When Lisa first came for help, she seemed almost hollowed out by anxiety. She urgently wanted to find a therapist for her son, because every morning, taking him to school had become a battle she could no longer bear alone.

The moment the car stopped at the school gate, his body would stiffen. He would cry, scream, breathe rapidly, and refuse to get out. Sometimes, in a state of panic, he would push his mother away, even kicking or hitting her. Lisa kept insisting that he was not a bad child. He was gentle, sensitive, kind and bright. But whenever he faced school, it was as if some invisible force crushed him.

She had tried almost every reasonable solution. She had spoken with the school about moving him into a class where he would always have familiar friends nearby; she had allowed him to stay home on days when his emotions felt too unsteady; she had negotiated a later start, so he could avoid the most stressful part of the morning; she had arranged for his favourite teacher to meet him at the gate; she had even accepted a plan in which he came to school only in the afternoons. Each adjustment worked at first. Her son seemed finally able to breathe, and she briefly saw hope. But before long, the door that had just opened would close again.

Lisa began to resent the school. She felt that the teachers were always too impatient, too demanding, too lacking in understanding. She said the school had come to see her son as a problem, rather than as a child who needed to be understood. Relationships require trust, and the school had broken his trust. Now he spent most of his time in his room. His games console had become the last stable thread connecting him to pleasure. The world inside the screen was predictable, escapable, rewarding, and free from the complicated gaze of other people. By contrast, school, classrooms, peers, teachers and homework all seemed rough, heavy and uncontrollable.

Lisa stood outside her son’s bedroom door, caught in a painful dilemma. If she insisted that he go to school, she feared she would be hurting him further. But if she continued to allow him to retreat into his room, she could see his life becoming narrower and the outside world growing ever more distant.

Stories like this are becoming increasingly common. They are no longer simply crises within individual families, but something closer to a symptom of the age. Many children seem less and less able to enter school, less able to tolerate ordinary social friction, more dependent on the comfort provided by screens, and more likely to interpret discomfort as something unbearable. When faced with these phenomena, we almost instinctively reach for the language of mental health: the child is anxious, traumatised, dysregulated; he needs therapy, support, and more understanding.

This shift has, of course, been necessary. In the past, many children’s suffering was crudely dismissed as laziness, wilfulness, oversensitivity or disobedience. Children who had genuinely experienced abuse, neglect, bullying or neurodevelopmental difficulties were often not seen at all, and were punished instead. Today, we are more willing to recognise that children have inner lives, that childhood experience shapes the future, and that emotional pain cannot be solved by simple reprimand. This is a mark of civilisation.

Yet another problem has emerged alongside it: when therapeutic language enters almost every conversation about child development, have we begun too quickly to interpret the ordinary friction of growing up as harm? Have we mistaken the places where children need practice for dangers that must be removed? In our pursuit of less pain and more support, have we unintentionally weakened children’s capacity to face life?

Many children have not suffered too much; they have practised too little

Before a child enters school, he needs more than an interest in letters, numbers and stories. He needs a whole set of more basic capacities: the ability to sit still for a short while, to wait while someone else finishes speaking, to take turns, to share with other children, to accept that he will not always win, to spend a few hours away from his parents, to follow collective rules, and to return to an activity after a small frustration.

These abilities look simple, but they are not merely the result of natural maturation. They are usually formed through repeated, low-stakes and sometimes boring practice. A child learns to wait not because waiting is pleasant, but because he discovers again and again that he can tolerate those few minutes of dissatisfaction. A child learns to sit still not because he naturally loves quietness, but because he has been gently and consistently asked to sit for a while. A child learns to get along with others not because peer relationships are always friendly, but because he has experienced grabbing, misunderstanding, losing, making up, and rejoining the game.

Yet many modern families are unintentionally reducing these opportunities for practice. A child does not want to dress himself, so his parents dress him to avoid a morning conflict. A child refuses vegetables, so his parents replace them with food he likes in order not to ruin dinner. A child does not want to sleep alone, so his parents keep postponing the training because they worry he is frightened. A child does not like losing, so his parents quietly change the rules of the game to preserve his dignity. A child does not want to go to school, so his parents let him stay home for a day because they worry about his anxiety. A child says a classmate is unkind, so his parents immediately intervene, filtering his friendships to make them safer, gentler and less likely to involve conflict.

Seen one by one, each act looks considerate. One might even say that each act comes from love. But the loss of growth rarely happens through a single decision. It happens through repeated patterns. Each time parents remove a small difficulty, the child misses another chance to practise. What he learns is not “I can tolerate a little discomfort,” but “when I feel uncomfortable, the environment should be changed.”

