You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Parenting’ tag.
The previous essay argued that we have stopped teaching self-control. The next question is what replaced it.
Too often, the answer is fragility.
Not deliberately. No parent sets out to make a child brittle. No teacher wants students less capable at the end of the year than they were at the beginning. The shift came wrapped in kind language: safety, validation, accommodation, trauma-awareness, student voice. Some of that language was needed. Cruelty has often hidden behind discipline, and adults have not always known the difference between formation and control. But there is another mistake now, quieter and more respectable: treating ordinary discomfort as harm.
In The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt call this the “untruth of fragility”: the assumption that young people are easily damaged by adversity, frustration, disappointment, or disagreement. The intention is protection. The result is often training, though not the kind adults think they are providing.
Children are not porcelain. They are more like muscles, immune systems, or voices in training. They develop through manageable strain, not through trauma or neglect, and not through well-intentioned overprotection. They need difficulty that can be borne, repeated, and mastered.
A child who never has to wait does not become patient. A child who never loses does not become gracious. A child who never hears “no” does not become free. He becomes dependent on the world bending quickly enough to keep him comfortable, and that dependence is one of the quiet curricula of modern fragility.
You can see it in ordinary school and home life. A student receives a low mark and treats it as injury rather than feedback. A child finds a task boring and is rescued by entertainment before endurance has a chance to form. A playground conflict begins, and adults rush in so quickly that no apology, embarrassment, repair, or social learning can happen. A deadline becomes flexible before the child has had to face the cost of poor planning.
None of this looks dramatic at the time. That is why it spreads. Each adult decision seems merciful in isolation: soften the consequence, remove the frustration, shorten the task, mediate the conflict, raise the grade, excuse the outburst, avoid the tears. Sometimes mercy is exactly what is required. Children are not all carrying the same burdens. A child being bullied needs protection. A child in genuine distress needs care. A child with a disability may need accommodation. A child in crisis may need the demand reduced.
But difficulty is not automatically damage, and that distinction is where too much modern child-rearing loses its nerve. A child being corrected is not necessarily being harmed. A child being disappointed is not necessarily being wounded. A child being asked to persist through boredom is not necessarily being oppressed. These are ordinary parts of formation. Remove them too consistently and the child does not become safer; he becomes less practised at living.
This is where Lukianoff and Haidt’s use of cognitive behavioural therapy matters. CBT does not teach people to obey every anxious thought. It teaches them to notice the thought, test it, reframe it, and move forward. A healthy adult response to childhood distress works in a similar direction. It does not sneer at the feeling, but neither does it make the feeling sovereign.
When a child says, “I can’t handle this,” the answer cannot always be, “Then you do not have to.” Sometimes the answer has to be, “I know this feels hard. We are going to do a smaller version, and you are going to discover that you can survive it.” That kind of answer is not cruelty. It is formation with an adult still in the room.
The older language of character understood this more plainly, even when it was sometimes misused. Patience, courage, temperance, perseverance, humility: these were not decorative virtues. They were survival equipment. Children learned them by doing unpleasant things under adult guidance — waiting, losing, apologizing, practising, revising, sitting still, trying again after embarrassment.
Modern childhood often wants the fruit without the cultivation. It wants confidence without correction, resilience without frustration, emotional health without disappointment, and independence without delayed gratification. The bargain looks generous in the moment, especially to adults who hate seeing children unhappy, but it does not hold.
This is where the link to self-control becomes direct. Self-control is one expression of antifragility. A child becomes stronger by meeting manageable resistance and discovering that impulse, fear, boredom, and frustration do not have to rule him. The Dunedin findings pointed in the same direction from the other side: children with poorer self-control were more likely to stumble into adolescent “snares” that narrowed their later options. The practical lesson is not that children should be hardened by neglect. It is that they need repeated practice meeting difficulty before difficulty becomes decisive.
This is the part our institutions need to relearn. Compassion and expectation are not enemies. Support and standards can coexist. A child’s distress may explain why something is difficult; it does not automatically prove the demand is wrong. If adults forget that, they may still sound compassionate while steadily reducing the child’s world to the size of his most avoidant impulse.
A wiser culture would prepare children for the road rather than trying to smooth every inch of it before they arrive. It would let small failures do their teaching while the stakes are still low. It would allow boredom, correction, awkwardness, and disappointment to resume their proper place as ordinary features of growth.
