Children are apprentices

And it is so easy to turn childhood develoment into a porridge.

They all need to run wild and self develope.  Protection and dependence are liabilities and we need to know that.

A child will do something risky over and over until he gets hurt.  Then he learns.  Yet he must do this.

Children are apprentices

The emotional and practical skills of adulthood can only be learned from (appropriate) levels of discomfort and stress

Niklas Serning

is a psychologist specialising in child psychotherapy, cultural analysis and resilience. He lives in Bristol, UK.

Nina Lyon

works in children’s mental health and writes about philosophy, psychology, culture and the history of ideas. She lives in Hay-on-Wye in Wales.

Lisa urgently wanted a therapist for her son. She was torn apart with worry for him. She couldn’t get him through the gate to school – he would panic, crying and shouting, sometimes lashing out at her too, and refuse to get out of the car. She’d tried everything: moving classes to make sure he was always with a friend, giving him time to catch up emotionally with a day off when he needed it, giving him a later, softer start, being met by his favourite teacher to walk in, even just coming in for afternoons. Each accommodation worked, until it didn’t.

The school itself had given up on them, she said angrily. He was such a lovely boy, but they always pushed too hard and asked too much of him – he had become a problem for them. Relationships need trust, and the school had undermined his trust. Now, he barely left his room. His PlayStation was his lifeline, his only source of enjoyment. Maintaining interest in other hobbies was just too hard, and he checked out. Lisa felt powerless to help, stuck between enforcing demands on her son, which she worried would harm him further, and seeing him withdraw deeper into himself, the days blurring into one another as the world outside his room grew steadily more remote.

This child is part of a pattern. Children in the English-speaking world, in particular, are not doing as well as their predecessors 10 or 20 years ago, and distress is part of the picture. One in 10 British adolescents report poor wellbeing, with a notable decline since the early 2010s. Nearly 18 per cent are persistently absent from secondary school. In early adulthood, one in eight is not in education, training or work. And 18 per cent consider themselves disabled. Meanwhile, although older workers are more likely to take sick leave, young people are more likely to be out of work entirely because of ill health.

When we try to make sense of this malaise, we turn almost automatically to the language of mental health and the notion of a mental health crisis. More mental health professionals are needed to diagnose and cure problems with emotion regulation, negative thinking or trauma. There’s more access to therapeutic support through schools and specialist teams than ever before, with the language and concepts of therapy shaping pretty much every conversation we have about children, development and human relationships. And things keep getting worse.

But what if we have over-corrected in our drive for less stress and more support, and our therapeutic mindset has failed to foster human flourishing? The answer may lie in what is happening long before children ever encounter a therapist. When four-year-old British children start primary school, research from the early years charity Kindred Squared found that 44 per cent cannot sit still, 37 per cent cannot play or share with other children, and 32 per cent are overly upset when their parents aren’t there. Also: 35 per cent can’t dress themselves, and 26 per cent aren’t toilet-trained. What looks like early signs of emotional distress may be inseparable from the missed developmental markers. Research has shown that these capacities are not simply temperamental traits but trained skills that develop through repeated low-stakes practice in early childhood. The missed developmental markers foreshadow future emotional difficulties: further down the line, these children will likely suffer more from school anxiety, whether it’s separation anxiety at being away from home, finding schoolwork hard, or both. They will find it harder to navigate social interactions, sowing the seeds for social anxiety and withdrawal.

Some children arrive in the world with neurodevelopmental challenges that are evident early on. Parents will explain how their child barely settled as a baby, and how they’ve existed in a storm of what-if worries since they could speak. Sometimes, they’ll tell us about how they’ve worked to the point of collapse to try to make the one-size-fits-all model of education work for their autistic child. Many parents are endlessly filling the gaps between their child’s additional needs and the scant resources available for them. Such children and their families will need additional accommodations to help them thrive, but these families don’t account for the scale of the problems we see, and this essay is not about them.

They think a lot about how to do the best thing by their child. They just somehow went off course

Instead, for many without these diagnoses, we are seeing a new, distinctive pattern of parenting. Look at the headline figures of school avoidance and developmental delay, and it might look, on the surface, like neglect; mostly, however, when you get to know the parents, the opposite is true. It is better described as overprotection.