We are already familiar with the idea of adverse childhood experiences. Violence, abuse, neglect, long-term humiliation and serious family conflict can harm children, and should rightly be recognised and prevented. In those cases, the problem is that children have endured too much of what they should never have had to endure.

But today, we may also need to recognise another kind of risk moving in the opposite direction: children enduring too little.

This risk does not come from cruelty, but from excessive softness. It is not that parents do not love their children, but that they are too afraid of their children feeling bad. It is not that the home lacks care, but that care has expanded so far that it covers over developmental tasks the child should have been allowed to complete himself. We might understand this as overprotective childhood experience.

Such experiences rarely appear in dramatic form. No one immediately realises that always letting a child win may also be a deprivation; that always preventing discomfort may make him less able to face reality; that constantly explaining, coordinating, cushioning and smoothing the road for a child may weaken his tolerance for the world. These experiences are too gentle, too reasonable, too much like love. That is precisely why they are so difficult to identify.

Imagine an ordinary morning. You need to take your two-year-old out, but he refuses to put on socks. He says they are scratchy. You crouch down, listen carefully, and offer him a choice: dinosaur socks or striped socks. He refuses both. You ask whether he dislikes the fabric. He nods. So you say that you will buy softer socks later, and that today he can wear sandals instead. You leave the house smoothly, without conflict, without crying. The scene looks almost like the ideal of modern parenting: the child is respected, the parent remains gentle, and the conflict is resolved.

This one time is not a problem. But if the same logic continues to extend outward, it can turn into something else. The child does not wear socks because he has sensory sensitivities; he does not wear certain clothes because they might be uncomfortable; he does not want to sit still because his body needs movement; he does not want to go to school because school makes him anxious; he does not want to play with certain children because they are not kind enough; he does not want to return to the classroom because it feels too stressful. Each time, the parent finds a reason to explain the child’s avoidance, and an adjustment to reduce his distress.

But life contains a great deal of low-level discomfort. Socks may feel a little tight. Vegetables may taste slightly bitter. Waiting may be boring. Sitting still may be irritating. Losing a game may be embarrassing. Being ignored by a friend may be painful. A teacher’s demands may feel stressful. Healthy development does not mean making all these feelings disappear. It means helping the child gradually discover that these feelings are not dangerous, that they pass, and that he can bear them.

Without exposure, there is no habituation. Without waiting, there is no patience. Without failure, there is no ability to lose. Without minor conflict, there is no social judgment. Without a little boredom and frustration, there is no executive function. Development does not begin only when a child is fully ready. On the contrary, readiness often comes from the small amounts of practice that happen when the child is not yet ready.

When school becomes unbearable

School is often the first place where families feel this contradiction sharply. School is not an extension of the home. It has timetables, collective rules, and structures that cannot be fully adjusted around the feelings of any single child. Children must line up, listen, eat, wait, take turns and follow classroom routines at the same time as everyone else. More importantly, school is an intensely social space. There are gentle children and rough children; invitations and exclusions; cooperation and competition; success and failure.

A child who has been carefully protected at home may experience the ordinary friction of school as unbearable. He may feel that teachers ask too much, classmates are not considerate enough, the classroom is too noisy, the rules are too rigid, the waiting is too long, and losing is too humiliating. When parents hear these descriptions, they naturally feel distressed, and they may easily come to see school as the place where harm is taking place.

Of course, schools sometimes really are the problem. Bullying exists. Unreasonable punishments exist. Systems that fail to include children with additional needs exist. Adults must distinguish these situations carefully. But there are also many times when what the child has encountered is not harm, but the ordinary friction of social life. A peer not choosing him is not necessarily exclusion. Losing a game is not necessarily injustice. A teacher asking him to sit properly is not necessarily oppression. A small playground conflict is not necessarily bullying.

If parents interpret all friction as harm, they will keep trying to secure fewer demands, fewer conflicts and less uncertainty for the child. In the short term, the child may feel more at ease. But he will also have fewer opportunities to learn how to live in a group. He will no longer need to judge for himself which friends are worth moving towards and which behaviours are best avoided. He will no longer need to handle disappointment, jealousy, competition and misunderstanding. He will no longer need to learn how to keep playing after losing.

Anxiety grows especially well inside this kind of cycle. Anxiety loves avoidance. If a child is afraid of school and is allowed to stay home today, his anxiety will drop immediately. His mother will also feel relieved. The house becomes quiet, the child stops crying, and the conflict disappears. But the brain does not learn that school can be managed. It learns that escaping school makes me safe. The next day, entering school becomes harder. On the third day, the threshold rises again. After a few weeks, the child is not only afraid of school; he is afraid of having fallen behind, afraid that classmates will ask where he has been, afraid that teachers will notice him, afraid of re-entering a place that has now become unfamiliar.

