5 modern parenting trends we’re more than ready to ditch in 2025

Natalie Stechyson · CBC News

· Posted: Dec 31, 2024 4:00 AM EST | Last Updated: December 31

What a year 2024 was for parents. What a … time.

Sure, there were some positive moments in the world of parenting news that had us cheering. Bluey made us weep happy tears. The U.S. surgeon general’s warning about parental stress helped many of us feel less alone. Roblox added more parental controls. Hooray!

But if you are currently in the position of raising small humans, this year you also may have found yourself:

• Paying more for your tween’s skin-care routine than your own.
• Wondering if your gentle parenting is, perhaps, too gentle; if your free-range parenting is going to get you arrested; if your lighthouse parenting is … um … you may have found yourself googling “lighthouse parenting.”
• Feeling like a failure because you don’t bake your own cereal and roast your own nut butters; because you failed to throw your child a “tooth fairy party” and a back-to-school bash; because your two-year-old doesn’t sleep 14 hours straight in their own bed.
• Fighting with every other generation of parents about your parenting, their parenting, and which parenting is more stressful (it’s definitely yours).
• Screaming into the void. (Or your phone, if we’re splitting hairs.)

Like we said — it was a year. One we’re mostly ready to let go of and set free, just like the soother you may have sent soaring into the clouds at your kid’s “bye-bye binky” soiree.

So, from Sephora kids and “sharenting” to lying on the grocery store floor next to your screaming toddler, here are all the modern parenting trends we’re happy to say “see ya!” to in 2025.

1. Kids who look better than we do

Is it not enough that Millennial and Gen X parents had to survive middle school with frizzy hair, braces and our faces scrubbed raw with St. Ives apricot scrub? Must we now suffer the added indignity of our own children looking better at age nine than we can ever hope to look in our own lives?

This was the year “Sephora kids” entered the public lexicon. The trend, where kids as young as eight or nine use anti-aging skin-care products purchased from beauty retailers such as Sephora, has been dividing parents, dermatologists, retailers and social media. 

WATCH | Introducing the Sephora kids: 

Social media is abuzz about the number of tweens obsessed with makeup and skin care in a trend dubbed ‘Sephora Kids.’ CBC’s Anya Zoledziowski explains how they’re getting hooked and why experts have mixed opinions on whether we should be worried about it.

Many people argue the trend is harmless (after all, there are worse ways for kids to spend their time), but a growing group of health-care professionals warn that using products meant for adults can harm pediatric skin.

Call us shallow, but here’s why we’re over this trend: Our kids look too darn good. You’re 10! You’re not supposed to be glowing! Between their dewy skin, mewing-induced chiseled jawlines, and curly-girl hair products, we’re done. May 2025 be the year kids look like kids again, ie., like wrecks.

In 2024, we started to see a “sharenting” reckoning. A term that describes parents who share their children’s lives online, sharenting has existed since the 2000s, with the rise of so-called mommy bloggers and family influencers. But research suggests the trend increased dramatically during the pandemic. 

Now, some kids of parenting influencers are growing up and sharing their negative experiences. 

On top of that, we’ve also seen some extreme situations that highlight what we may not see online. In one case, a U.S. parenting influencer and YouTube personality was sentenced in February to up to 30 years in prison after pleading guilty to four counts of aggravated child abuse. Another mom in Utah is being investigated by police after an internet uproar over a video that appeared to show her son flinching as his father approaches.

Meanwhile, the aforementioned U.S. surgeon general’s report warned that part of modern parenting’s unique struggles are what he calls our “culture of comparison,” propagated by influencers and online trends that create unrealistic expectations for parents to pursue.

Parents are inundated with elaborate school lunch ideas, strategies for breaking generational cycles and videos on back-to-school party themes. Sharenting is why we all felt like we needed to start celebrating “inchstones.” It’s why we embraced beige nursery decor.

It’s why we’re apparently judging parents if their houses are too messy, or not messy enough (because are we not playing with our children enough if the floor is tidy? Are they loved if the laundry is folded?)

It’s why we’re screaming into the void. And yes, the void is still your phone. Keep up!

Seeing as how schools are banning cell phones, and Australia is banning social media for kids, maybe next year we’ll see parents put down their phones more often, too. 

3. Trad wives

We’ll be concise for this one: The trad wives have got to go.

There’s been a growing trend on TikTok and Instagram of young women sharing about their daily lives as “trad wives.” “Traditional wives” forego the workplace, extol the virtues of homemaking, and often talk about the ways they “submit” to their husbands. 

LISTEN | Trad wives glamourizing life at home: 

They’re baking goldfish crackers from scratch for their eight home-schooled children, they’re waking up at 4 a.m. to pack their husbands’ lunches, they’re being erroneously conflated with traditional stay-at-home moms while also making you wonder if you should be homesteading and making your own toothpaste. 

Now, some of the OG trad wife influencers are “quitting” the lifestyles and getting divorced.

Enough said. Goodbye to this trend!

4. Gentle parenting (that’s too gentle)

This modern parenting style —  whether you call it “gentle parenting“, “positive parenting” or “respectful parenting” — centres on acknowledging a child’s feelings and the motivations behind challenging behaviours.

Steered by big-name parenting influencers like Big Little Feelings, Dr. Becky and Janet Lansbury, many parents today aim to be more respectful and less reactive than their own authoritarian parents. Great, in theory.

But recently there’s been a shift as exhausted moms, dads, guardians and experts question if a gentle parenting style is actually too rough — on them. A peer-reviewed study recently published in the journal PLoS ONE found that a third of the parents they surveyed who identified as “gentle parents” reported feelings of burnout and parent uncertainty. 

Part of the problem is that people confuse “gentle” with being overly permissive in every moment, experts have noted, an impossible standard that sets parents up for failure. 

Remember this in 2025 when Ella Rose is throwing a fit on the grocery store floor because she wants Oreo cereal.

5. ‘Safetyism’

In parenting literature, the term “safetyism” has been used to describe the modern culture of overprotecting children through methods like softer, lower playgrounds and constant hovering, which has also been called “helicopter parenting.”

Listen, we’re not saying we want kids to be less safe. In fact, we want kids to be as safe as possible. This is, after all, why we attend car seat clinics and battle each other online for those impossible-to-get toddler swimming lesson spots.

But in 2025, wouldn’t it be nice if you could send your kid to the park alone without worrying about getting arrested?

Like the Georgia mom arrested in October after her 10-year-old walked to their rural town alone. Or the� Winnipeg mom who was investigated Child and Family Services in 2016 due to a complaint about her children playing unsupervised in their own backyard.

Issues of child safety versus independence were hotly debated in the parenting news community this year. In January, the Canadian Paediatric Society (CPS) released new guidelines emphasizing the importance of risky play for children’s development and physical and mental health.

And in August, a team of anthropologists from Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., argued that efforts to mitigate the risks of playgrounds by making them as injury-proof as possible may, in fact, be harming kids.

Maybe in 2025 we’ll all stop hovering as much. It would give us more time to focus on our own skin-care routines and figure out what Lighthouse parenting means once and for all.

WATCH | Why kids need risky play: 

Running free, taking chances and even getting hurt are essential to healthy childhood development, says the Canadian Paediatric Society. A new study says engaging in risky outdoor behaviour with peers is key to kids’ mental, physical and social health.