We have long known that deprivation of developmental opportunities can lead to delays in motor control and self-care, and hinder the development of executive functioning, like our ability to take turns or regulate emotions. If the deprivation of those opportunities happens due to overprotection instead of neurodiversity, even with the best of intentions we may see similar outcomes.

The generation of parents raising developmentally delayed children are overwhelmingly caring. They have educated themselves through books like Tina Payne Bryson and Dan Siegel’s The Whole-Brain Child (2011), Shefali Tsabary’s The Conscious Parent (2010) and Sarah Ockwell-Smith’s The Gentle Parenting Book (2016), which became publishing hits across the West. They have taken expert advice from social media, not only from unqualified influencers but also from respectable, credentialled psychologists. They think a lot about how to do the best thing by their child. They just somehow went off course.

In working with children and families, you notice specific hardships, like family conflict, bereavements or abuse – the adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) that we’re good at noticing as a society too. But there’s another, more subtle pattern we’ve now observed. This pattern is of softness rather than hardship. It is, in fact, the assiduous removal of hardships, no matter how small – the helicoptered playdates with predetermined toy rotations and parents leaping in to direct the interactions at the first whiff of dissent; the board games rigged to ensure the smallest always wins; the decision to kick the can of solo sleeping, toilet-training, sitting still, reading, swimming, bike-riding, overnight stays away from home down the road until the child is ready, by which the parent means ‘in a state of feeling entirely at ease and confident’, which may never fully materialise.

These aren’t adverse childhood experiences in the conventional sense. They are not upsetting or destabilising – quite the opposite, at least in the short term. They are well-intentioned attempts to make life easier, smoother, less distressing. But they do create adversity in the long run, as part of a pattern of overprotection that leaves children more vulnerable to the rough and tumble of ordinary existence outside the caring bubble of the family home.

Mounting evidence suggests this pattern is causing harm. Overparenting is linked to worse emotion regulation and self-efficacy. It is linked to higher rates of anxiety and depression. When we consider its sheer prevalence, it may end up cumulatively causing enough harm at the population level that we should take it as seriously as the ACEs from which we rightly try to protect children. And, just as naming ACEs made it easier for us to look out for them and try to reduce their impact, naming overprotective childhood experiences might help us pin down the problem so we can work on it. We propose calling them just that, overprotective childhood experiences, or OCEs.

The asymmetry between our ability to notice ACEs and OCEs reflects a broader imbalance in human threat-detection. We evolved sophisticated systems for spotting acute danger fast in an ancestral environment rich with predators and existential threats. But we’re remarkably poor at perceiving incremental harms. In Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), Daniel Kahneman describes the human inclination towards fast, reactive thinking driven by emotion and cognitive bias – what he calls System 1 thinking. We often arrive at better decisions via effortful, slow System 2 deliberation, but we’re wired to take the shortcuts wherever possible. System 1 feeds on the ‘known knowns’ of familiar information; it neglects the domains of information it cannot immediately access.

The parent who shields their child from a scary confrontation sees only the acute distress they prevented. They don’t see the slightly eroded capacity to face the next challenge, or the next. The harm compounds invisibly, like an ignored debt. By naming OCEs, we can start to get better at noticing the pattern: each instance where we trade short-term relief for long-term resilience.

You drop him at school, and ask if he feels OK about you leaving him. He says he’d rather be at home

Imagine a typical parenting challenge, in which you need to go out but your two-year-old doesn’t want to put on his socks. You start by supporting his autonomy by offering him a choice: dinosaur socks or stripy socks? It’s still a no; you try to understand his motivations. He says he doesn’t like socks. They’re scratchy. You ask him if he’d like softer socks. He nods. You can problem-solve this together, you say; we can get some softer socks later, while we are out. Meanwhile, you offer him some sandals, which he accepts, and you leave the house.

You centred his experience and met his needs; you were collaborative rather than authoritarian, in line with the prevailing wisdom. You have learned from this that he cannot tolerate certain fabrics. He can wear only soft socks. Later, when he refuses to get dressed, you wonder if this extends to shirts and trousers too. You don’t want to cause him harm by forcing him into clothing that triggers a sensory sensitivity he cannot yet express and that may cause him pain. So you restrict the range of textures and designs; you tell grandma not to knit those cute woollen jumpers that you used to love, and to please choose future items without zips or buttons.

