“Because You Let Me.” The Horror of Speak No Evil, Niceness, and Complacent Men

Spoiler Alert: This article contains heavy spoilers for Speak No Evil (both the Danish original and the American remake).

No animal in the wild suddenly overcome with fear would spend any of its mental energy thinking, “It’s probably nothing.”—Gavin de Becker

Shhh…

A nice American couple and their daughter, new Londoners weathering loneliness and marital strain, go to Tuscany on holiday. The Daltons—Louise (Mackenzie Davis), Ben (Scoot McNairy), and young Agnes (Alix West Lefler)—are eager to distract themselves from their unhappiness. Amidst the throng of other tourists, one charismatic British couple stands out: Paddy (James McAvoy), Ciara (Aisling Franciosi), and their quiet son Ant (Dan Hough), fellow English-speakers who wear their passion for life and for one another on their sleeves. After some shared meals and adventures, the irresistibly charming Paddy and Ciara elicit a promise from the Daltons that they will visit them at their Devonshire home in the future. 

Months pass. London rains. A letter arrives in the mail, reminding them of their promise. Despite Louise’s misgivings (“We don’t know them well enough to stay that long.”), the unemployed and insecure Ben leaps at the chance to rub shoulders with the free-spirited, red-blooded Paddy. And so the Daltons venture out to his remote farmhouse in the countryside—so remote, in fact, that there are no neighbors in sight. The Daltons’ denial and dark humor keep pace with their mounting reservations as they pull into the driveway. 

It’s probably nothing.

But this is a psychological thriller/horror film: it’s definitely not nothing. The scene is set for Speak No Evil, the end result of the Daltons’ continuous choice to see no evil and hear no evil, until it’s (almost) too late. Ben and Louise are nice people who believe in the goodness of humanity and compulsively shush their fears, more concerned about appearing rude than protecting themselves. They know something feels off about this couple, their silent son, and the isolated setting. But their cultural milieu has trained them to withhold judgment, to bite their tongues, to make excuses for their hosts’ increasingly inappropriate behavior, and to submit to the continuous testing and breaching of their personal boundaries by a “slow-accumulating series of small affronts.”

Louise is a vegetarian conscious of animal cruelty and the climate while Ben is a mild-mannered man who practices positive thinking. Agnes is anxious, so Ben and Louise embrace “gentle parenting,” have an app to help her breathe slowly when distressed, and bend over backwards to make sure her plush “comfort bunny” is always within arm’s reach. The Daltons represent a type: the decent, inclusive, Do No Harm, white-collar liberal American. As such, they actively force themselves to assume the best of their hosts long after the audience has started shouting get the hell out! at the screen and groaning over missed opportunities.

Paddy and Ciara targeted this family precisely because their inoffensiveness was a homing beacon for exploitation. They can’t bring themselves to say “no” and stick to it. Because that might sound… mean.

Being Harmless Is Harmful

Louise registers and broadcasts her growing discomfort with their hosts more keenly than her husband does, and it’s painful to watch him repeatedly let her down. Her many failed bids to Ben—for him to lead and protect their family, for him to trust her intuition, provide moral support, and plan an escape—could easily be made into a drinking game.

Watch for every moment when one of Louise’s boundaries is violated by Paddy and Ciara’s aggressive hospitality: feeding her goose flesh, insisting on leaving the children with an adult male babysitter, pressuring her to skinny-dip, emotionally blackmailing her into inappropriate touching.

Watch Louise dart a glance at Ben for back up in the midst of a creepy oh-god-is-this-really-happening? and how-do-I-say-no? moment, and watch Ben do… nothing. He squirms. He shrugs. He lowers his eyes. He minimizes. He makes an excuse for their abusive hosts. Ben’s harmlessness to strangers puts his wife in harm’s way.

As the tension mounts, it’s actually eleven-year-old Agnes who acts creatively to get her mother alone and share what the mute boy Ant has shown her about their hosts. Ant had taken Agnes through a trap door in the barn floor, to where countless photographs of murdered families (including one of Ant’s real parents) are hidden, alongside neatly organized piles of past victims’ belongings. Paddy and Ciara target nice liberal couples vacationing abroad with an only child; they invite them to the farmhouse, murder the parents, cut out the child’s tongue, and “adopt” the child as their own. When the pleasure of their success wears thin, they travel abroad to target and groom a new family. Rinse and repeat. They’ve been at this for years.

