Supernanny at 20: Is the naughty step out of date or do we still need Jo Frost’s help?

The Noughties phenomenon saw childcare guru Jo Frost swoop in to teach parents at the end of their tether how to take back control and discipline their wayward children. After the TV show celebrated its 20th birthday in July, Helen Coffey asks the experts whether these strict methods still pass muster

Jo Frost starred in the ‘Supernanny’ series for seven years (EPA-EFE)

I find that disrespectful what you’re doing right now. Will you calm down? I’m talking to you!” Jo Frost, parenting guru, kid-wrangler extraordinaire and star of Channel 4’s hit Noughties TV show Supernanny, is laying down the law. But in this instance, it’s not a badly behaved toddler that she’s taking to task. It’s a grown adult.

In this particular episode, stay-at-home mum Danielle Colombo from Florida is practically weeping with frustration as her four-year-old son refuses to nap. Frost’s response? To swiftly reprimand her for trying to deviate from the pre-agreed routine.

It was this brand of straight-talking, no-nonsense, hard-line discipline that saw Frost rise rapidly to fame at the turn of the century. Supernanny, a reality show in which professional nanny Frost was helicoptered in to help struggling parents manage their badly behaved offspring, first aired in the UK in 2004. The series became so popular that the following year the concept migrated to the US (albeit for a slightly more souped-up, high-drama version designed for American sensibilities), where it ran until 2011.

At the time, her methods were revered, quickly gaining mainstream appeal among exhausted parents who wanted nothing more than to follow simple steps that would stop their children from acting out. Frost was severely opposed to both physical punishments (like smacking) and shouting and screaming at children – a far cry from the received parenting wisdom of the Seventies and Eighties. “It’s really important that we recognise the positive impact Jo Frost has had on parenting,” Sarah Ockwell-Smith, author of The Gentle Parenting Book and How to be a Calm Parent, tells me. “I think she had a huge effect on parents moving away from smacking their children and that is admirable.”

Much of the behaviour management revolved around the idea of carrot and stick. The carrot was usually a chart for good behaviour, with a treat earned when a certain number of reward points had been accrued. The stick, meanwhile, came in the guise of the “naughty” spot.

This could take the form of a step, chair, circle, corner or room, but the principle was the same: the child would receive a warning. If they continued the bad behaviour in question, they would have to spend the same number of minutes as their age (three minutes for three-year-olds, for example) in the naughty zone. If they left the zone during that time, they would be physically returned to it. During this phase, the parent was neither to engage with their child verbally nor make eye contact. They were to learn that bad behaviour would not be rewarded with the attention they craved from their caregiver. This process ended with the parent explaining once more precisely why the child had been punished, requesting an apology, giving them a hug and moving on.

Within the episodes, this approach has varying results. It’s all well and good mandating such a technique with one child. But when you have three, all of whom are being wholly disobedient, and just one exhausted parent to corral them, it resembles a particularly protracted and joyless game of whack-a-mole. In one episode with the Senior family, it takes around 45 minutes for mum Debbie to successfully implement the naughty corner concurrently for her three- and five-year-old daughters. By the end, she has the dead-eyed, thousand-yard stare of a woman returned from war.

The ‘naughty step’ or spot was one of the key tools in the programme (Supernanny USA)

It is fascinating to rewatch the show in 2024. At the time, a generation of parents were committed proponents of the Supernanny method. Two decades on, while some of it still makes a great deal of sense – instigating structure and routine, setting clear boundaries and expectations, getting down to a child’s level and speaking to them calmly without raising your voice – on certain child-rearing points, society has done a complete 180.

“A big change is that many parents today are concerned about the impact of their parenting,” says parenting expert Oona Alexander. “They know about cortisol, they’re concerned about trauma. All this language is completely new.”

Alexander’s style hinges on helping parents to create a close and loving connection with their children – “helping children feel seen, heard, loved and understood. Because that’s what children want, and a lot of behaviour is about trying to get that.” The second cornerstone – “where I would be in line with Joe Frost” – lies in creating structure and boundaries, “creating a life for them that is contained, in which they can thrive”. And the third, which perhaps diverges more from the Supernanny way, is about giving children the freedom to be themselves. “You’re not just letting them do anything, anytime, anywhere, but you’re giving them places where they can just be bored or grumpy, or they can do the things that they love, that maybe aren’t your cup of tea. It’s all about feeling that it’s fundamentally OK to be them.”

Though they’re coming at it from different angles, all of the contemporary parenting experts I speak to agree that the idea of punishment has fallen out of favour. Principally, because it doesn’t work.

Contrary to what many believe, gentle parenting is not at all permissive, we say ‘no’ lots

Sarah Ockwell-Smith

Ockwell-Smith describes this previous parenting style as “authoritarian”, which is “categorised by having expectations of children that are unrealistic of their age, parents having all the control, and expecting obedience and compliance from their children without very much regard for how the children are feeling.”

