The dangerous cult of ‘toxic parents’

Complaining about ‘toxic parents’ has been a viral hit on TikTok with videos on the topic racking up several billion views. Only one of those views is mine and there won’t be another because it was like peering through a window into a cross between a padded cell and a charnel house.

In video after video, boys and girls across the English-speaking world – aged roughly 15 to 25 – share the trauma of what they’ve had to endure, courtesy of their terrible mothers and fathers. Many children suffer at the hands of the people who should protect them, but in this case what the kids find intolerable would, to anyone sane, look like normal, even responsible, parenting.

It is, for example, toxic, painful and shaming for parents to criticise clothes or behaviour, the teens agree. One 15-year-old films herself traumatised, barely able to speak. Her dad had said her T-shirt was too revealing, it turned out. ‘I can’t believe it. It’s so inappropriate. I feel unsafe.’

What makes me feel unsafe is when children start to talk like HR professionals.

For older kids, the ones who’ve moved away from home, a toxic parent is one who comes over to their flat uninvited, or tries to clean the house, or tuts, or gives unwanted tips on how to bring up grandchildren. These are all a ‘violation of boundaries’, I’ve learnt, and if a parent can’t respect your boundaries, why then it’s only sensible to excise them from your life. And this is where the trend takes a turn towards the dark, where the tide of self-pity becomes a collective decision to cut contact. It’s all framed in such a horribly lighthearted way: Time out for toxic parents! Go no contact! You need space to heal! It’s as if giving up your family is like giving up dairy, or a sort of colon cleanse.