Horrified by Agnes’s revelation, Louise brings Ben into the loop. But throughout the terrifying ordeal of the next few hours, Louise is the one who keeps her head and takes decisive action, and—when necessary—attacks their would-be killers in a believably suburban way. Louise is no Atomic Blonde or Charlie’s Angel: she’s a willowy soccer mom in a sundress who weighs a hundred pounds. But she will not let her daughter die, even if her husband is having a crisis of masculinity in the corner.

The real horror of Speak No Evil doesn’t lie in the narcissistic violence of Paddy and Ciara (for the psychopaths you will always have with you); it’s in the uselessness and cowardice of Ben, whose passivity provides an open door for predators. At the point in the story where Paddy ceases to play with his food and makes his intentions clear, a tied-up Ben asks through tears, “Why are you doing this to us?” 

Paddy replies simply, “Because you let me.”

It’s significant that Ben (not Louise) asks Paddy this question, and this is how Paddy answers another man. Paddy would have answered Louise differently, because bad men have always been able to take what they want from women without their permission. But bad men need decent men to be weak, timid, and passive if they are going to get their way. In the face of Paddy’s relentless charisma, Ben willingly obliges—and seems surprised that his harmlessness is so roundly abused.

A Little More “Texas,” Please!

Speak No Evil (2024) is a remake of the 2022 Danish film of the same name. The American version is, well, American: the family makes it out alive, having rescued both the children and the comfort bunny to boot. This is in marked contrast to the Danish original, in which the parents are brutally murdered and their child takes her place as the next silent victim of sadism. The parents never fight back; the murderers remain uncaught. Most viewers wanted to curl up in bed for two weeks after watching it.

Christian Tafdrup, who co-wrote and directed the original film, intended it as a social satire of political correctness and bourgeois complacency in the face of evil: 

I’ve discovered that many modern, civilized people are not used to evil—not in their everyday lives. They don’t know how to react if they actually meet it. Perhaps they permit evil themselves and allow evil things to happen; they’re not fighting it or trusting their gut, so they let it happen for too long… I wanted the story to symbolize evil in the world and how we react to it.¹

Tafdrup noted that audiences from different countries had different reactions to the couple’s passivity and the film’s bleakness. Some could relate and appreciated it while others hated it, couldn’t comprehend it, and stormed out. That would have been me.

Americans love Hail Mary heroics, underdog victories, implausible escapes, and redemptive second chances. (Or, in the Daltons’ case, seventh chances.) Recognizing this, writer/director James Watkins steered his story in a way that allowed a less compliant American attitude to eventually shine through. (Though, as my bitten-down nails protest, it sure took them long enough.) Scoot McNairy, who played Ben, confirmed that Americans would indeed push back in such a situation: “No f***ing way, man. I’m from Texas,” he said. On-screen Ben needed a lot more “Texas” than what he managed to muster, but the point still stands. The Daltons do survive.

But Speak No Evil, despite its unlikely ending, starkly portrays the point at which niceness becomes a weapon in the hands of those cruel and clever enough to wield it. In this era of political conflict over the meaning of free speech, this nightmare parable reminds us that there are few things more dangerous than biting your tongue when you have something important to say. If we see evil (or as in this case, feel it in our gut), we must speak about it. We cannot be willing participants in evil, including evil perpetrated against ourselves, which is often harder to recognize and resist.

How a Sponge Grows a Spine

I both loved and hated watching this film, because I recognized my younger, softer self in Louise—the me who was an emotional sponge, a people-pleaser, an accommodator who said yes when she meant no, and who couldn’t bear the thought of causing a scene. It was painful to watch her. I would never, ever want to go back to that version of myself.

Among the many things puberty did to me was to wash away in torrents of estrogen the innate selfishness of my childhood, that stamp of the foot, the unrestrainable “No!” It certainly made me a generous and patient mother who could always say yes to her crying babies at 4:00am night after night. (Why else would nature so ruthlessly and systematically erode female boundaries from the inside?) But it also made me a terrible pushover in my teens and twenties.

