Pathological Mothers Are Killing Birth Rates

The Birth Drop We Don’t Want to Talk About

50% of women in their 30s are childless, and we are desperate to find out why.

How can we expect people to imagine their own children will be any different from children they are modelled? After witnessing their nephew hold his parents hostage at Christmas with nothing but a glare and a gluten allergy, any reasonable person would go home thinking—perhaps we’ll travel and enjoy ourselves just one more year.

The reason is that my generation fell for gentle parenting in some form or another. Many won’t even realize that’s what they’re doing. This isn’t just about those who explicitly subscribe to it, which is why I’ll use the term millennial parenting for my purposes here. The style has permeated the culture, thanks to the dominance of maternal influence, a sentimentalized view of childhood, and the slow displacement of men from the family structure.

The Empathy Delusion

For my peers, empathy and understanding is the solution to absolutely everything. They try not to say “No” or “Stop!” They’ll say, “Let’s try it differently!” And when their toddler smacks his sibling, they crouch down, eyes wide with therapeutic concern, and announce, “I feel very sad when you hit. What do you feel?”

When this inevitably delivers anxiety and defiance, they go to a professional in search of a neuropsychiatric answer.

Gentle and millennial parenting rests on a noble seeming but ultimately naive belief: empathy is a universal solvent. That if we just validate enough feelings and explain enough boundaries, our children will spontaneously develop into self-regulating, emotionally literate mini adults. If parents can just stay calm and “co-regulate” tantrums without ever imposing top-down oppressive control, their kids will blossom into wise, kind humans.

That’s equal to believing that if I eat enough chicken, I’ll learn to fly.

Millennials project their own perceived complexity, preciousness and adult intelligence onto children. Therefore, the only reason a child can misbehave is because they don’t understand.

It began with Rousseau, who painted children as innocent blank slates - pure beings corrupted only by society. That idea, now wrapped in pseudo-spiritual neurobabble and Instagram aesthetics, leads parents to believe bad behaviour is simply a byproduct of a developing prefrontal cortex. “Neurons firing”. So rather than correcting or punishing misbehaviour, the millennial parent is encouraged to patiently narrate feelings and offer guidance - never “mean” consequences.

But here's the irony: true empathy doesn’t arise from being endlessly validated. It arises from feeling safe. And safety for a child comes from structure, knowing that their parent will act as a buffer between them and the terrifying world outside.

Have you ever had an anxiety or panic attack? And when in the throws of such an attack, did you stop and ask someone how they’re doing? Of course not because dysregulation naturally turns us inward. You must secure your own safety before you can extend care to others. And children, can’t be empathic when they feel emotionally uncontained. They certainly won’t feel secure when the adult in charge is too busy narrating their own emotional state to provide order.

It follows that only within the solid fences a parent ensures, will play unfold, and it is through play that they learn empathy. Psychologist Jordan Peterson emphasizes that through play, children learn to interpret social cues, understand others' perspectives, and develop emotional responses aligned with societal norms.

Research from McGill University found that "the single most important childhood factor in developing empathy is paternal involvement in childcare." While children can show signs of empathy from an early age, a full theory of mind - the ability to understand that others may have different beliefs - typically develops around age four. Paternal warmth has been significantly positively related to empathy in children, especially boys, while maternal warmth has shown a negative relation to empathy in children, particularly girls.

The gentle parent puffs out her chest, talking about time-outs and boundaries (the buzzword of the decade). When push comes to shove, however, what mechanism is there to keep a misbehaving child in said time-out? Without earned respect for the parent’s word, implementing consequences becomes impossible. Without authority, a parent is as effective as a wet blanket.

The Vanishing Father and the Performative Mother

We’ve built a culture that glorifies the feminine traits of nurturing and empathy, while treating masculine ones - authority, discipline, stoicism - as dispensable. A necessary move for the normalization of single motherhood.

When fathers do instinctively enforce those boundaries, they’re waved off or subtly undermined. “That’s too harsh,” she says. “Let’s talk about it instead.” And so, the father withdraws - uncertain, ashamed, less inclined to step in next time.

I see it constantly. The mother rolling her eyes at her child’s misbehaviour, as if to say, “This is just so unexpected.” The banana peel tossed into a stranger’s handbag is met with performative disbelief. Can you believe he just did that? Like distancing themselves from their child’s behaviour somehow absolves them of the responsibility to correct it.

This is Freud’s devouring mother, in modern packaging: nurturing turned pathological in the absence of masculine balance. We forget that parenting is meant to be shared. The gentle parenting paradigm is only possible when the father’s instinct to lead is either shamed out of him or pushed out entirely.

The kids learn quickly that mom’s boundaries mean nothing, and dad’s voice will be silenced. There’s no real authority—only a hierarchy where the child rules.

The Data Is Clear (But Ignored)

Decades of developmental research affirm that authoritative parenting - not permissive, not authoritarian - produces the best outcomes. Diana Baumrind’s original work, and many studies since, have shown that children raised with high warmth and high control outperform others emotionally, academically, and socially.

Permissive parenting (which gentle and millennial parenting invariably is), in contrast, is correlated with higher rates of anxiety, impulsivity, and risky behaviour. But we don’t like hearing that anymore. We’d rather believe in the redemptive power of emotional mirroring than confront the reality that children are not born with exclusively good impulses.

They don’t need a mirror to facilitate understanding, they need a wall. A loving, steady, immovable wall that tells them where the world begins and ends. Then, and only then, can they begin to move confidently within it, tame bad impulses, making way for generosity towards others.

Hannah Spier, MD

Psychiatrist