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.