This newly softened pre-mother-me was so empathetic that my heart was a constant “full house.” While others might have to strive to open up their hearts and make room to let others in, I was the opposite. Everybody was already inside by default; if I was to have any chance of hearing my own voice, of discovering my own desires and standing up for my own opinions, I’d have to work hard to push everybody out (at least temporarily). I’d have to practice not caring. As my husband once told me, if I aimed really hard at being aggressive, I might just barely land on the near side of being assertive. 

If Aristotle was right, that virtue lies in the Golden Mean between the extremes of excess and deficiency, then I was one of those folks whose besetting sin wasn’t selfishness (a deficiency of hospitality), but rather, an excess of hospitality—something our culture doesn’t have a singular, common, and recognizable word for. (That’s telling, isn’t it?) Perhaps “indiscriminate openness” covers it, or “infinite welcome,” or “promiscuous generosity leading to self-annihilation.” These longer phrases, however, don’t have the ring of verbal jabs like Pushover. Doormat. Martyr. Yes-Man. Bleeding Heart. Wet Noodle.

I shudder to think how the younger me would have caved to the pressure exerted on women and girls today to “Be Kind,” as if we are the ones who need to hear that mantra or have it sewn in sequins on our daughters’ t-shirts. Not “Be Tough” or “Be Smart” or “Be Brave” or “Be Balanced,” but an equivocal catch-phrase that in practice implies do what other people want and don’t hurt anyone’s feelings. One woman on Mumsnet, a UK support group for mothers, describes the unsettling effect of this therapeutic campaign on her daughter:

DC (9) is at a school with a “be kind” mantra. In her head at least this has taken hold as “I must be kind to all people at all times irrespective of how horrible they are to me or how uncomfortable they make me feel.” Standing up for herself no longer appears to be allowed because it may upset the person who has upset her or made her feel uncomfortable, and that would be unkind. Fast forward a few years and I’m genuinely concerned that she will find herself unable to set boundaries for fear of appearing unkind.

That’s the kicker: appearing unkind. There’s nothing actually unkind or cruel about standing up for yourself, saying no, or setting a boundary. Nobody dies of hurt feelings. There is much wisdom in the knock it off, shake it off, suck it up style of parenting that has fallen out of favor of late, not least its ability to teach children that they can set limits, wield stigma, and express disapproval just like their parents.² If mom and dad can say hell, no then so can I, and so can others. But if mom and dad (and other adults with authority, like teachers and school administrators) can’t stick to their guns, they communicate one of two equally terrible lessons to kids: either “good people don’t say no” or “you can always get your way if you push hard enough.” The incapacity to enforce boundaries is a fast track for the creation of both bullies and victims.

The boundaries I have now at forty-four are hard won and feel just about right. I’m a loving person who is still quick to empathize and form bonds. But I’ve learned how to say no, how to speak up, how to disagree, and how to live with the fact that I will always disappoint somebody somewhere. I chalk up this change to five facts (the first four were choices, the fifth was inevitable):

1. Forming friendships with strong, opinionated women I admire and imitate (you know who you are).
2. Marrying a man with a spine of steel who helped me learn self-respect.
3. Reading Gavin de Becker’s book The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence, which taught me that if you let someone talk you out of the word “no,” you might as well wear a sign that reads, “You are in charge.”
4. Writing in public as a form of exposure therapy.
5. Hormones.

Being on the tail end of mothering as opposed to the front end (with its emotional intensity and sensitivity to others’ distress) has its benefits. Thank God being an emotional sponge was just a life stage. The next time you’re tempted to label a middle-aged woman a “Karen,” just remember, it’s quite possible this might be the first time she’s had enough headspace to consider her own needs in years. Sure, she could just be exercising her “privilege” like she always has. But she might just be a recovering doormat. If Louise had channeled a little more Karen and a little less “kindness,” this movie would have lasted ten minutes. And Paddy and Ciara would have had to look elsewhere for their victims. 

The Brute, the Milksop, and the Knight

While it’s true that one of my takeaways from Speak No Evil was gratitude that my boundaries have thickened up and that I am no longer like Louise, the movie doesn’t lay that much criticism at her door. She saves their lives, once she has material proof (and not just intuition) that they are indeed in mortal danger. She’s a sympathetic, smart woman who eventually learns that niceness doesn’t equal goodness, and may in fact be a fatal flaw.

