Parenting Folklore
Well-meaning parents inherit beliefs about children and call it common sense. I call it folklore.
Parents, I come in peace. Mostly.
But lately, I’ve noticed a lot of what passes for parenting wisdom is folklore: inherited, emotionally satisfying to the adult, and never checked against whether it serves the child.
Parenting folklore. I have a name for it now because I keep meeting it in the wild. Two stories, three weeks apart.
The first: a teenager who learned to fake the dashboard of the monitoring app on their phone. Why? Their parents told them they weren’t allowed to have boundaries. That parent believes safety is control.
The second: a parent wrote to me recently that in a hard moment, what a child needs most is touch and closeness, and that no child would ever turn to a screen instead. This parent believes harm dissolves in comfort. Hug it and it goes away.This was in the context of disclosing sexual abuse, by the way. I can’t help but wonder who the hug is actually for in this moment.
For a while I would have filed those as two different parents. They are not. They are the same error wearing different clothes.
The surveillance parent substitutes control for trust.
The comfort parent substitutes their own need for closeness for the child’s actual experience.
Both put the adult’s script ahead of the child standing in front of them.
And here is the uncomfortable part: the comfort parent is half right. Connection is the destination. The error is believing the adult gets to choose the route and the moment.
Hear me out: how many parents ask a child before hugging them? I don’t have hard data on this but I’d guess “not that many.” Access to a child’s body is treated as a parental default, the same way the surveillance parent treats access to a child’s inner life as a parental default. That’s the folklore talking.
The hug that heals is the one the child reached for. The hug that teaches a child their body is not their own is the one they never got to decline. And before anyone comes for me, this is not an argument against hugs. It’s simply an argument for asking.
And the surveillance parent? Different outfit, same mindset on access. A surveilled child does not become a safer child. They become a better hider. We already met the proof: the dashboard was flawless, and the child behind it was gone. Control does not build trust. It teaches a child that trust was never on the table.
That’s what makes it folklore: passed down generation to generation, and never once checked against the child it claims to protect.
But here’s the question I can’t get out of my head, and the one I want to leave with you.
The next time you reach for the thing your own parents reached for, the watching or the holding, ask yourself honestly: whose comfort is it for?