A few months ago, I watched a child cry over a board game. She was nine. She had lost to her younger sister, and the loss had undone her completely. What struck me wasn’t the crying. Children cry. What struck me was how quickly the room rearranged itself around the crying.
Her grandmother went to fetch a biscuit. Her father pulled her onto his lap. Her mother started explaining, very gently, why winning isn’t everything, and how she was still wonderful, and how next time it would probably go differently. The whole family was busy, in a matter of seconds, making the feeling go away.
The child stopped crying after about thirty seconds. Not because the disappointment had passed, but because she had been efficiently reassured out of it. The feeling didn’t move through her. It got managed.
I stood there thinking about how rarely children are allowed to just feel the thing now.
The skill that used to be ordinary
There’s a particular kind of adult capacity that’s been getting harder to find in people under thirty. It isn’t grit, and it isn’t toughness, and it isn’t anything as grand as resilience in the way the word usually gets used.
It’s smaller and more specific than that. It’s the ability to feel the sting of having lost something and let the sting pass on its own. To not text anyone. To not scroll. To not call your mum. To not reach for the soothing voice that’s always two clicks away on a screen. To sit with the small ache of disappointment until your nervous system, on its own time, recalibrates back to a place where the disappointment doesn’t define the rest of your afternoon.
This skill used to be ordinary. Children who grew up in the 1970s, 80s, and even most of the 90s had something like it by the time they were ten. They had been alone with their disappointments often enough to learn that the feelings passed on their own, that you didn’t need anyone to manage them out of you, that you could be sad for an hour and then somehow, mysteriously, find yourself not quite as sad.
What I’ve noticed, watching the children in the families around me, is that this isn’t happening as often anymore. The pause between feeling the thing and reaching for someone or something to make the feeling stop has gotten shorter and shorter, until in many young adults it’s barely there at all.
I came across a video recently that talks about how modern-day parents are raising children with zero resilience. It’s not an attack on parents – but it does highlight how we’ve been sucked into a culture of mollycoddling children and how, ultimately, it’s doing them more harm than good.
What the research says
I’m not a psychologist. I’m a writer who’s spent a lot of time thinking about how people change. But the research on this isn’t subtle.
A widely cited 2014 study by Holly Schiffrin and colleagues at the University of Mary Washington, published in the Journal of Child and Family Studies, found that college students with over-involved parents reported significantly higher levels of depression and lower life satisfaction. The mechanism the researchers pointed to was self-determination. When parents organise their involvement around shielding their children from difficulty, the children don’t, by the time they reach early adulthood, have a strong working belief that they can handle difficulty on their own.
A more recent 2022 systematic review in Frontiers in Psychology pulled together the broader helicopter-parenting literature and reached a similar conclusion. The well-meaning involvement, when it consistently steps in to manage the child’s emotional responses to setbacks, tends to produce adults with reduced emotional regulation capacity and a heightened vulnerability to anxiety and depression.
The picture across these studies is consistent. The parents are not doing this out of indifference. They’re doing it out of love. They genuinely cannot bear to watch their child be in distress, and they have the tools, the time, the resources, the always-available phone, the chat function on the laptop, to make the distress go away in seconds. So they do.
The child registers the rescue and learns, over thousands of small repetitions, that distress is something that has to be managed by someone else. The capacity to manage it themselves, which would have developed if they had been allowed to sit with it sometimes, doesn’t quite build.
What’s happening in homes
The thing that’s hard about this pattern is that none of it looks like bad parenting in the moment.
A child loses a match and is crying in the car. The parent talks them through the feeling on the drive home. A child gets a bad mark on a test and is upset that evening. The parent sits with them, explains why the mark doesn’t mean anything about their worth, and talks them out of the feeling. A child is bored on a Sunday afternoon. The parent suggests something to do, or hands over a screen, or proposes a treat.
Each of these interventions is loving. Each of them, in isolation, is fine. The trouble is that they’re happening constantly, in households where they used to happen occasionally, and the child is no longer getting the experience that’s actually quite developmentally important: the experience of sitting alone with a small bad feeling and discovering, on their own, that it passes.
There’s also something newer that wasn’t a factor when most of us grew up. The phone. The constant low-grade availability of distraction, reassurance, and parasocial company is making it almost impossible for a young person to be alone with a feeling for longer than about ninety seconds. The feeling starts. The phone comes out. The feeling never quite finishes its arc.
The capacity is built in the space between the feeling and the reaching. When the reaching is instant and constant, the capacity doesn’t get built.
What this costs in adulthood
I see this in people I know in their twenties. They are intelligent, articulate, often kind. They have language for their feelings that my generation never had. They can name what they’re feeling with a precision I find genuinely moving.
What they often can’t do is hold the feeling for very long without needing something or someone to take it away.
A small bad day becomes a crisis they have to share with three friends before they can sleep. A minor professional setback becomes the trigger for a difficult few weeks. A romantic disappointment becomes something that requires extensive processing rather than something that, in a slightly older generation, might have been allowed to ache quietly for a while and then fade.
I’m not saying the old way was better. The old way involved a lot of feelings being suppressed and a lot of distress being carried alone that probably didn’t need to be. But the new way has its own costs, and one of those costs is that the small everyday skill of letting a feeling pass on its own has gotten harder for many young people to access.
What parents can actually do
If you’re a parent reading this, I want to be careful here, because the last thing I want to do is hand you another thing to feel guilty about.
The instinct to comfort your child when they’re upset is one of the most beautiful instincts a human being can have. I don’t think anyone should be advised against following it.
What seems to help, in the accounts of parents who’ve thought about this consciously, is the small practice of pausing. Not refusing to comfort. Just pausing for a moment before stepping in. Letting the child have the feeling for a beat or two before the management of the feeling begins. Letting silence and small ordinary discomfort sit in the room sometimes without immediately filling it with reassurance.
The child watches you do this and learns, in a way they couldn’t have learned if you had rushed in, that the feeling isn’t an emergency. That it can be in the room and they can be in the room and the room can hold both of them for a moment. That a feeling has a beginning and a middle and an end, and that they’re allowed to be present for the whole thing.
This is, in some ways, what previous generations of parents did without thinking about it. They were too busy, or too tired, or too distracted by their own lives, to step into every small distress their children had. The children, somewhat by accident, learnt to sit with the smaller versions of disappointment on their own. The capacity built without anyone designing it.
We can rebuild it, in our children and in ourselves, if we’re willing to occasionally tolerate the discomfort of not rushing to fix things.
A small note to close
The child crying over the board game is fine. She will probably grow up with a good childhood. Her family clearly loves her. None of what I’m describing is a catastrophe, and none of it is anyone’s fault.
But I keep thinking about that thirty-second window, and how quickly the room moved to close it, and how easily that pattern can become the only pattern a child knows.
If there’s anything I’d offer, from the position of someone who watches these things rather than treats them, it’s this. The next time your child is sad about a small thing, see if you can let the sadness be in the room for a moment before you do anything about it. Sit beside them. Don’t explain. Don’t fix. Just be there, while they have the feeling, until the feeling moves on its own.
It might be one of the more useful things you ever teach them. And it might also be one of the harder things you ever do.