We wanted children to feel safe. Fair enough. But somewhere along the way, too many adults began treating safety as the absence of discomfort rather than the growth of capacity. That is how we stopped teaching self-control, and how we started teaching fragility.
One of the most important childhood traits is also one of the easiest to make sound old-fashioned.
Self-control.
The word itself feels dusty now. It carries the smell of scolding, punishment, stiff collars, and adults who confused obedience with virtue. Modern childhood has moved in the other direction. We speak more fluently about affirmation, expression, accommodation, trauma, identity, and emotional safety than we do about restraint. Some of that shift was necessary. Cruelty often hid behind the language of discipline.
But the abuse of discipline does not make discipline abusive.
A child who never learns to wait is not being liberated. A child who cannot tolerate frustration is not being protected. A child whose every impulse is explained, softened, renamed, or excused is not being prepared for freedom. He is being left alone with appetites stronger than his judgment.
That is not a moral slogan. It is close to what one of the strongest longitudinal studies in the world found.
“A child who never learns to wait is not being liberated. A child who cannot tolerate frustration is not being protected.”
In 2011, Terrie Moffitt, Avshalom Caspi, and their colleagues published a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences titled “A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth, and public safety.” The paper drew on the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study, a cohort of 1,037 people born in Dunedin, New Zealand in 1972–73 and followed from birth to age 32 with 96 percent retention. That retention matters. The study did not simply track the easy cases and lose the troubled ones. It kept nearly the whole cohort in view.
The researchers did not build their argument from one marshmallow-test moment either. They measured childhood self-control across the first decade of life using reports from researcher-observers, teachers, parents, and the children themselves at ages 3, 5, 7, 9, and 11. Those measures were combined into a reliable composite. Later, at age 32, the researchers assessed adult health, substance dependence, finances, and criminal conviction using physical examinations, laboratory tests, clinical interviews, informant reports, and official conviction records.
The results were not subtle.
Children with poorer self-control were more likely as adults to have worse physical health, more substance-dependence problems, weaker finances, and criminal convictions. The researchers found these associations even after accounting for childhood IQ and social class. They also checked the problem from another angle, using a second longitudinal cohort of British sibling pairs. In same-gender sibling pairs, the five-year-old with poorer self-control was more likely by age 12 to smoke, perform poorly in school, and engage in antisocial behaviour, despite both siblings sharing the same family background. That does not eliminate every possible confound, but it makes the “this is just class background” dismissal much harder to sustain.
The financial findings are especially concrete. By age 32, adults who had shown poorer self-control as children were less financially planning orientated, less likely to save, less likely to have built assets such as home ownership, investment funds, or retirement plans, and more likely to report money-management difficulties and credit problems. People who knew them well also rated them as poorer money managers.
The criminal-conviction result was just as direct. By age 32, 24 percent of the cohort had been convicted of a crime in New Zealand or Australia. Children with poor self-control were more likely to have a criminal conviction, even after accounting for social class and IQ.
The gradient is the part that should make parents, teachers, and policymakers pause. This was not only a story about the worst-behaved children at the bottom. The pattern survived two useful stress tests: it remained after the authors removed children diagnosed with ADHD, and it remained after they removed the least self-controlled fifth of the cohort. In other words, this was not only a story about clinical impairment or the most difficult children in the room. Self-control mattered across the distribution. More of it was generally associated with better outcomes; less of it with worse ones.
That should change how we talk about discipline.
We have spent years teaching adults to be suspicious of correction. We are told to notice the wound beneath the behaviour, the unmet need beneath the disruption, the social condition beneath the failure. Fine. Often there is a wound. Often there is an unmet need. Often there is a social condition. But noticing those things does not remove the child’s need to develop the capacity to wait, persist, recover, plan, and say no to himself.
The best trauma-informed approaches already understand this: compassion and self-command are not enemies. A child’s distress may explain why self-control is difficult; it does not make self-control unnecessary.
The Dunedin paper gives a colder version of what good parents and teachers used to know by instinct. Self-control is practical equipment. It is not merely about being pleasant in class or convenient at the dinner table. It is part of how a person gets through life without being governed by every passing appetite, insult, temptation, panic, advertisement, algorithm, or peer demand.