When he starts school, you explain this to the teacher. She mentions that he struggles to sit still at story time. At home, you never forced him to sit still; he was free to meet his own needs to move his body when he wanted to. You ask the teacher for a way to work around this, because it doesn’t feel right to do that to a child. She says they try to be flexible and keep the timings short, but that children do need to sit still to read and write and learn. It all feels very pressured, and you worry about how it impacts him.

When you drop him at school, you ask him if he feels OK about you leaving him. He says he’d rather be at home. Now he has opened up to you about it, you can’t force him in, so you take the day off to get to the bottom of the problem. You ask him about what he struggles with at school. He says that the teacher is mean and the other children sometimes leave him out at breaktime. You ask the teacher to keep an eye on him at breaktime; she reports that they’re just playing normal games like tag, and he sometimes moves between groups; she doesn’t think anything is wrong.

You invite some of the children over for playdates to help build those friendships, vigilant for signs of strife. You want the experience to be perfect to help him feel confident and liked, so you plan games where no one can lose or feel left out. Observing those other children, you realise that he’s more sensitive than them. He needs more support, and, as his parent, it is your role to make sure he gets it.

If you remove any annoying sensory experience, you deny your child the opportunity to calibrate low-level discomfort

You speak to the teacher again. Eventually, she agrees to some accommodations. He can be paired up with the children you’ve identified as kind. A teaching assistant trained in emotional support will check in on how he’s doing every morning. He can move freely to the quiet space when he feels uncomfortable sitting down.

None of these parental concerns are crazy. They are all totally normal worries. But the way we frame the costs and benefits we assign to each course of action can lead us into an OCE-rich trajectory where each worry leads to an avoidance of discomfort. Does it matter as a one-off if you don’t wear socks? Of course not. But if you remove any novel or annoying sensory experience, you are denying your child the opportunity to calibrate low-level discomfort as something normal and forgettable. Without exposure, the tuning-out won’t happen. It’s the same for the bitterness of vegetables, or the discomfort of being still. Developing executive function takes consistent, repeated practice, and that practice often takes the form of waiting, persisting through mild aversion, suppressing short-term wants, and doing boring things.

OCE-rich parenting denies children these practice opportunities. It also sets up the expectation that mild discomfort is a problem to be fixed, narrowing the child’s range of experience and starving them of the opportunity to build confidence in their ability to tolerate uncomfortable feelings, like the low-level conflict that often pops up in playground games, and to navigate that conflict on their own. Flourishing at school isn’t just about having the executive-function skills to focus and learn – schools are intensely social spaces, and children who struggle to regulate their emotions struggle more with making friends.

Parents sometimes perceive this friction as bullying. When we spoke to teachers, a fuller picture emerged: children who get upset at losing; who can’t wait turns; and whose crying and verbal outbursts can alienate their peers. Yet, if the parent removes the challenge, social skills are further delayed.

The reflex to shield children from short-term distress can, when repeated, lead to longer-term problems. An axiom of cognitive behavioural therapy literature is that anxiety feeds on avoidance; create the conditions for carefully graduated exposure to scary situations, as demonstrated by a widely used CBT-based parenting programme from the clinical psychologist Cathy Creswell at the University of Oxford, and the anxiety lessens. A programme from the Yale psychologist Eli Lebowitz asks parents to ease off accommodating anxiety and to respond instead with calm, steady support, with equivalent success to individual CBT. In each case, both parent and child grow. Overcoming anxiety is a learning experience, a part of our development that sometimes needs a helping hand. When we accommodate low-level worry and discomfort, we remove that opportunity.

