A retired teacher watched her daughter spend 20 minutes helping her grandson process his feelings about losing a board game, and couldn't help but compare it to her own childhood when her mother's entire emotional support system was "Life's not fair—set the table for dinner."
A recent analysis of generational data found a small but consistent link between overparenting and increased rates of anxiety, sadness, and social withdrawal in children. Researchers studying children raised in the 1960s and 1970s have documented something else: those children developed emotional resilience not through any deliberate parenting strategy, but through sheer parental absence. The hands-off childhood, it turns out, may have been doing something right by accident.
I thought about this the last time I visited my daughter's house. I watched her spend twenty minutes helping my grandson process his feelings about losing a board game. She validated his disappointment, discussed coping strategies, and helped him identify the physical sensations of frustration in his body. Meanwhile, I remembered the summer when I lost every single game of checkers to my older sister for three straight weeks. My mother's entire emotional support system consisted of: "Life's not fair. Set the table for dinner."
Which child will grow up more resilient? Modern parenting experts would surely side with my grandson, wrapped in his cocoon of emotional support and careful guidance. But after 32 years teaching high school, watching the steady decline in students' ability to handle basic adversity, I'm not so sure. The uncomfortable truth might be that those of us raised in the supposed dark ages of parenting accidentally received something valuable in all that benign neglect.
The accidental laboratory of independence
We tend to romanticize the past, but there's mounting evidence that something important happened to children who grew up when parents were too busy, too tired, or simply too unsupervised themselves to hover. Recent research indicates that children raised in the 1960s and 1970s developed emotional resilience not through intentional parenting strategies but due to increased parental absence, which led to greater independence and self-reliance.
Think about it: our parents weren't following developmental psychology blogs or attending workshops on raising resilient children. They were working multiple jobs, managing households without modern conveniences, and genuinely believing that children could entertain themselves for hours without adult intervention. "In the 1960s and 1970s children were more often left to their own devices," notes author Edward Collier. And those devices weren't iPads. They were bicycles, library cards, and imagination.
During my teaching career, I watched this shift in real time. My early students would shrug off a bad grade, figure out what went wrong, and adjust their approach. By the 2000s, a disappointing test score triggered parent emails, requests for extra credit, and sometimes therapy appointments. The children hadn't changed. The space we gave them to experience and process failure had vanished.
Boredom as an unexpected teacher
Remember being bored? I mean truly, desperately, mind-numbingly bored? My grandchildren look at me with horror when I describe entire summer days with absolutely nothing planned. No camps, no structured activities, no adult-guided enrichment. Just time. Endless, empty time that we had to fill ourselves.
Edward Collier argues that "Boredom may be an intrinsic part of life for practically everyone, but it needn't be destructive. In fact, boredom can be a force for good, fostering the ability to fall back on one's own resources, a life skill best developed when young."
When I was young, I spent an entire rainy week one summer with nothing to do. My mother was working double shifts, my siblings were at various jobs or friends' houses, and I was alone with my boredom. By day three, I'd started writing terrible poetry. By day five, I'd reorganized my entire bedroom. By day seven, I'd read two novels and learned to braid my own hair in ways that horrified my mother. That week taught me more about self-sufficiency than any structured program ever could.
The gift of natural consequences
Modern parenting often involves protecting children from the natural consequences of their actions. We cushion every fall, explain away every failure, negotiate every punishment. But what are we really teaching them? That the world will always send someone to fix things. That is not a lesson that serves anyone well past the age of ten.
Children of the 1960s and 1970s developed emotional strength through independence and self-regulation, as they were often left to entertain themselves and manage boredom without constant adult intervention.
I learned about consequences the hard way, which, it turns out, might be the only way that really sticks. When I forgot my homework, I got a zero. No email to the teacher, no negotiated extension, no parent intervention. Just a zero and the sick feeling that came with it. That feeling ensured I rarely forgot homework again.
Processing feelings versus living with them
Perhaps the starkest difference between then and now is how we handle emotional difficulties. Today's children are encouraged to process, discuss, and analyze every feeling. We had a different approach: feel it, deal with it, move on.
Was it the kindest model? No. But the constant processing has not produced steadier children, only more fragile ones, and the evidence for that keeps accumulating in classrooms, clinics, and college counseling offices.
Program Director Allie Riley notes that "Resiliency is a skill that can be learned, practiced and developed as kids grow." The question is: are we giving children the right kind of practice? When every setback requires adult intervention, when every disappointment needs detailed processing, when every conflict demands mediation, where do children learn to develop their own internal resources?
The pendulum swings too far
Have you noticed how every generation seems to overcorrect for the previous one's mistakes? A study found a small but consistent link between overparenting and increased internalizing symptoms, including anxiety, sadness, and social withdrawal, suggesting that overprotective parenting may hinder the development of self-regulation and resilience in children.
Our parents might have been too hands-off, but we've swung to the opposite extreme. In trying to give our children everything we felt we lacked (attention, emotional support, structured opportunities), we may have accidentally removed the very experiences that made us strong.
I saw it in the classroom every day before I retired. Students who couldn't sit with discomfort for five minutes. Young people who needed constant validation. Teenagers who fell apart at the first sign of difficulty because they'd never been allowed to struggle without a safety net.
Finding the sweet spot
So where does this leave us? Should we abandon our children to figure everything out alone? Of course not. The goal isn't to recreate the sometimes harsh conditions of the past but to recognize what was accidentally beneficial about them.
Children need some unstructured time to be bored. They need to experience natural consequences without parental interference. They need to navigate conflicts without constant mediation. They need to fail without the failure being treated as trauma.
In my previous post about finding purpose in later life, I mentioned how surviving difficulties shapes us. The same is true for children, but only if we actually let them experience those difficulties instead of constantly smoothing their path.
Final thoughts
The resilience of my generation wasn't built through superior parenting techniques. It was an accident of history, economics, and social norms that left us largely to our own devices. Our parents weren't following best practices; they were just trying to survive. Yet somehow, in their absence, we learned to be present for ourselves. In their inability to solve our problems, we learned to solve our own. In their failure to process our emotions with us, we learned to sit with discomfort until it passed.
Here is the part that modern parenting culture does not want to hear: the child who is debriefed after every hard moment is being taught that hard moments require an adult to resolve them. The child whose boredom is always solved never learns that boredom is solvable. The child whose disappointments are always validated learns that disappointment is an event rather than a weather pattern. We are raising a generation that has been talked through everything and prepared for almost nothing, and no amount of careful language around feelings will change what that produces on the other end of childhood.
