Nancy McDermott
Writer and parenting culture researcher
Irish parents are caught between gentle parenting, helicopter parenting, and a therapeutic model of schooling — and their children are growing more anxious, not less. Nancy McDermott, an American researcher who has spent years scrutinising modern parenting culture, joined Stella to name what many Irish parents sense but rarely feel permitted to say.
Nancy McDermott is an American writer and researcher whose work examines how contemporary parenting culture has transformed the relationship between adults and children. Writing regularly for Spiked, she has argued that the modern imperative to protect children from discomfort, failure, and ordinary risk has not produced more secure young people — it has produced more fragile ones. Her research focuses on the ideas and social pressures driving this shift, from the rise of therapeutic language in schools to the competitive anxiety of parenting advice culture.
In the Beyond Gender episode Modern Parenting Is DESTROYING Childhood (#20, July 2025), McDermott joined host Stella O'Malley for a conversation that will land with particular force for Irish listeners. The parenting philosophies she has spent years studying in the United States have arrived in Ireland in full: gentle parenting as a social media orthodoxy, helicopter parenting driven by fear of failure, and an increasingly therapeutic framing of school life that redefines ordinary childhood difficulties as conditions requiring professional management.
For Ireland, this is not merely a borrowed American trend. CAMHS waiting lists, the expansion of social-emotional learning programmes in Irish schools, and a cultural atmosphere in which parental anxiety is routinely medicalised all reflect the same underlying shift McDermott identifies. Stella's perspective as a practising Irish psychotherapist — someone who sees the downstream effects in her consulting room — gives the conversation a grounding rarely found in these debates.
McDermott's core argument offers Irish parents something genuinely useful: not another layer of guilt, but a clear-eyed case for why restoring ordinary challenge, boredom, and failure to childhood is not neglect — it is the work of raising capable people.