When overprotected children start secondary school, and the external demands ramp up, things get harder still. The rules are less flexible, because teen behaviour needs consistent management, and forging new friendships is hard enough for the kids who are doing fine. A continuing OCE approach here would allow a stressed-out child a day off to reduce his anxiety and help him re-regulate with his favourite online games at home. Then, having learned that he needs to take time off when anxious, and that the frictionless comfort bubble of technology helps him feel calm, he views school as increasingly intolerable. You ask for more help at school, and they agree he can work in the student support room when he needs to. He doesn’t go back to class after that and loses contact with his peers. Now he feels not just anxious but also lonely at school. Eventually, without a social incentive to tolerate the distress, he may not make it into school at all. The OCE cycle is complete.

This might sound like an extreme example. But in practice, with teenagers nearing the crunch point of high-school graduation – months out of school, their chances of leaving with qualifications slipping – versions of this pattern are common. Step back, and the broader picture comes into focus: over recent decades, children’s independence, resilience and wellbeing have all declined. A sizeable group who might once have muddled through are no longer managing now.

From playing with a mix of children, some of whom are mean, he learns that some are nicer than others

In another possible world, that first time your two-year-old didn’t want to wear the socks, you could have said: ‘We have to go, so I am going to put the socks on for you.’ There will be some transitory tears as you gently wrestle those socks onto his feet. But by the time you put on some music in the car, he has forgotten them. You never think about it again.

Fast-forward, and he’s bigger. Now you tell him to sit still and be quiet while you take an important call on the train, or to wait a turn when his sibling is talking at dinner. Afterwards, you thank him for doing such a good job, and a few years later this has happened so many times that neither of you ever thought about it again.

Your child has learned that, sometimes, we have to tolerate low-grade discomfort, and that we get through it. From playing with a mix of children, some of whom are mean, he learns that some are nicer to you than others, and those are the best ones to play with. He didn’t always enjoy school, but he enjoyed the good bits, like breaktimes, and was fine when you picked him up at the end of the day.

How did we get from a laissez-faire attitude to the situation we find now? A look back at history tells the tale. Through the 19th century, ideas of child development were largely behaviour-led. A child appeared primarily as a bundle of habits, virtues and vices to be shaped, rather than as a complex inner subject. The focus was on training and disciplining behaviour through reward, punishment and example, in line with broader social and religious norms.

At the turn of the 20th century, the focus shifted inward. Sigmund Freud argued that children develop their adult personalities through the psychic imprint of their earliest family relationships: when those relationships go awry, development is disrupted, leaving the child fixated in unresolved conflicts – often sexual and centred on the parents – and predisposing them to adult neurosis. The remedy, in his model, was the therapeutic relationship itself, with the psychoanalyst standing in as a kind of proxy parent.

By the 1930s and ’40s, psychoanalysis had shifted away from its earlier psychosexual focus toward the mother-infant bond. Melanie Klein argued that insufficient maternal availability – captured in her image of the ‘bad breast’, the mother experienced by the infant as withholding – could leave lasting psychic scars, later expressed as hostility or depression. Because such claims rested on the analyst’s subjective interpretation, they were difficult to test or falsify.

The prevailing view is clear: get it wrong, and you damage your child forever

These psychoanalytic hunches gained scientific credibility with attachment theory. In 1951, John Bowlby wrote a report for the World Health Organization on the emotional harms of prolonged maternal separation – findings drawn from the extreme privations of wartime, then vastly generalised. ‘The development of a child’s character has been shown to depend essentially upon the relationship with the mother in early years,’ he wrote. His collaborator Mary Ainsworth devised a series of experiments in the 1960s and ’70s in which she briefly separated infants from their mothers, then watched how the children responded when their mothers returned. Ainsworth described avoidant infants as seeming largely untroubled by separation and showing little interest when the mother returned, while anxious-resistant infants became intensely distressed and sought contact even as they resisted comfort. The data showing that contented babies tended to become contented adults was real. What was folded in without proof was the causative claim: that the mother’s attunement was the determining factor.

From the 1970s onward, attachment theory moved beyond specialist research circles and into wider professional and popular culture – a culture increasingly anxious about working mothers and institutional childcare. By 1993, The Baby Book by William and Martha Sears had taken ‘attachment parenting’ mainstream, and a new scientific-ish common sense had hardened into axiom: long-term emotional wellbeing is determined by the mother’s early attunement to the baby’s needs. Confounding factors – innate temperament, the many other formative relationships children learn from – were waved away.

