On Being a Trustful, Autonomy-Supportive Parent
Gray, Peter. 2025-08-18.
URL: https://petergray.substack.com/p/letter-89-on-being-a-trustful-autonomy
Trustful parents trust Mother Nature’s plan for child development; they facilitate rather than inhibit children’s inborn drives to play and explore on their own and with other children, to make their own decisions, to take risks, to learn from their own mistakes and failures. Trustful parents do not measure or try to direct their children’s development, because they trust children to direct their own development. They understand that human children, like all organisms, have an internal, DNA-driven plan for development. All they need is a fertile environment. Trustful parents are not negligent parents. They provide not just freedom, but also the sustenance, love, respect, moral examples, and environmental conditions required for healthy development. They support, rather than try to direct, their children’s development.
My concept of it is in some ways the opposite of what is commonly called helicopter parenting in the research literature as well as in common parlance. Helicopter parenting is characterized by intrusive monitoring, controlling, and correcting the child’s behavior along with attempts to plan and control the child’s future. Dozens of studies have shown that emerging adults who grew up with such overinvolved parents are disproportionately likely to suffer from anxiety, depression, low self-efficacy, and reduced self-control compared to otherwise comparable young adults who grew up with parents who were less hovering and controlling
Another common term in the parenting research literature is autonomy-supportive parenting. As the term implies, this is parenting aimed at reinforcing the child’s sense of freedom.
I have now decided on a new term for what I had previously called trustful parenting. I’ll call it trustful, autonomy-supportive parenting, abbreviated TAS parenting. This term, though more cumbersome, is more descriptive than the term I had used in previous writing. TAS parents not only trust their children to direct their own behavior but support those decisions by providing help where help is needed and desired.
Practically, what does it mean to be a TAS parent? Here is a list of practices that come to mind.
Recognize the child as a unique, whole person, not the parent’s creation
Attempt to see from the child’s point of view
Focus on the child’s present, not future. It’s natural for parents to have some concern about their child’s future. We all want our children to grow up to be kind, moral, happy, healthy adults who can provide and care for themselves and others. But TAS parents know that the child’s future is the child’s responsibility, not the parent’s. It is the child, not the parent, who must determine his or her life goals and routes toward achieving them. TAS parents recognize that the best they can do to help their child toward a satisfying future is to provide the conditions required for a satisfying childhood
Do not do for children what they can do for themselves. Children come into the world designed by nature to want to do as much for themselves as they can. That is how they progress toward adulthood. TAS parents understand this, so they allow their children the freedom to do for themselves what they can, even though they will not do it as well as the parent could. TAS parents allow their children to make mistakes and to fail, because they know that mistakes and failures are inevitable components of learning.
Expect children to be partners in family chores. Nobody wants to be always a recipient and never a giver, and that applies to children as much as adults. It is empowering to be helpful. Everyone in a family is a unique individual, but they are on the same team, and teamwork is the ingredient of family coherence. [..] One aspect of autonomy is having a say in how you will contribute to the household. Volunteering to do something feels great; being ordered to do the same thing does not. Children, especially as they grow older, like to take on ever more complex and challenging tasks. Not just washing dishes, but cooking dinner, for example.
Involve children in decision-making and problem-solving. I’m not suggesting equal democratic power within the household. That’s unrealistic. But TAS parents recognize that children like to be at least consulted and heard in family decisions.
Reinforce moral values more than achievement. TAS parents recognize the harm of parental pressure for high grades in school or excellent performance in athletic or other competitive events (discussed in Letter #80). They also understand that what the world needs is not more “winners,” but more decency, and that people who are kind and care about the welfare of others do well in life because others, in turn, care about them and befriend them.
Instead of banning activities, teach safety rules. Parents are naturally and properly concerned about their children’s safety. One way, not the TAS way, to try to promote safety is to prevent children from doing things that involve risk. Prevent them from going outdoors anywhere away from the home without an adult; don’t let them use sharp knives, or build fires, or climb tall trees, or turn on the oven. Don’t let them have a smartphone or use social media. Such restrictions reduce certain immediate risks, but they also greatly reduce learning opportunities, reduce the child’s sense of autonomy, reduce joy, and reinforce a message of distrust in the child’s competence.
Such banning may be appropriate for children who clearly lack the maturity required for the banned activity, but many U.S. parents today ban, even for 10-year-olds and young teens, activities that my friends and I were allowed to do at age 5 or 6 and kids in Finland and Norway are still allowed to do at about that age (Shaw et al, 2015; Welch, 2024). TAS parents know that a far better route to safety is to teach children how to do safely what they are physically capable of doing and want to do, and then allow them to do it, perhaps with careful monitoring at first and then with increasing independence.
Respect the child’s privacy. Everyone, at least everyone beyond the age of about four, needs some privacy. Nobody likes to be snooped on all the time. This is especially true for teenagers, who are at a life stage where the primary developmental task is to break away, develop an identity independent of their parents, and experiment with ways of being, including ways of being intimate, which cannot be done with parents monitoring. Younger children benefit from time away from parents; teenagers need time away from parents. TAS parents respect that. Just as they don’t read their children’s diaries, they don’t monitor their internet explorations or the messages they send to friends; they don’t require detailed reports of what the child did every time the child was away from home; and they certainly don’t use digital tracking devices to follow their children’s every move away from home.
Resist fear-based and defensive modes of parenting. The enemy of trust is fear, and, unfortunately, fear for children runs rampant in our society today. It runs rampant not because the world is truly more dangerous than it was in the past but because, as a society, we have generated dangerous myths about the dangers. The fears that children might be snatched away by strangers, or suffer some terrible accident, or make an irreversible life-damaging decision, or fail to achieve and end up as life failures (by whose criteria?) underlie both helicopter parenting, which is the overprotective brand of fear-based parenting, and tiger parenting, which is the pushy, controlling brand of fear-based parenting (here).
Enable free play and independent exploration. Perhaps the biggest challenge for TAS parents is helping their kids find ways of playing and exploring independently, especially outdoors with other kids, in a world that is not very welcoming of such activities.
TAS parenting is healthier not just for kids but also for parents (see Letter #56). It allows parents to enjoy watching their children grow and develop without the never-ending worry and parent-child conflicts that accompany fear-based parenting styles.