The study also shows how the damage can accumulate. Children with poorer self-control were more likely to encounter what the authors called adolescent “snares”: smoking by age 15, leaving school early without qualifications, and unplanned teenage parenthood. Those snares then partly explained later adult outcomes in health, wealth, and crime. Not all of the connection disappeared, but some of it did. That matters because it gives the abstract trait a concrete pathway. Poor self-control does not ruin a life in one dramatic scene. It narrows options through repeated collisions with temptation, frustration, and short horizons.
“A society that stops teaching self-control does not produce freer children. It produces children governed by whatever impulse reaches them first.”
This is where modern institutions often get the balance wrong. They are very good at naming distress and very nervous about forming character. They can identify barriers, labels, diagnoses, inequities, triggers, and contexts. Some of that work is useful. But children also need adults who will help them do hard things before hard things become catastrophic.
The child who waits through the boring part of rehearsal is not merely obeying. He is learning that the future can make claims on the present. The student who revises the paragraph again instead of throwing the pencil down is not being oppressed. She is practising frustration tolerance. The teenager who learns not to answer every insult, chase every appetite, spend every dollar, or quit every difficult task is acquiring something more durable than self-esteem.
This is not a call for cruelty. It is a call for formation.
Self-control is teachable only when adults believe they are allowed to teach it. That means expectations. It means consequences. It means repetition. It means letting children experience small frustrations before life supplies larger ones. It means refusing the sentimental lie that every demand placed on a child is a threat to that child’s authenticity.
A society that stops teaching self-control does not produce freer children. It produces children governed by whatever impulse reaches them first.
There are limits to what this study proves, and they should be stated clearly. The Dunedin paper is observational and correlational. It does not prove that self-control alone causes adult success or failure, or that it matters more than poverty, family stability, trauma, school quality, intelligence, disability, or luck. It does not endorse one magic classroom program. The authors also note that natural improvements in self-control over time are not the same thing as intervention-induced change. But those limits do not erase the finding: childhood self-control predicted adult outcomes across health, wealth, and public safety; those associations remained after accounting for IQ and social class; sibling comparisons pointed in the same direction; and children who became more self-controlled from childhood to young adulthood had better outcomes by age 32.
That is enough to take seriously.
We do not need to pretend children are doomed by age three. We do need to stop pretending self-control is optional. Children are not born ready for freedom. They are prepared for it by adults willing to require something from them before the world does.
The question is whether that formation will come from parents, teachers, coaches, conductors, and mentors who love children enough to help them master themselves, or from commercial and digital systems that profit when they never learn how.
References
Moffitt, Terrie E., Louise Arseneault, Daniel Belsky, Nigel Dickson, Robert J. Hancox, HonaLee Harrington, Renate Houts, Richie Poulton, Brent W. Roberts, Stephen Ross, Malcolm R. Sears, W. Murray Thomson, and Avshalom Caspi. “A Gradient of Childhood Self-Control Predicts Health, Wealth, and Public Safety.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, no. 7 (2011): 2693–2698.
https://dunedinstudy.otago.ac.nz/files/1651629222231.pdf
Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study. “About the Dunedin Study.” University of Otago.
https://dunedinstudy.otago.ac.nz/
Glossary
Dunedin Study
A long-running research project following a group of people born in Dunedin, New Zealand in 1972–73. The self-control paper discussed here uses data from that cohort through age 32.
Longitudinal study
A study that follows the same people over time. This is stronger than asking adults to remember their childhoods, because researchers can compare early measurements with later outcomes.
Self-control
In the paper, this refers to capacities such as delaying gratification, regulating frustration, controlling impulses, persisting with tasks, and thinking before acting. It does not simply mean obedience.
Gradient
A pattern where outcomes change step by step across a range. In this study, adult outcomes generally improved as childhood self-control increased, rather than only changing at the very bottom of the self-control scale.
IQ and social class controls
A statistical method used to test whether self-control still predicts later outcomes after accounting for childhood intelligence and family background. In this study, it did.
Cohort
A group of people studied together. Here, the Dunedin cohort means the 1,037 children born in Dunedin during the study’s birth window.
Retention rate
The percentage of original study participants who remain in the study over time. The Dunedin paper reported 96 percent retention by age 32, which is unusually high.
