Mollycodding children leads to mental illness in teens

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We talk incessantly about how to make children more “resilient”, but whatever we’re doing, it’s not working. Rates of anxiety disorders and depression are rising rapidly among teenagers, and in the US universities can’t hire therapists fast enough to keep up with the demand. What are we doing wrong?

Pretty sure CF people called it:

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Children’s social and emotional abilities are as antifragile as their immune systems. If we overprotect kids and keep them “safe” from unpleasant social situations and negative emotions, we deprive them of the challenges and opportunities for skill-building they need to grow strong. Such children are likely to suffer more when exposed later to other unpleasant but ordinary life events, such as teasing and social exclusion.

...free play in which kids work out their own rules of engagement, take small risks, and learn to master small dangers (such as having a snowball fight) turns out to be crucial for the development of adult social and even physical competence. Depriving them of free play stunts their social-emotional growth.

Mental health statistics in the US and UK tell the same awful story: kids born after 1994 – now known as “iGen” or “Gen-Z” – are suffering from much higher rates of anxiety disorders and depression than did the previous generation (millennials), born between 1982 and 1994.

Makes sense. Instead of letting kids get into a little trouble, figure shit out on their own, and mess up every so often, parents would rather shield them from everything. Instead of telling their kids they fucked up, they'll praise every single thing they do like it's some kind of miracle. They'll only expose their kids to nice feel-good things and protect them from everything else. They also very rarely, if at all, discipline their brats, so the kids grow up thinking they can do anything they want.

The result is kids who have no idea how to cope with stress, structure, unpleasant situations, or simply being told no. This is bad enough, but the parents will straight-up support this behavior and blame the kids, relatives, teachers and anyone else who caused the child to have a negative experience, which tells the kid that the way they behave and react is fine and everyone else is wrong, which will amplify their behavior.

So by the time they reach high school and have to deal with stress, structure, expectations, bullying, arguing, discipline, and everything else on a regular basis, they fucking lose it and develop anxiety and depression over dumb shit. It's not their fault, it's the parents' fault for raising them wrong. I know this feeling to an extent. My mother was/is a control freak and wouldn't ever let me mess up or figure shit out on my own, and as an adult, things that would bother precisely nobody else bother me for an unreasonably long period of time. Like if I say something dumb out of social awkwardness (which was due to her discouraging socialization), I'll be upset about it for two or three weeks. Meanwhile, the person I said it to probably forgot about it five seconds later and doesn't care. I also cry a lot over dumb shit, even in my thirties. I'm trying to fix myself, but some of this mindfuckery is just soaked right into my mental foundation and there's no getting it out completely.

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That's not to say that parents should just let their kids get hurt all the time. Obviously keep them safe from genuine dangers, but protecting them from every single unpleasant feeling in the world means that those kids will grow up never experiencing sadness or stress or frustration and when they do finally experience it, it's gonna hit them a LOT harder because it's a bad way to feel on top of a new and unfamiliar way to feel. Being unhappy now and then is a normal part of life and preventing a child from experiencing it is a huge disservice. It's like not telling a girl she's eventually gonna start bleeding from her genitals because it might hurt her fee-fees, then when it happens, she breaks down and thinks she's fucking dying (which also happened to me).

There's a very definite middle ground - let kids learn how to deal with shit on their own and keep them safe from real danger like running into traffic. Though I think some parents mollycoddle their kids because they want to control them and letting a child learn things the hard way could give them independence, which isn't what a controller wants.