So the family and the school begin to arrange more support. He can arrive later. He can go first to a quiet room. He can temporarily avoid the classroom. He can do less homework. He can skip certain lessons. Each arrangement is well-intentioned, and some may be necessary in the short term. But if these arrangements do not point towards re-entry into life, and instead leave the child permanently in the zone of avoidance, support becomes another form of isolation.

Truly effective help usually does not mean removing the object of anxiety altogether. It means creating tolerable approach. It does not mean throwing the child into deep water, nor does it mean never letting him touch water at all. It means accompanying him from the shallows, practising again and again. The message from parents should not merely be: “I know you are frightened, so you do not have to do it.” It should be: “I know you are frightened, but fear does not mean you cannot do it. We can go slowly, but we still have to move forward.”

This is entirely different from coldness. Coldness says: “Stop crying and go in.” Support says: “You may cry, and I will stay with you, but you still need to go in a little.” The former crushes the child. The latter trains him.

Why are we so afraid of letting children feel bad?

Today’s parental overprotection did not appear out of nowhere. Behind it lies a whole history and culture.

For a long time, children were mainly seen as beings who needed discipline. Adults emphasised obedience, rules, hardship and endurance. Children’s feelings were often considered unimportant, or were treated as signs of wilfulness, weakness or immaturity. This older style of parenting caused real harm: shame, fear, harsh punishment, emotional neglect and control disguised as “for your own good”.

Later, psychology turned people’s attention towards the inner life of the child. Early relationships, mother-infant attachment, emotional responsiveness and traumatic experience gradually became important ways of understanding personality and psychological distress. This corrected the blind spots of the old model. Children are not little adults without feelings, and childhood experiences do not simply disappear in adulthood.

But when a correct warning is expanded again and again, it can become a new form of anxiety. Parents begin to believe that every word and action may leave an irreversible mark on their child’s mind. One moment of anger may be trauma. One refusal may be emotional neglect. One delayed response may damage secure attachment. One episode in which a child cries while completing a task may teach him forever that he is “not loved”.

Ordinary family life then begins to resemble a minefield. Parents no longer ask only, “Is this demand reasonable?” They ask, “Will this hurt him?” They no longer ask only, “What does my child need to learn?” They ask, “Does he feel completely safe right now?” In this atmosphere, firmness becomes dangerous, boundaries become suspect, and authority becomes shameful.

The word “trauma” has also expanded during this process. It originally referred to extreme and serious suffering: violence, abuse, disaster, long-term neglect and major loss. But in contemporary parenting discourse, it is sometimes used to describe almost any unpleasant experience. A parent raising their voice, a teacher criticising a child, a child being asked to wait, a boundary being held, a wish not being immediately fulfilled — all of these can be absorbed into the imagination of harm.

When everything might harm a child, the safest choice seems to be reducing all friction. But a frictionless childhood is not the same as a healthy childhood.

Modern parenting also places great value on children’s autonomy. This is not wrong. Children should not be treated as objects without wills of their own. They need respect, choices and the gradual formation of their own judgment. But autonomy is not the same as the satisfaction of immediate desire.

A three-year-old saying he does not want to brush his teeth is not exercising mature bodily autonomy. A six-year-old who wants only sweets is not making a rational dietary choice. A ten-year-old who wants to play games all night is not organising his life goals. Children’s desires are real, but they are not always reliable. Children need adults precisely because they cannot yet consistently connect present wishes with long-term interests.

True autonomy requires the ability to manage impulses, delay gratification, tolerate short-term discomfort and choose in favour of a larger goal. In other words, autonomy is not the absence of limits, but the ability to govern oneself within limits. A child who has never been asked to wait, try, persist or give up certain immediate pleasures will not become freer. He will simply become more ruled by his impulses.

Parents are neither rulers nor servants here. They are scaffolding. The purpose of scaffolding is to provide external structure while the child’s capacities are still immature. As the child grows, the scaffolding is gradually removed. But if it is removed too early, the child loses support; and if parents are afraid to provide structure from the beginning, the child can only be pulled along by his emotions.

So the real question is not whether to respect the child, but how to respect the child while preserving adult judgment. A child’s feelings need to be taken seriously, but they do not always need to make the final decision. A parent can say, “I know you do not want to go to school,” and also say, “But school is what you need to do today.” These two sentences do not contradict each other.

Care also means allowing some things to go wrong

Research on parenting styles has long suggested that the most beneficial approach is neither harsh control nor unlimited permissiveness, but a combination of warmth, stability, high expectations and clear boundaries. Boundaries without warmth leave children frightened, ashamed and lonely. Warmth without boundaries can leave children without direction, endurance and self-management.

Modern parents understand the first danger very well, but increasingly overlook the second. We are so afraid of becoming harsh parents that we sometimes fail to become clear parents.

