Sometimes the Loving Thing Is Not Removing the Hard Thing.

Why It Matters

This matters because parental reflexes to remove difficulty can inadvertently fuel anxiety and undermine long-term emotional resilience and competence. Allowing children to face age-appropriate challenges supports mental health and their ability to handle future stress.

Summary

The speaker warns that the two most common parenting mistakes with anxious children are escape and avoidance—pulling kids out of uncomfortable situations to spare them distress. Using a personal anecdote about raising three children who ran in difficult conditions, they argue that enduring hardship built sturdiness, perseverance and unseen capacities. Continually extracting kids reinforces anxiety by confirming that problems are too big and the child is too small, preventing development of competence. Parents should instead tolerate manageable discomfort to help children build resilience.

Original Description

Sometimes the loving thing is not removing the hard thing. Sometimes the loving thing is standing beside them while they learn they can do hard things.