Not everyone accepted this determinism. As far back as 1953, the paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott proposed the idea of the ‘good-enough’ mother, who prepares the child for an imperfect world by mostly meeting his needs, with inevitable and necessary lapses. It was a significant softening – but it didn’t displace the broader message that formative processes were unfolding in early childhood, largely out of view, and that a mother’s missteps could carry lasting consequences. In 1998, the psychologist Jerome Kagan also challenged what he called ‘infant determinism’: the belief that the experiences of the first few years of life fix a child’s emotional trajectory permanently, making everything that follows – resilience, relationships, adult personality – a function of what happened in the cradle. Seductive and intuitive, Kagan argued, but incorrect. By the time his critique was published, the framework had already migrated out of academia and into paediatric advice, parenting books and eventually social media, becoming common sense.

In the 21st century, the prevailing view is clear: get it wrong, and you damage your child forever. Attachment parenting holds that extended breastfeeding, baby-wearing and co-sleeping creates the physical conditions for emotional attunement, in line with our mammalian ancestry. Its millennial descendant, ‘gentle’ or ‘conscious’ parenting, takes this further: the parent-child power relationship must be equalised to allow the child autonomy, the parent must anticipate and meet the child’s emotional needs, and the quality of the parent’s emotional space determines the child’s. There is no ‘bad’ behaviour, only emotional dysregulation – and if your child is dysregulated, it’s probably because you are too.

The cumulative weight of this history lands on today’s parents as a kind of moral instruction: the past was harmful, and you must do better. The social media meme of ‘breaking the cycle’ frames conscious, attentive parenting as a rescue operation – not just for your child, but for yourself. By parenting differently from how you were parented, the idea goes, you can heal your own wounded inner child. For parents who experienced genuine ACEs – violence, abuse, neglect – this is a powerful and legitimate principle. The trouble begins when the definition of what counts as harm quietly expands to include almost everything.

Trauma, in its clinical sense, refers to the psychological impact of extreme suffering: physical and sexual violence, death, disaster, the kind of experiences Bowlby was studying in those orphaned or separated from their families by war. But concept creep has carried the word ‘trauma’ far from those origins. A parent raising their voice, a boundary held clumsily, a need that goes briefly unmet: in the language now circulating through parenting books and social media, these become potential traumas to prevent, rather than the ordinary friction of imperfect, good-enough care. The bar for harm has dropped so low that normal childhood – with its frustrations, its disappointments, its moments of conflict – starts to look like a minefield. And if everything is potentially traumatic, the only safe response is to remove all friction. That is precisely the logic that produces OCEs.

Responsiveness, meeting needs and promoting autonomy are all sensible, well-evidenced ideas. Avoiding coercion – in the sense of fear-based discipline and conditional love – is sound advice too. None of this is wrong. The problem is what happens when these principles are pushed to their logical extreme.

A generation of kind parents have been nudged into becoming more permissive out of fear of being too harsh

Where modern parenting can unintentionally go wrong is in the flattening of the parent-child decision-making hierarchy out of a fear of autonomy-stomping coercion. But autonomy is not as straightforward as it sounds. To act autonomously, in any meaningful sense, is to act on deliberative judgment rather than immediate instinct. Coercion, instruction and guidance all sit somewhere on a spectrum. Go too far to avoid coercion, and what looks like respecting your child’s autonomy becomes something else entirely: a parent who cannot say no, who defers to a four-year-old’s refusal to put on shoes or eat a vegetable, who mistakes the removal of all constraints for the granting of freedom. But a child who gets everything they want in the moment is not becoming more autonomous – they are becoming less so. Real autonomy requires the capacity to override immediate impulse in favour of a longer-term goal, and that capacity is built through practice, through being told to wait, to try again, to tolerate the thing that feels uncomfortable. A child who has never had to do any of that has not been freed. They have simply been left without the tools they will eventually need.

To possess autonomy, we need to exercise self-control over our immediate wants and urges. Even as adults, this is hard: we doomscroll, overeat, react in anger. Children are children not only because they are small, but because their cognitive capacities are not yet fully developed. They need the scaffold of the adult mind to shape their own decision-making and actions; their momentary wants, untethered to a bigger-picture view, are not truly autonomous. The developmental psychologist and learning theorist Lev Vygotsky invoked the idea of a more knowledgeable other to describe the provider of that scaffold, whether it’s a teacher, a mentor or a parent.

