to do with parenting?

This confusion about the incompatibility of autonomy and being other- or community-oriented (and therefore rule-following and norm-abiding) is at the heart of why we struggle with parenting young children. When you think about it, most of what we are trying to do with discipline is teach our children to follow the rules of your home and your society, to respect others, to forgo self-satisfaction and immediate gratification when it benefits the family, and to be generally more pro-social. We feel that in order to achieve this we need to curtail their autonomy: we need to create a lot of rules and say no a lot. But do we really?

As I’ll explain, it’s entirely possible (though not easy) to teach your children how to be respectful of others (and to follow society’s rules) without being coercive. As always, the hunter-gatherers provide us with some great guidance, but the trick is making it work in the modern context.