A child needs to know: I am loved, even when I cry and protest. I am accepted, even when I fail. I can turn to my parents for help, even when I have done wrong. But he also needs to know: the world will not always change according to my feelings; other people have needs too; rules do not disappear simply because I dislike them; some things are hard, but still have to be done.

This kind of parenting will not always look beautiful. There will be crying. There will be conflict. There will be moments when the child says, “I hate you.” But if parents can remain steady, without humiliating or frightening the child, and without retreating too quickly, the child will gain an important experience: strong feelings can be borne, relationships do not break because of boundaries, and difficulty does not vanish simply because I am afraid.

This is the source of resilience.

Of course, it would be too simplistic to attribute today’s difficulties among children entirely to overprotection. Smartphones, social media, online entertainment, pandemic lockdowns, economic pressure, weakened communities and inadequate school resources are all changing the environment in which children grow up. Screens are especially important. They provide anxious and withdrawn children with a low-friction refuge. In games and short videos, children can quickly obtain stimulation, control and reward, without facing the awkwardness, waiting and failure of real relationships. When the real world becomes increasingly hard to tolerate, screens become the easiest place to retreat.

But these factors cannot explain everything. Many signs of developmental delay, school anxiety and declining independence appeared before the pandemic. Nor are they found only in poor families or under-resourced schools. A deeper shift in parenting culture has occurred across a much wider range of society: parents have become better at protecting children from harm, but less certain about how to let them practise endurance.

Today’s parents are often trapped by questions of safety. Letting a child walk a short distance alone may be seen as dangerous. Letting a child climb a tree, ride a bike or handle a peer conflict alone may provoke concern. If a child cries on the playground, adults immediately look for someone to blame; if a child falls and hurts himself, parents may be questioned for not supervising closely enough. By contrast, a child who spends all day in his room scrolling, gaming and not going outside is less likely to attract the same moral judgment.

This shows a distortion in our idea of safety. We easily see acute, visible risks: falling, injury, crying, conflict. We are much less able to see slow, cumulative risks: declining independence, weakened social ability, insufficient executive function, and eroded confidence in the face of difficulty.

A child who never falls is not necessarily safer. He may simply have failed to learn balance. A child who is never rejected is not necessarily happier. He may simply not yet have learned how to face rejection. A child who is never asked to endure is not necessarily freer. He may simply find it harder to escape the rule of his immediate emotions.

True safety is not merely the absence of tears, fear or injury today. True safety also includes the future capacity to live: to care for oneself, to work, to sustain relationships, to face setbacks, and to keep going when the world does not arrange itself according to one’s wishes.

We need to recover a broader idea of care. Care certainly includes protecting children from real harm. Children should not be abused, humiliated, chronically neglected or subjected to violence. They should not be left unsupported in environments they truly cannot bear. Adults must firmly prevent such harms.

But care also includes another, less flattering task: allowing children to face the right kind of small difficulty. Let him put on the socks, even if he dislikes them. Let him taste the vegetable, even if he grimaces. Let him lose the game, even if he gets angry. Let him speak to his friend himself, even if he is clumsy. Let him walk into school, even if he is afraid. Let him discover, through a little discomfort, that he has not been destroyed.

This is not cruelty, but a longer form of tenderness. It trusts that children are not made of glass, that they will not shatter at every setback. It also trusts that children possess the capacity to develop, so long as adults do not rush in to remove every opportunity for practice.

Children are apprentices of life. Apprentices need teachers, and they need tools; they need demonstrations, and they need to try things with their own hands; they need protection from serious harm, and they need to be tempered by reality within bearable limits. No apprentice learns a craft by being comforted alone. The craft of growing up is no different.

In the past, we were too ready to ignore children’s pain. Today, perhaps, we are becoming too afraid of children’s pain. The first error allows adults to crush children in the name of discipline. The second allows adults to deprive children of necessary practice in the name of love.

Adverse childhood experiences remind us that children can be harmed by being exposed to too much pain. Overprotective childhood experiences remind us that children can also be made fragile by being exposed to too little reality. A healthy society must be able to see both dangers at once.

Parents do not need to return to the cold, authoritarian and humiliating parenting styles of the past. Nor do they need to continue down the road of no friction, no conflict and no demands. What is worth pursuing is a form of parenting that is warm and firm: seeing the child’s feelings without allowing those feelings to govern everything; understanding the child’s difficulties without removing all difficulty; accompanying the child as he cries, but also accompanying him as he moves forward.

Sometimes, loving a child means picking him up.
Sometimes, loving a child means shielding him from what would truly harm him.
But at other times, loving a child means standing beside him and saying, gently, steadily and without humiliation:

I know this is hard.
I know you do not want to do it.
But you can try.
I will be with you.
And slowly, you will learn.