It’s Ben who is savaged by the storytelling; Ben, who doesn’t have a mean bone in his body and is drawn to Paddy like a moth to a flame. None of this would have happened if he hadn’t pressured Louise into going to the farmhouse in the first place, and then pressured her into staying there long after her alarm bells had gone off. Ben manages to do one or two helpful things by the very end of the film, but it’s too little, too late. He even fails to kill Paddy when he has a clear shot (and obvious justification), leaving it to a traumatized ten-year-old to relentlessly smash in Paddy’s face with a brick. 

As the feminist Andrea Dworkin wrote, “Men who want to support women in our struggle for freedom and justice should understand that it is not terrifically important to us that they learn to cry; it is important to us that they stop the crimes of violence against us.” The only thing that can stop an evil man is a good man who doesn’t turn the other cheek. The kind of men capable of steely actions are less likely to find sensitivity, tears, and compassion ready-to-hand. In the classic words of Rust Cohle from True Detective’s first season, “The world needs bad men. We keep the other bad men from the door.” Even good men need a little bit of “bad” in them to stop those whose consciences are broken.

In his essay “The Necessity of Chivalry,” C.S. Lewis noted that the ideal man of medieval times was the man who “brought together two things which have no natural tendency to gravitate towards one another”: the brutal sternness of the warrior and the gentle meekness of the man of the court. 

The medieval ideal… taught humility and forbearance to the great warrior because everyone knew by experience how much he usually needed that lesson. It demanded valor of the urbane and modest man because everyone knew that he was as likely as not to be a milksop. In so doing, the Middle Ages fixed on the one hope of the world. It may or may not be possible to produce by the thousand men who combine the two sides of Launcelot’s character. But if it is not possible, then all talk of any lasting happiness or dignity in human society is pure moonshine. 

If we cannot produce Launcelots, humanity falls into two sections—those who can deal in blood and iron but cannot be “meek in hall,” and those who are “meek in hall” but useless in battle. 

The technology of our era allows “blood and iron” to take on a more figurative meaning: in the digital age, the ability to communicate powerfully matters more than how much you can bench press. Strength need not be physical to be genuine strength, and the reverse is true as well: a small stature doesn’t imply a weak character. You take the measure of a man by his voice and his actions, not his size. And just as it is a mistake to conflate sternness of character with, say, athleticism, it is likewise a mistake to make physical weakness itself into a virtue. Turning the other cheek is only admirable if you have the guts to blacken someone’s eye; it’s only admirable if you offer your own cheek, and not someone else’s. Meekness isn’t the absence of strength or courage; it is strength contextually restrained.

Speak No Evil shows us the terrible things that can befall women and children when men collapse back into the exclusive (yet naturally occuring) camps of “the stern” and “the meek” untempered by one another. When the wellbeing of women and children depends upon the non-existent mercy of a Paddy and the non-existent spine of a Ben, God help us. The only kind of man that builds a world in which we can flourish is the man who combines strength and tenderness into a singular virtue. 

Our modern political parties have contributed to the polarization of men into caricatures of these isolated traits, a trend Lewis observed at work in his own day: the “liberal” or “enlightened” tradition regarded the “combative side of man’s nature as a pure, atavistic evil,” and distrusted chivalrous sentiment as the glamorization of war. The “neo-heroic tradition” sneered at chivalrous sentiment “as a weak sentimentality, which would raise from its grave (its shallow and unquiet grave!) the pre-Christian ferocity of Achilles by a ‘modern invocation.’”

We all know the slurs that the “enlightened” tradition and the pagan revivalists hurl at each other these days. The far right is more creative and hits below the belt: Simp. Beta Male. Cuck. Soy Boy. Progressives use fancier words, but the slurs still drip with disgust: Toxic masculinity. Misogynist. Incel. Fascist. I, for one, find Bronze Age Perverts and men donning pink pussy hats equally disturbing (and irritating in that they co-create each other). If only each side could give the devil his due, and integrate his rival’s gifts rather than amp himself on a feedback loop on social media, I expect many women would breathe a sigh of relief. Most men don’t fit these polarized stereotypes, but as symbols they serve as cautionary tales of both the excess and deficiency of power, as examples of what women don’t want.

