I have three beautiful children and I love to look at them, but in terms of posting their pictures on social media, I have decided to opt out.

It took me a while to get to this. I have never been a rabid social media user but I started using Instagram regularly three-plus years ago. When I did, I occasionally posted pictures of my kids. My feed included lots of pictures of kids, many of them alone in the frame, doing some kid-thing, unconscious of the camera. Particularly when the kid in the picture appeared to have no idea that his/her picture was being taken, let alone posted, I would look at the pictures and feel unsettled. I love kids, but I couldn’t like these images.

Eventually I gave this type of post a name: the parental gaze. This was a riff on the similarly power-imbalanced male gaze, and also shorthand I used to complain about these images to my husband, a film editor. Often when we would chat about something we saw on Instagram, I would take a moment to bemoan the parental gaze.

The parental gaze returned me to a quote I had read a few years earlier, by British child psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, in his 1971 book Playing and Reality, in a chapter on adolescent development. Although my kids weren’t yet adolescents when I first read it—two of the three of them are now—it has remained one of the most significant things I have read in my parenting life:

If you do all you can to promote personal growth in your offspring, you will need to be able to deal with startling results. If your children find themselves at all they will not be contented to find anything but the whole of themselves, and that will include the aggression and destructive elements in themselves as well as the elements that can be labelled loving. There will be this long tussle which you will need to survive.

In all my parental discussions up to that moment—with teachers, principals, pediatricians, and other significant figures in my parenting work—I had never before heard a peep about the desirability of dealing with “startling results” such as these. The parenting canon as I had seen it seemed rife with experts whose sole aim—I am thinking now of the brightly-titled mega-bestseller 1-2-3 Magic—was to keep the parent secure in his/her domain of wizard-y control. That as brilliant a psychoanalyst as Winnicott should have stated that a death-defying “tussle” is an essential aspect of parenting whole children—and serves as a sign that one has parented well rather than poorly—is a concept I have held onto tightly in part because I...