How Does Overparenting Weaken Kids' Resilience?

Anna Lembke says overparenting raises a generation with no tolerance for uncertainty and no psychological touchstone for resilience. Many parents try to raise kids in padded cells, insulated from pain and uncertainty, so the parents can reduce their own anxiety. Protecting children in order to avoid feeling anxious about hurt or failure is a codependent pattern. Young people then never learn that they can encounter failure, live through a negative experience, and lift themselves back up.

Technology makes the pattern worse. Parents can track children from infancy, including a device in the other room meant to confirm that breathing is okay. The worries are natural, yet the devices mediate anxiety and feed obsessive-compulsive loops that demand constant reassurance. With obsessive-compulsive disorder, the more someone looks for reassurance and gets it, the more anxious that person becomes. The loop is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The same pattern shows up at the university level. At Stanford, wonderful young people with enormous gifts, talents, and promise for the future reel at any bit of uncertainty or even the hint of imperfection. There is no ballast to hold them.