Shift the power balance of that joint decision-making too far from the more knowledgeable other’s perspective towards the child’s, and the risk is that the scaffold shrinks away. You opt for the short-term path of least resistance, which is capitulating to short-term wants instead of long-term needs. It is easy to get spooked when the new parenting culture continually insists on the need to maintain safe spaces and avoid coercion. The threat of harm lurks beneath the surface, creating a bias against anything that might distress a child or run against their instincts. Better – and safer – to hew to the frictionless option.

No individual decision determines the future outcomes for a child. But a bias towards repeated short-term-focused choices – I want the cookie now, I don’t want to get back on the bike – results in children developing more slowly, so that they’re not yet school-ready, people-ready, real-life-ready when they need to be. We know from decades of research on parenting styles, beginning with Diana Baumrind’s foundational studies in the 1960s, that permissive parenting – high warmth, low expectations – gets worse developmental outcomes than parenting that combines warmth with clear boundaries and high expectations. A generation of kind and highly conscientious parents have been nudged into becoming more permissive than they intended out of fear of the well-documented harms of being too harsh. It was an over-correction.

When we try to pin down why things go wrong for a child, we shrink down the vast complexity of the world around them into the patterns that we notice. From working on the frontlines of children’s mental health, and from writing about it, we have noticed OCEs, and believe that it would be helpful to notice them more, but there are multiple confounding factors in play too – where do we factor in smartphones, the COVID-19 lockdowns of school and social interaction, or economic decline?

This, therefore, is a suggestion of something to think about, rather than a claim that overprotective parenting is the One Bad Thing that has happened to kids. Evidence that screen use harms adolescent mental health is currently contested, but there is emerging evidence that screentime impacts development in younger children and that parental screentime use undermines the responsiveness and communication that children need.

The rise in developmental and emotional delays does, however, predate the pandemic, even if lockdowns exacerbated them. And, while these problems are more pronounced in deprived communities, where many developmental risks accumulate, the Kindred Squared survey shows that the scale of the pattern reaches far beyond any one social class.

ACEs harm children through exposure to too much. OCEs harm them through exposure to too little. We need to notice both

Parents’ core anxieties don’t change depending on whether they’re looking for a private-practice therapist or a free practitioner in the community. They know the situation’s bad and that something needs to be done, but they’re terrified of making things worse by taking a firm lead with their child, of making them leave their room, go into school, even taking their phone away overnight. They’ve read about trauma, in books or on social media. They don’t want to take any risks.

As we cycle through different models of how to raise children over time, we find new forms of harm and new ways to avoid them. The behaviour-led model pathologised deviation from the norm; the psychoanalytic model pathologised imperfect mothers; the current therapeutic model, at its worst, pathologises ordinary childhood difficulties.

In each case, there’s a trade-off. When trauma is the form of harm that haunts the discourse, we lose sight of the OCE-shaped harms that arise when we throw everything at avoiding it. ACEs harm children through exposure to too much. OCEs harm them through exposure to too little. We need to notice both.

But we can do more than just notice and name. We should also think about OCEs as a collective problem, because humans are social animals. We gradually nudged one another into the selective safetyism we’re in right now, and we can nudge one another back out into the world. For as long as parents are judged more harshly for letting their child walk home alone from school, break a wrist falling from a bike or tree, or burst into tears while dealing with unsupervised playground conflict than for letting them hide in their room on an iPad, we will stay stuck in our bias for ACE-type harms.

We can expand our safeguarding lens to include the capacity for resilience. A child who becomes an adult unable to look after himself will not be safe. At some point, our children will leave our care, for few of us want them indefinitely languishing in the basement, and, when they do leave, the world will throw an unpredictable array of problems at them.

We can expand our idea of care, too. With care, we can give them the stepping-stones they need to be genuinely autonomous, and to enjoy the confidence that comes with that. Sometimes, they will slip and fall, and we will help them get back up. Care sometimes entails allowing things to go wrong in exactly the right kind of way.