The Value of Ordinary Difficulty in Childhood Development
My uncle fell out of a mango tree at nine and broke his arm in two places. Nobody sued the tree. There was no incident report, no family meeting, no follow-up email. He got a cast, a scolding, and a month later he was back up the same tree, only better at it.
I thought about that last week when a friend sent me a photo of her son’s new school playground here in Bangkok. Rubber flooring. Every corner rounded. A climbing frame roughly the height of a kitchen counter. It looked less like a playground than a very expensive apology.
And she wasn’t wrong to want it. That’s the part that makes this worth writing about.
Some Difficulty Beats None
The usual story about the generation raised in the sixties and seventies is that they were hardened by hardship. I don’t think that’s quite it. The more interesting claim is that they were tempered by ordinary difficulty—the low-grade, unmanaged, nobody-is-coming kind.
Research supports this perspective. A large longitudinal study by Mark Seery and colleagues at the University at Buffalo and UC Irvine tracked a national sample over several years and found something counterintuitive: people who had lived through a moderate amount of lifetime adversity reported better mental health than those with either a great deal of adversity or none at all.
This U-shaped relationship suggests that too much difficulty can overwhelm an individual, while no difficulty leaves them untested and unprepared. The middle ground appears to foster resilience and personal growth.
Seery himself cautioned that this research is correlational—no one can ethically assign traumatic experiences to test the theory directly. However, he emphasized that while the study focused on major adversity, it’s plausible that smaller, everyday challenges contribute similarly to building resilience.
What Actually Disappeared
This idea becomes tangible when looking at childhood independence over recent decades. In 1971, about 80% of seven and eight-year-olds in England were allowed to walk to school unaccompanied. By 1990, that figure had plummeted to just 9%, according to a follow-up study by Mayer Hillman and colleagues.
This drastic change is not about trauma or danger, but about the loss of countless small decisions and challenges children once faced daily: choosing a route, navigating weather, handling bullying, or deciding when to speak up. These are the micro-problems that help children develop problem-solving skills and confidence.
Peter Gray, a psychologist at Boston College, has argued extensively that the decline in free, unsupervised play parallels a rise in anxiety and depression among young people. His research highlights the concept of locus of control—the belief in whether one’s actions influence life outcomes. Over the latter half of the twentieth century, children’s sense of control shifted towards feeling governed by external forces rather than themselves.
Gray’s thesis is clear: without opportunities to manage challenges independently, children cannot develop a sense of agency.
I Am Not Romanticising 1974
It’s important to acknowledge the other side of this argument. Nostalgia for the past can be misleading. The 1970s also featured dangerous realities: no seatbelts, leaded petrol, casual violence in schools, and a culture that often ignored children’s suffering at home. Many elements of today’s safety culture have indisputably saved lives and improved well-being.
The problem is that in removing real dangers, we also removed everyday friction—the kind of difficulties that help children learn resilience. These are different issues, but they were addressed with the same blanket approach.
I grew up in Manila in the 1990s, experiencing this transition firsthand. Later, boarding school in Australia taught me that sometimes you are on your own, like when I forgot my sports kit and no one was going to bring it to me. That small lesson in self-reliance stuck with me.
Risk and Danger Are Not the Same Word
This distinction is crucial. Danger means hazards a child cannot recognize or evaluate—like broken glass in a sandbox or a gap in a fence leading to a busy road. These must be removed.
Risk, on the other hand, is something a child can perceive, assess, and decide to engage with or avoid. Examples include climbing higher on a tree, going further on a bike, or handling tools that might pinch. A systematic review led by Mariana Brussoni at the University of British Columbia examined 21 studies on risky outdoor play and found broadly positive effects on physical activity and social behavior, with no clear evidence of increased injury rates.
Children, when given chances, are surprisingly adept at assessing risk.
What This Looks Like on a Tuesday
Applying these lessons doesn’t require adopting a formal philosophy. Mostly, it means resisting the urge to intervene immediately and excessively.
Let children make their own phone calls. Let them order their own food. Let them resolve disputes with friends without parental drafting of texts. Let them experience mild failures without smoothing over the discomfort by the evening.
The easy path is to create a fully solved world for children. The generous and ultimately more beneficial path is to hand them a slightly unsolved one and stay nearby for support.
My uncle is in his seventies now. Still climbs things he shouldn’t.
