I was watching Episode 2 of the Netflix documentary *Beckham* when a scene stopped me cold. Ted Beckham, David’s father, is being asked whether he was too hard on his son. The camera holds on to him. His answer is unequivocal:
***No. If I told him how good he was, then he’s got nothing to work at.***
Beside him, David’s mother, Sandra, visibly struggles. David himself, elsewhere in the series, describes being scared of his father’s feedback, of practising for hours each day, not out of love for the game but out of a compulsion born of fear.
I had seen this scene before — or versions of it. In the opening minutes of HBO’s *Tiger* (2021), Earl Woods stands at a podium, voice cracking with emotion, telling an audience that his son will bring to the world “a humanitarianism which has never been known before.” He then addresses Tiger directly: “This is my treasure. Please accept it and use it wisely.” Behind the grandiosity was a man who had trained his son from the age of two with military precision — an ex-Green Beret who used psychological hardening techniques to build mental toughness in a toddler, who forbade him from trying other sports, who turned a childhood into a training programme.

It was the third generation of the Beckham family — and Brooklyn’s explosive January 2026 Instagram statement confirming his estrangement from his parents — that prompted me to write this essay. Because the Beckham saga now spans three generations. It tells us something important about what happens when the pendulum of parenting swings from one extreme to another without ever finding the middle.

Ruthless and Loving: A Paradox Worth Acknowledging

Before going further, it is important to say something that the popular narrative often elides: these were not absent fathers. They were not indifferent. In many cases, they were the most invested parent in the room.

Ted Beckham drove 200 miles from East London to Old Trafford, week after week, to watch Manchester United. He coached David’s junior team, Ridgeway Rovers. He dedicated years of his life to his son’s development. Earl Woods gave up his own pursuits to become his son’s full-time coach, training partner, and psychological architect.

These men loved their sons. The evidence for that is overwhelming and should not be dismissed. The problem was never the investment; it was the method. They confused harshness with high standards. They believed that withholding praise was the same as maintaining standards, that fear was a synonym for motivation, and that the absence of warmth was a form of preparation for a harsh world. The psychological literature draws a clear distinction between having high expectations for your child (which is protective) and deploying psychological control to enforce those expectations (which is harmful). These fathers were firmly in the latter camp — but their commitment to their sons was total, and that commitment matters, even as we examine its costs.

Ted Beckham: The Withholding Father

The documentary makes clear that Ted’s approach was strategic rather than sadistic. He believed that withholding praise would keep David hungry, that fear of disapproval would keep him practising, and that the world would not be kind to his son, so the home environment should prepare him for that unkindness.

And yet David reveals something else: that this approach left him scared. When asked how he survived being vilified by an entire nation after the 1998 World Cup red card, David says he was able to endure fan abuse because of the way my dad had been to me. It is a statement that functions simultaneously as gratitude and indictment — and it captures the paradox of achievement-oriented harsh parenting perfectly. The armour it builds is real. So is the wound underneath.

The Second Father: Alex Ferguson and the Replication of Ruthlessness

There is an under-appreciated chapter in the Beckham story that adds another layer of complexity. When David left home at fifteen to join Manchester United’s youth academy, he did not escape the model of the demanding, withholding father. He found a second one. David has described Sir Alex Ferguson in remarkably filial terms: “I always looked at the boss as a father figure. I moved up from east London when I was 15 years old and, even though he was Manchester United’s manager, he was like my dad.” In the *Beckham* documentary, he elaborated: “Alex Ferguson was someone that I looked up to as a father figure. One of the most important people in my life from the age of 12, 13, when I first met him.”

Ferguson’s management style was legendary for its ruthlessness. He controlled every aspect of his players’ lives. He famously forced Beckham to cut his mohawk, objected to his celebrity lifestyle, and, ultimately, in February 2003, kicked a boot across the dressing room that struck David above the eye. David has said that Ferguson “knew exactly when to put his arm around you, but he also knew which player could take a bit of a stronger word.” He also said, revealingly, that the comment that hurt him most was when Ferguson told his mother: “The trouble with David is that everybody sucks up to him now.” It was, David said, the exact same thing his own father used to tell him when he felt David’s attitude was slipping: You’ve changed.

David recognised the echo himself: “I inherited that stubbornness as part of my own character — first from my dad, then from the other father figure in my life.”

What this tells us is that David’s formative experience of masculinity, authority, and excellence was shaped not by one demanding father figure but by two — both operating from the same philosophical position: that harshness, withholding, and refusing to let talent become complacency were the essential ingredients of greatness. The model was doubly reinforced.

The implications for David’s own parenting are significant. When he resolved to be “softer” than his father, he was not merely overcorrecting for one man’s harshness. He was rejecting a model reinforced by the two most powerful male figures in his life over two decades. The depth of that overcorrection becomes clearer when we recognise how deeply entrenched the harsh-discipline model was in David’s experience.