She was at the vanguard of the “gentle parenting” ideology that many middle-class millennials now swear by when raising families. The core tenets involve parenting the way you wish you’d been parented: having empathy with your kids, cultivating mutual respect, understanding their cognitive capabilities so that expectations are age-appropriate. But it’s also about boundaries: “Contrary to what many believe, gentle parenting is not at all permissive, we say ‘no’ lots, we constantly have an eye on safety; it’s just that we discipline collaboratively with our children, with a view on teaching and guiding them,” she says.

Yet Ockwell-Smith wouldn’t recommend naughty steps, timeouts or “ignoring the bad and praising or rewarding the good” because these techniques expect too much of children cognitively. “For instance, the naughty step expects a child to sit and think about what they’ve done wrong, how they’ve made another individual feel and what they can do better next time. In reality, this type of hypothetical and abstract thinking is not well developed until a child approaches their pre-teens.”

A timeout conditions a child to be quiet, teaching them that, in their moments of greatest need and emotional dysregulation, their parents aren’t a safe harbour. “Children learn to keep big emotions inside and become overly self-sufficient,” adds Ockwell-Smith. “These children grow into men who struggle to talk about their feelings and women who have ‘good girl syndrome’ and are chronic people-pleasers, who put everybody else’s needs before their own.” (This outcome certainly rings true for most of the adults I know.)

Jo Frost was known for her no-nonsense approach and strong sense of discipline (Supernanny USA)

Alexander agrees that, while consequences are important – if your child rams their scooter into another child on purpose, for example, you take the scooter away – punishments can be damaging. “It makes them angry; it makes them resentful,” she says. “The thing that parents often take away is their presence, like vanishing to the other room. The child’s deepest, primal fear is one of abandonment. They know they can’t live without their parents. So not being able to access the parent triggers a very, very deep fear that every child has, which is, ‘I might be abandoned, or I might lose my parents, and I might not survive’.”

Expert childcare practitioner and parenting coach Katherine Elizabeth takes a more hardline approach. “We’ve normalised positive parenting and therapeutic parenting – but ultimately, children need parents with a strong, grounded point of view,” she says. She believes that modern parents are doing too much, bending around their children’s needs; “society is putting a lot of pressure on them, telling them they have to be nice and soft all the time. But then either the children are running and screaming and bouncing off the walls, or the parents flip and feel the need to punish, slap down and micromanage.”

An advocate of always finding the middle ground, Elizabeth still agrees that punishments are ineffective. “I’m all for parents being the boss, but discipline isn’t something you do to but something you instil in a child,” she says. “Since Supernanny, we’ve leaned too hard on bribery or rewards and threats – parents don’t know what they’re doing otherwise. It’s all very manipulative. But children are very good at manipulating their parents right back. A child will eat the carrot and hit you with the stick.”

She calls this punishment and reward approach “transactional parenting” – everything is about getting the child to do something. Instead, it’s about “understanding the root issue” behind the bad behaviour – the “why” behind the symptoms. And even positive rewards aren’t something Elizabeth would encourage: “Kids shouldn’t need a major reward to do something basic like brushing their teeth.”

The child’s deepest, primal fear is one of abandonment. They know they can’t live without their parents

Oona Alexander

One thing that’s clear when watching the show is Frost’s natural ability with children. Despite (or perhaps because of) her role as strict disciplinarian, even the most rebellious usually end up in her thrall. What’s sometimes less comfortable is seeing her with the parents. At times, she is encouraging, telling her adult charges that “they got this!”, or being a literal shoulder to cry on when needed. At others, she is harsh and stern, telling them off as if they were another disobedient child. The latter was, presumably, ramped up with the goal of making good telly. But chastising a single mum at her wit’s end, complete with finger wag, is a far cry from the way the modern parenting experts tell me they would work with a family.

“My whole focus is picking parents up, giving them their power back, building their confidence,” says Elizabeth. “Making a parent feel bad in this day and age, when society is already piling the guilt on, is the worst thing I could do.”

Ockwell-Smith agrees that it is “incredibly important for the parents to be kind to themselves.” She argues that parents who resort to harsh discipline or are out of control are unconsciously mimicking the way they themselves were parented, and are usually the ones most in need of empathy, understanding and support. “When I work with parents, I always start with helping them to learn about themselves, why they do the things they do and how they can make small positive changes to help not only their children but themselves too. I would never dream of telling them off.”

And yet, amid all the tantrums and timeouts, behaviour management and berating, there are moments of surprising softness when you watch Frost in action, 20 years after she first exploded onto our screens. Because one thing she does emphasise is the importance of quality time, of complimenting and being kind to children, of nourishing loving family ties.

“All they want to do is be loved by you. All they want to do is spend time with you,” she says gently in one episode, to a mother who has been focusing solely on crowd control rather than enjoying her daughters’ company. Parenting techniques will come and go – and undoubtedly some of Supernanny’s methods have fallen out of favour in the past two decades – but actually loving your kids never goes out of style.