Modern Parenting Is DESTROYING Childhood - Nancy McDermott (#20)
3 July 2025
With Nancy McDermott
culture-and-ideology
Nancy McDermott argues that the crisis of modern childhood is not a parenting failure but a cultural one: the family has been reshaped from a stable institution into a vehicle for adult self-fulfilment, producing children who cannot tolerate disappointment and adults who have stopped acting like adults. She traces a direct line from the divorce revolution and self-esteem movement to the conditions in which gender ideology now thrives — not as the cause of dysfunction, but as its beneficiary. The prescription is a recovery of adult authority grounded in evidence rather than anxiety.
Something has gone wrong with how Western societies understand childhood, and Nancy McDermott has spent years trying to name it precisely. As the author of The Problem with Parenting and editor of Genspect's Inspecting Gender Substack, she brings a researcher's discipline and a parent's directness to a question that tends to attract either sentimentality or panic: why does raising children in affluent, educated communities so often produce anxious, fragile adults? McDermott's answer begins with institutions, not individuals. The family itself has been quietly transformed over several decades from a durable social structure into something more like a personal project — a space for adults to achieve psychological fulfilment through their children. That shift did not happen in a vacuum. The divorce revolution of the 1970s produced a generation of children who experienced family as contingent and unstable, and who went on to parent from a position of anxiety rather than confidence. The self-esteem movement of the following decades compounded this, teaching adults to treat children's emotional states as the primary measure of parenting success. What replaced authority and structure was a culture of curation: hovering, protecting, managing. The hosts press McDermott on the mechanics of this shift — how schools absorbed therapeutic functions once reserved for families, how the idea of neutral parenting became ideological cover for a specific and narrow set of values, how institutions that were once in the business of transmitting knowledge began instead to validate children's interior lives as the highest good. This is the context in which gender ideology finds its foothold. McDermott is careful not to treat it as a cause but as a consequence — a set of ideas that became available and persuasive precisely because the cultural ground had been prepared. A child taught that discomfort is damage, that identity is the primary category of selfhood, and that adults exist to affirm rather than guide is a child for whom the language of gender identity offers ready answers to ordinary developmental struggles. The ideology did not create the dysfunction; it capitalised on it. The episode's larger argument is about what happens when adults abdicate the role of adults. McDermott draws a direct line between parenting styles that refuse to tolerate children's frustration and a broader cultural inability to accept limits, disappointment, or the authority of evidence over feeling. That abdication runs not only through families but through schools, professional bodies, and policy — the same institutions that once transmitted stable expectations now compete to affirm whatever children report about themselves. McDermott closes with something rarer than diagnosis: a case for reclaiming responsibility. Not nostalgia, but a recognition that children need adults who can hold a position, absorb distress without collapsing, and act from knowledge rather than fear. That argument sits at the heart of what the gender-critical perspective has long been trying to articulate about medicine, education, and care.
