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Children naturally dose themselves with manageable amounts of fear through play and exploration.

By shielding children from manageable challenges, well-meaning parents deprive them of critical experiences.

In Independence-Focused Therapy, children choose “independence activities” to do without parental involvement.

Parents today spend more time with their children than at any point in recent history, yet childhood anxiety and depression are surging. How could more parental attention produce more fragile kids?

In a recent article in Open Inquiry in Mental Health, clinical psychologists Camilo Ortiz and Matthew Fastman argue that intensive parenting—what’s commonly called helicopter parenting—is a major contributor. By shielding children from manageable challenges, well-meaning parents deprive them of the very experiences they need to build competence, confidence, and emotional resilience (Ortiz & Fastman, 2025).

Ortiz and Fastman document the clinical problem convincingly. But their article raises a deeper question: Why does shielding children from manageable challenges do so much damage? The answer comes into focus when you consider what kind of world the developing brain was actually designed for.

For more than 95% of our species' evolutionary history, children grew up with a degree of independence that would alarm any modern parent. In hunter-gatherer societies—the social ecology in which our developmental psychology........

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