Adolescent snares
The paper’s term for teenage experiences that can trap or narrow future options, including early smoking, leaving school without qualifications, and unplanned teenage parenthood.
Correlation
A relationship between two things. Correlation means two things move together, but it does not automatically prove that one causes the other.
Intervention
A deliberate program or action designed to change an outcome. The paper suggests self-control may be worth improving but does not prove that any one school or parenting program will work.
Some children are genuinely vulnerable, atypical, or distressed, and they deserve careful support.
That should be easy to say. It should also be the beginning of the conversation, not the end of it.
The problem starts when a narrow duty of care is expanded into a broad teaching mandate. Support for a small number of children becomes a reason to saturate schools, children’s media, and online spaces with contested identity frameworks. What begins as accommodation becomes doctrine. What begins as care becomes a general lens for everyone.
That is the central move.
It is usually framed in soft language: inclusion, visibility, affirmation, making room. Sometimes that language is fair. But it can also hide a scope change. A real minority need is used to justify population-level exposure. The existence of some children who need unusual support does not, by itself, justify turning child-facing institutions into delivery systems for anti-normative identity scripts many children are not developmentally ready to evaluate.
Put simply: support is not the same thing as saturation.
A useful heuristic is the inoculation model. The implicit argument often sounds like this: expose everyone early and often to the framework so harm is prevented later. But that assumes the framework is age-appropriate, conceptually clear, and socially harmless when applied at scale. Those assumptions are usually asserted, not argued.
You can see the pattern in school frameworks like SOGI 123. SOGI 123 describes itself as an initiative to help educators make schools safer and more inclusive for students of all sexual orientations and gender identities, with tools spanning policy, school culture, and teaching resources. In British Columbia, SOGI 123 has been broadly integrated through educator networks and district participation structures. In Alberta, similar SOGI 123 resources and supports exist and are used, but public acceptance and implementation have been more contested and uneven. (Your local framing here is fine; if you want, we can add a specific Alberta anchor in the next pass.)
The point is not that every teacher using these materials has radical intentions. Most likely do not. The point is structural. A framework introduced in the name of protecting a minority of vulnerable students can become a general lens for shaping the environment of all students. That is exactly where support turns into saturation.
None of this requires pretending there are no benefits. Anti-bullying frameworks and school supports can reduce harassment and improve school climate for vulnerable students, and in some cases for other students as well. Recent SOGI 123 evaluation reporting in B.C. has explicitly claimed reductions in some forms of bullying and sexual-orientation discrimination, including effects observed for heterosexual students in studied schools. But that is a different question from whether a framework is well-bounded, developmentally fitted, and appropriate as a general lens for all children. A program can produce some good outcomes and still be overextended in scope.
This is also where ordinary parents often feel morally cornered. They are told the framework is simply about kindness and safety. Then they discover it also carries contested claims about identity, norms, and development. When they raise questions about age, fit, or timing, the objection is treated as hostility rather than prudence.
That rhetorical move matters. It is how debate gets shut down.
Some activist frameworks are not just asking for tolerance or non-harassment. They are more ambitious. They treat ordinary social norms as presumptively suspect—or as things to be actively challenged—rather than mostly inherited and refined. Adults can debate that in adult spaces. The problem is when those frameworks are translated into child guidance and presented as common sense before children are developmentally ready to sort through the concepts.
You do not need a graduate seminar to see the issue. Children imitate. Children seek belonging. Children absorb prestige cues. Children are shaped by what trusted adults celebrate. That is not bigotry. That is basic reality.
This is why developmental fit matters. Children do not process abstract identity questions the way adults do. Identity formation is gradual. Social context matters. Timing matters. Adult authority matters. Age appropriateness is not a slogan; it shifts across developmental stages, and what may be discussable at 16 is not automatically suitable at 6. When institutions present contested frameworks in a celebratory register first and a cautionary register later (or never), adults should worry.
The usual public binary is false. The choice is not between cruelty and total affirmation. It is not between neglect and ideological immersion. A sane society can do both things at once: provide targeted support for the children who truly need it, while refusing to reorganize the symbolic environment of all children around contested anti-normative frameworks.
That is not repression. It is proportion.
And proportion is exactly what gets lost when every concern is moralized and every request for limits is treated as harm.
