We’ve handled our kids with kid gloves for too long. We’re raising little wusses | Opinion

Objectively speaking, young adults and children have it really good these days.

Compared to 100 years ago when their days were filled with school, chores, and even hard jobs. History suggests even though crime was higher than it is now, kids were often left unsupervised to play on weekends from dawn to dusk because parents were busy working or surviving the Great Depression.

Despite their access to mind-blowing technology, relative wealth — poverty has declined significantly since the 1960s — and quality education, the irony is that the confluence of these has created a generation of children unable to handle stress, disappointment and fear. This does not bode well for them, or the rest of us.

Perhaps you are familiar with this quote from author G. Michael Hopf: “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.” It’s hard not to look at our current society, with its cushy conveniences from smartphones to DoorDash, remote work and stimulus checks, and think we might be nearing the end of the cycle Hopf warns about.

A closer look at the health of our young adults and kids suggests as much.

Young adults are struggling with mental health. Even before the pandemic, studies show anxiety in children had been steadily increasing. A generation ago, the biggest issue at stake for a college student was how best to pay for school and where to find the right life partner.

Now, some young adults who were in college in 2016 required safe rooms and coloring books to help soothe their anxiety over the fact that they didn’t like the president. It’s one thing to be worried about your physical safety when moving to a new college town; it’s another to be unable to regulate the uncomfortable emotions politics can elicit.

A KQED article about this topic sums the problem and solution up well: “Psychologists have directly connected a lack of resilience and independence to the growth of mental health problems and psychiatric disorders in young adults and say that short cycles of stress or conflict are not only not harmful, they are essential to human development. But modern childhood, for a variety of reasons, provides few opportunities for kids to practice those skills.”

It’s become such a problem that classes akin to “Adulting 101” are proliferating on college campuses. This is likely because young people weren’t taught at home how to function.

In a study under review on risk, Americans were asked to describe a dangerous experience. They cited relatively normal occurrences, such as being outside alone. Their peers from other countries like Russia cited events such as witnessing a violent fight on public transportation, something that’s actually scary.

In other words, American students have a terrible risk threshold, or even a risk assessor. Experts have chalked this up to low autonomy in childhood, which can translate later into low efficacy and then stress.

Clinical psychologist Camilo Ortiz, a professor at Long Island University-Post, says kids experience less of the “four Ds” — discomfort, distress, disappointment and danger — than they used to because their parents, who have great intentions, deprive them of the chance to have these feelings.

After reading about this story and researching similar studies, I asked myself where my four kids, who range in age from 9-15 years-old, fall on the scale of autonomy and independence. How do they handle those four Ds?

My eldest has been doing more activities after school with friends, like going to a football game. However, most of my anxiety was assuaged by the fact that he had a cell phone on him and could reach me if needed.

We live about a block and a half from a gas station. My 13-year-old loves to walk there and come back with a treat, probably to get a break from her younger siblings. I’ve let her do it and warned her to stay aware of her surroundings and be vigilant.

I still worry. When I was a kid, I regularly biked to a Tom Thumb several blocks away — sans cell phone, of course — and I don’t recall my mother or I being worried. Have the times changed or the parents? Probably both.

They say the traits we admire most about adults — resilience, independence, courage, and compassion — are often forged in those people during hard times in previous years, even in childhood. Yet as parents, we want to keep our kids from feeling pain, even if it produces resilience. There’s such an awareness of trauma now, and parents, rightfully, want to prevent it so badly, perhaps they are overcompensating. As such, they’re also preventing kids from feeling uncomfortable or distressed and overcoming it.

After reading about how incompetent and anxious young people are, maybe it’s time to loosen the reins a bit and remove the bubble wrap, piece by piece.