What Women Want

Norah Vincent, a journalist who posed undercover as a man and dated straight women, describes her politically incorrect insights into what women want in her brilliant book Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Year Disguised as a Man:

[The women I dated] wanted a man to be confident. They wanted in many ways to defer to him. I could feel that on many dates, the unspoken desire to be held up and led, whether in conversation or even in physical space… They wanted someone, they said, who could pin them to the bed or, as one woman put it, “someone who can drive the bus.”… Yet as much as these women wanted a take-control man, at the same time, they wanted a man who was vulnerable to them, a man who would show his colors and open his doors, someone expressive, intuitive, attuned…

[This] made me feel very sympathetic toward heterosexual men, not only because living up to Caesar is an immensely heavy burden to bear, but because trying to be a sensitive new age guy at the same time is pretty well impossible. If women are trapped by the whore/Madonna complex, men are equally trapped by this warrior/minstrel complex.

There is nothing simple or straightforward in this merger of opposites. The “warrior/minstrel complex,” as Vincent puts it, is therapy-speak for Lewis’s Launcelot. He is less of a “complex” than a beautiful paradox, a personal male achievement (ignoring his adultery, of course, as the fly in the ointment). As Lewis reminded us, “the knightly character is art not nature—something that needs to be achieved, not something that can be relied upon to happen.” Nobody stumbles into chivalry by accident or grows into it inevitably: it’s a skill and a habit. The chivalrous ideal, while it seems like a dream of romantic, nostalgic escapism, is, in Lewis’s mind, “the only possible escape from a world divided between wolves who do not understand, and sheep who cannot defend, the things which make life desirable.”

Ben never gets his powerful redemptive moment of unbridled masculine chivalry in the film; I kept waiting for it, but it was almost comically absent. It wasn’t because the story was elevating Louise as an Amazon at his expense: she was desperate for his leadership. She would have been immensely relieved if he had learned to “drive the bus” without feeling compelled to go back into the lion’s den to get their daughter’s misplaced comfort bunny. I mean, come on. (Can you hear the deafening sound of all the parents in the audience slapping their foreheads in unison?)

It may be rather dowdy these days to admit out loud that I find chivalry not just attractive but necessary. I love chivalry because it is a uniquely Christian vision of men that arose as a repudiation of both the pagan warrior and the controlling patriarch: it is Christlike in its self-control and the sacrificial devotion that channels strength into service. It is Christ’s natural ease and respect in holding an extended conversation with a woman in public: “[The disciples] marveled that he was talking with a woman, but no one said, ‘What do you seek?’ or, ‘Why are you talking with her?’” (John 4:1-45). It is the quiet strength of Christ drawing in the dirt as he waits for a menacing group of male stone-throwers to walk off in shame: “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her” (John 8:1-11). It is Christ defending an intuitive, generous woman from a group of male scolds: “Leave her alone. Why do you trouble her? She has done a beautiful thing to me” (Mark 14:3-9). It is Christ’s willingness to enact his first public miracle, inaugurating the ministry that would lead to his death, at his mother’s request: “They have no wine” (John 2:1-10).

As Dorothy Sayers wrote in her essay collection Are Women Human?:

Perhaps it is no wonder that the women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this Man—there never has been such another…who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend; who took them as he found them and was completely unself-conscious.

The ideal Christian man is an imitation of Christ, and as such, he isn’t natural: he’s a supernatural phenomenon. But if Lewis is correct, that our only other option for masculinity is the brute/milksop binary (which is dreadful for women and children), then I hope I can be forgiven for being old-fashioned.

A Time to Say “No”

My mind keeps coming back to Gavin de Becker’s book The Gift of Fear which, though it reads like a thriller, is actually a practical manual on how to recognize the pre-incident indicators of violence and the common tactics violent people employ to elicit victim trust and participation beforehand. And that’s one of the most shocking things his book reveals: violence is incredibly predictable. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the wicked broadcast their intentions (those who have ears to hear, let them hear), but we choose—or are trained—to ignore the signs.

Just like Ben and Louise, we frequently shush deep-seated uneasiness and fear when it bubbles up unbidden. Such feelings are our embodied intuition giving us its rapid-fire assessment in the moment, having jumped from A to Z to give our conscious minds the conclusion (get the hell out!) without detailing all the legitimate reasons it took to get there (that takes too long). Such intuitive fear is a life-saving gift of our animal nature, the wisdom of our evolved bodies that still remember we are prey.