What the Research Actually Shows

A systematic review of 138 million academic papers identified six studies that examined the effects of harsh paternal discipline on children's psychological outcomes. The findings were unequivocal: all six studies reported negative effects. No study reported positive effects.

Three findings are particularly relevant to the Beckham story.

First, concurrent warmth does not buffer the effects of harsh discipline. Wang and Kenny (2014) found that parental warmth did not moderate the negative effects of harsh verbal discipline on conduct problems or depressive symptoms. Yoon and colleagues (2021) identified a pattern they called “engaged but harsh discipline” — fathers who combined high engagement with punitive methods — and found that children in this group still showed elevated behavioural problems. This is directly relevant to men like Ted Beckham and Earl Woods: fathers who were undeniably engaged and invested, yet whose harshness was not neutralised by that investment.

Second, achievement-oriented psychological control operates through self-criticism. Soenens and colleagues (2010) found that fathers who used guilt induction, shaming, and love withdrawal in response to failure produced adolescents who developed a persistent inner critic. The child internalises the parent’s harsh evaluative stance, which becomes a permanent feature of their internal landscape. David’s own description of being “scared” of his father’s feedback is consistent with this pathway.

Third, the only identified protective factor was early attachment security. Bendel-Stenzel and colleagues (2023) found that secure infant-father attachment mitigated the negative effects of power-assertive control, whereas insecure attachment amplified them. This is the crucial nuance: harsh fathering is not universally catastrophic. A child with a secure base — who, at a fundamental pre-verbal level, knows that their father’s love is unconditional even if his standards are exacting — may be more resilient to later harshness. This may partly explain why David was able to convert Ted’s severity into fuel rather than collapse.

Crucially, no study in the review measured actual achievement outcomes alongside psychological outcomes. Whether achievement-oriented harsh discipline simultaneously produces measurable performance gains while incurring psychological costs remains untested. Researchers at Victoria University were direct: the evidence suggests that David was successful despite the high-pressure home environment, not because of it.

David Beckham: The Conscious Overcorrection

In a 2025 interview on James Corden’s This Life of Mine podcast, David said plainly: “I am different with my kids — I’m a lot softer than my dad was.” This is a textbook example of what the intergenerational parenting literature describes as discontinuity — the deliberate decision by a parent to deviate from the style they received.

But in an earlier interview with The Times, when his children were young, David said something revealing:

“They’ve got a great life set up for them. But I think, as a parent, you always worry: ‘Have they got that hunger that I had as a kid?’”

In the same interview, he said he was “as hard on my boys as my dad was.” The contradiction is telling — a parent caught between two competing impulses: the wish to spare his children what he endured and the fear that, without some version of it, they will lack the drive that made him extraordinary.

The context in which David raised Brooklyn could hardly have been more different from East London. Brooklyn grew up between homes in Madrid and Los Angeles. He was on magazine covers before he could walk. His godparents were Elton John and Elizabeth Hurley. The material conditions that shaped Ted’s worldview — scarcity, the need to fight for everything, the understanding that talent without relentless work was worthless — were absent.

And here lies the paradox of intergenerational overcorrection. A parent who experienced harsh parenting and resolved to be different may successfully eliminate the harshness. But if they do not replace it with something equally structured — if the correction is simply less rather than different — the child may end up with abundant resources and negligible internal scaffolding.

*Left: Brooklyn with his grandfather Ted at his 2022 wedding. Right: The Beckham family at a formal event — before the estrangement.*

Brooklyn Beckham: The Third Generation

Brooklyn’s trajectory reads like a catalogue of false starts. He played in the Arsenal Academy but was not offered a scholarship. He enrolled in a photography degree at Parsons School of Design and dropped out before completing his first year. He published a photography book at eighteen, which was widely mocked. He interned with the photographer Rankin, reportedly startling colleagues with his lack of basic skills. He pivoted to cooking, appearing on American television to make a bacon sandwich, then launched a YouTube series that reportedly cost $100,000 per episode despite never having taken a cooking class. He became a model, signed with Superdry, and was dropped within a year. He co-founded a sake brand. He launched a hot sauce line. Each venture arrived with maximum visibility and dissolved with equal speed.

In January 2026, Brooklyn released a six-part Instagram statement confirming his estrangement from his parents. “My family values public promotion and endorsements above all else,” he wrote. “Brand Beckham comes first.” He described “performative In January 2026, Brooklyn released a six-part Instagram statement confirming his estrangement from his parents. “My family values public promotion and endorsements above all else,” he wrote. “Brand Beckham comes first.” He described “performative social media posts, family events and inauthentic relationships” as fixtures of the life he was born into. He said he had been “controlled by my parents for most of my life” and had “grown up with overwhelming anxiety.” He said he did not want to reconcile.