We should be able to say, plainly, that some children need exceptional care without turning exceptional cases into the template for everyone else. We should be able to protect the vulnerable few without swamping the many. We should be able to teach kindness without requiring ideological inoculation.
If we cannot make those distinctions, then we are not practicing compassion. We are practicing scope creep with moral language.
Support for vulnerable students is necessary. But targeted care is not the same as saturating schools with contested identity frameworks for all children.
References
- SOGI 123 / SOGI Education. “SOGI 123 | Making Schools Safer and More Inclusive for All Students.”
https://www.sogieducation.org/ (SOGI 123) - SOGI Education. “What Is SOGI 123?”
https://www.sogieducation.org/question/what-is-sogi-123/
(official explainer page) - SOGI Education. “British Columbia.”
https://www.sogieducation.org/our-work/where-we-support/british-columbia/
(B.C. implementation / network context) - ARC Foundation. “UBC Evaluation of SOGI 123 (October 2024).”
https://www.arcfoundation.ca/ubc-evaluation-sogi-123-october-2024
(evaluation / outcomes framing from SOGI-supportive side) - Alberta Teachers’ Association. “What is SOGI 123?”
https://teachers.ab.ca/news/what-sogi-123 (teachers.ab.ca) - Keenan, H., and Lil Miss Hot Mess. “Drag Pedagogy: The Playful Practice of Queer Imagination in Early Childhood.” Curriculum Inquiry 51, no. 5 (2021): 578–594.
https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2020.1864621 - Gender Report (opinion/critical perspective). “We need to take ideological gender rhetoric out of education.” (Jan. 28, 2021).
https://genderreport.ca/sogi-gender-curriculum-queer-theory/ (CANADIAN GENDER REPORT) - Global News. “Duelling protests held in Edmonton over sexual orientation and gender identity policies in schools” (Sept. 20, 2024).
https://globalnews.ca/news/10766483/edmonton-gender-identity-sexual-orientation-alberta-schools/ (Global News)
Many thanks to Courage is a Habit on “X”.
“Strong parenting is fundamentally about exclusion, and the imposition of boundaries becomes paramount.
From the moment our children are born, it is our duty as parents to build formidable barriers that protect their growth and development. We do not welcome inclusion; we embrace exclusion. Newborns, delicate and defenseless, require a fortress against the tumultuous outside world. We rigorously limit the number of individuals permitted to hold them, acknowledging the necessity of a controlled environment that minimizes potential health risks.
As these beautiful tiny beings evolve into crawling explorers, our parenting role transforms into a vigilant act of exclusion – shielding them from the lurking dangers of electrical sockets, sharp edges, household hazards, and countless other items they want to put into their mouths.
The trajectory of parenthood traces a deliberate expansion of boundaries, mirroring the child’s burgeoning independence. With every developmental stage, our responsibility as parents pivots towards a meticulous curation of the influences that shape their world. The friends they choose, the content they consume, and the food they ingest all fall under the scrutiny of our discerning oversight.
Friendships In the realm of friendships, we guide them towards relationships that instill confidence and personal growth. By cultivating a discerning approach to friendships, we foster an environment that nurtures values that reflect those within our family.
Social Media In the digital era, where a deluge of information bombards impressionable minds, the imperative of exclusion becomes even more pronounced. We assume the role of gatekeepers, wielding control over the content they consume. In a world teeming with both constructive and detrimental influences, setting firm boundaries on screen time, online interactions, and the nature of digital content is critical to sculpting responsible, discerning individuals.
Food The practice of exclusion extends decisively to dietary habits, where we vigorously steer our children away from the insidious allure of junk food and sugar. By instilling a profound appreciation for nutritious choices, we not only contribute to their physical well-being but also lay the groundwork for enduring habits that transcend a lifetime.
Embrace Exclusion In essence, strong parenting asserts itself through a resolute rejection of inclusion for its own sake. While love and support remain foundational, the imposition of unwavering boundaries becomes the scaffolding that empowers our children to navigate, learn, and flourish within the safety of predefined limits.
Strong parenting has always been about exclusion, not inclusion. Never let anyone, especially government school employees, guilt you into accepting “inclusion”.
Those who cannot respect parental boundaries never have good intentions for children.”
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
Your opinions…