“Every day,” de Becker writes, “people engaged in the clever defiance of their own intuition become, in mid-thought, victims of violence… So when we wonder why we are victims so often, the answer is clear: It is because we are so good at it. A woman could offer no greater cooperation to her soon-to-be attacker than to spend her time telling herself, ‘But he seems like such a nice man.’” In Tuscany, Paddy seemed like such a nice man—an irresistible man—who charmed Ben even more than Louise.

Niceness isn’t the mark of a good character, de Becker notes: it’s a strategy for getting what you want in social interactions. Paddy and Ciara deploy charismatic niceness to groom the Daltons. Louise and Ben deploy niceness habitually as a way to avoid conflict and signal “I’m a good person” to both themselves and others. If the Daltons had trusted their gift of fear over their habit of niceness, they would have steered clear of friendly predators who never take no for an answer and who require victim buy-in before they proceed. Our cultural habit of talking ourselves out of our intuitions, of defying our embodied common sense in favor of an idealized world where there are no wolves (or where wolves never wear sheep’s clothing so convincingly), is the bread-and-butter of horror movies. Google “why are people in horror movies so stupid?” and you’ll have endless articles at your fingertips.

Screen Rant’s clever list of “11 Horror Movie Character Mistakes That Nobody Would Make In Real Life” is a great summary, and includes classic dumb moves like “not getting up after tripping,” “asking if someone is there when it’s quiet,” “splitting the group,” and “assuming the villain is dead (and getting too close to check).” But there is one mistake on the list that lots of people make in real life: “trusting strangers.” Many of us find it hard to hold together Christ’s admonition to be innocent as doves and shrewd as serpents: “Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves; so be as wary as serpents, and as innocent as doves. But be on guard against people, for they will hand you over to the courts and flog you in their synagogues…” (Matthew 10:16-17). We need to remember that the feeling of suspicion isn’t sinful, it’s a signal from reality: “But Jesus would not entrust himself to them, for he knew all people. He did not need any testimony about mankind, for he knew what was in each person” (John 2:24-25).

To be “wary” is to be perceptive, prudent, and alert, and to trust what your senses tell you in the moment over what you wish were true. This isn’t the same as giving in to anxiety or prejudice, which are mental conceptions drawing on memories of the past or imaginations of the future, as opposed to bodily perceptions of the present. To experience fear as a gift is to recognize that this person is trying to control me and hurt me, and my body is telling me I’m a target. Allowing it to happen isn’t Christlike; it’s naïve.

The union of the serpent and the dove is in many ways the same image as Lewis’s knight who is courageous in battle as well as “meek in hall.” Holding together this incredible union of opposites is a very difficult (and very Christian) thing to do. It takes discernment to know when to say yes and when to say no, when to trust and when to distrust, when to give and when to stop giving. “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven,” says the writer of Ecclesiastes. A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace (Ecclesiastes 3:1-8).

The two different versions of Speak No Evil show us one couple who “kept silence” all the way to their grave, and another who learned to speak, hate evil, and fight for their lives. Both films are a “wolves vs. sheep” story, and thank goodness the American sheep had just enough Texas in them to squeak out alive. The wariness and shrewdness of Louise, Agnes, and Ant—though belated—was sufficient to secure their survival in the face of the deadly combination of Paddy’s psychopathy and Ben’s passivity.

If the film’s effect on me is to be trusted, then the healthy reminder that “No” is a complete sentence will be a very welcome message. “No” might not feel nice in the moment; it might even be received and reframed by others as an act of aggression. But “no” can be necessary; it can even be good.

1. “I’m Afraid of Other People and Myself: Christian Tafdrup on Speak No Evil,” an interview with the creator of the Danish film. ↩︎
2. I borrowed the language of knock it off, shake it off, suck it up parenting from Abigail Shrier in her book Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up. She makes the case that permissive forms of “gentle parenting” (offering choices and emotional validation rather than saying “no” and setting firm limits) is actually quite bad for children’s mental health, moral growth, and maturation. She argues that kids need to learn to actively cope with their negative feelings instead of having those feelings relieved and accommodated. ↩︎