Children are apprentices

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

by Niklas Serning & Nina Lyon  BIO

Photo by Gideon Mendel/Getty Images

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

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.

Edited byPam Weintraub

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.

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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........

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