This paper focuses on how families of Hawkins, Indiana respond to trauma and threat and considers how the idea of family itself shifts in Stranger Things between Seasons One and Two. “Parenting into the Spin” (or skid) refers to what the authors see as a particular valorization of adaptive and flexible modes of parenting that has a good deal more to do with contemporary values and concerns than the 1980s that Stranger Things nostalgically recalls. The introduction of domestic violence in Season Two, alongside still ongoing institutional and supernatural traumas, expand the importance of authority and empathy in parenting. Of interest here is how Stranger Things offers a dark mirror to those contemporary anxieties that shape parental practice, and to the challenges of parenting itself, while providing a revisionist account of the family as it appears in nostalgically-recalled 1980s texts. We see this especially in a range of non-normative parental figures whose character arcs shift to protect and empower the children in their care. At the same time that Stranger Things reinscribes heteronormativity on the children within the show, it also offers various queerly-coded found families and informal familial relations that radically depart from 1980s patriarchal norms.