Whether one takes Brooklyn’s account at face value or recognises it as one perspective within a complex family system (his brother Cruz has publicly disputed elements of the narrative), the clinical picture is worth examining. Here is a young man who describes growing up in an environment where external presentation took precedence over internal experience, where love was contingent on compliance with the family brand, and where authentic self-expression was subordinated to image management. He describes anxiety, inauthenticity, and a sense of being controlled — not through punitive harshness, but through a softer, more insidious form of psychological control centred on the family’s public identity.

The Pendulum Problem: Three Generations, Three Failures to Find the Middle

What we may be seeing in the Beckham family is a three-generational arc that illustrates a phenomenon well recognised in the clinical literature but under-appreciated in popular discourse: the pendulum does not stop in the middle.

Generation One (Ted): Harsh, authoritarian, achievement-oriented parenting. David develops extraordinary discipline and resilience but also fear, compulsive performance, and anxiety. He succeeds spectacularly but carries psychological scars. The model is then reinforced by a second father figure, Ferguson, who operates from the same philosophical position.

Generation Two (David): Having experienced the costs of harshness from both his father and his manager, David consciously adopts a softer approach. But this softness operates within a context of extraordinary privilege, celebrity, and brand management. The structure that Ted’s harshness provided — however damaging — is not replaced by a healthy alternative. Instead, it is replaced by a different kind of control: the management of public image, the expectation of participation in “Brand Beckham,” and a material environment that eliminates the natural consequences and friction that build competence.

Generation Three (Brooklyn): Raised without harsh discipline but also without structured autonomy, Brooklyn arrives at adulthood with every external advantage yet no internal compass. He cycles through identities — footballer, photographer, chef, model, entrepreneur — without the capacity to sustain the tedious, unglamorous apprenticeship that genuine competence in any field demands. When he finally asserts himself, it is not through achievement but through estrangement.

Baumrind’s classic framework identifies four parenting styles: authoritarian (high demand, low warmth), authoritative (high demand, high warmth), permissive (low demand, high warmth), and neglectful (low demand, low warmth). The research is clear that authoritative parenting — not permissive — produces the best outcomes. Ted was authoritarian. The available evidence suggests David, despite his best intentions, may have landed closer to permissive — at least in terms of the demand and structure dimensions — while layering on a form of psychological control tied to brand and image that fits neither category neatly.

What This Means Clinically

In my practice, I regularly encounter parents who offer one of two justifications. Harsh disciplinarians cite their own success or their child’s compliance as evidence that their methods work. Permissive parents cite the damage caused by their own authoritarian upbringing as justification for eliminating structure entirely.

Both positions are understandable. Neither is supported by the evidence.

The research on harsh paternal discipline is unambiguous: it causes psychological harm, and that harm is not offset by concurrent warmth, positive involvement, or the parent’s good intentions. The research on permissive parenting is equally clear: children need structure, expectations, and opportunities to experience manageable failure. The goal is not to choose between harshness and softness but to provide authoritative parenting — warmth combined with structure, autonomy support with clear expectations, and a willingness to allow children to experience the natural consequences of their choices.

The Beckham family story is not, ultimately, a story about harsh fathering producing success. Nor is it a story about gentle parenting producing failure. It is a story about the pendulum — about how the unprocessed psychological residue of one generation’s experience can distort the parenting of the next, and about how the correction of one error, without the introduction of something better, can produce a different but equally damaging set of outcomes.

Ted Beckham never told David he was good enough. David, perhaps, never told Brooklyn he wasn’t.

Both silences had consequences.

References

Baumrind, D. (1991). The influence of parenting style on adolescent competence and substance use. Journal of Early Adolescence, 11(1), 56–95.

Bendel-Stenzel, L. C., An, D., & Kochanska, G. (2023). Revisiting the debate on effects of parental power-assertive control in two longitudinal studies. Attachment & Human Development, 25(6).

Lee, S. J., Kim, J., Taylor, C. A., & Perron, B. E. (2011). Profiles of disciplinary behaviors among biological fathers. Child Maltreatment, 16(1), 51–62.

Soenens, B., Vansteenkiste, M., & Luyten, P. (2010). Toward a domain-specific approach to parental psychological control. Journal of Personality, 78(1), 217–256.

Van Ijzendoorn, M. H. (1992). Intergenerational transmission of parenting: A review of studies in nonclinical populations. Developmental Review, 12(1), 76–99.

Wang, M-T., & Kenny, S. (2014). Longitudinal links between fathers’ and mothers’ harsh verbal discipline and adolescents’ conduct problems and depressive symptoms. Child Development, 85(3), 908–923.

Yoon, S. H., Kim, M., Yang, J., et al. (2021). Patterns of father involvement and child development among families with low income. Children, 8(12), 1164.

Zvara, B., Mills-Koonce, W. R., & Cox, M. (2016). Intimate partner violence, maternal gatekeeping, and child conduct problems. Family Relations, 65(5).