The Rescue That Feels Like Love
I was thirteen when my parents put me on a plane to a boarding school in Australia. Week three, I rang home from a payphone in a corridor that smelled of floor polish and told my mother I wanted to come back to Manila. I had it all worked out. There was a flight on Friday.
She said no.
Then she asked what I’d eaten that day, and whether the boy in the next bed was still snoring. She stayed on that phone until my coins ran out. An email arrived the following Tuesday. Another one the Tuesday after that. Nobody came to get me. Nobody left me to sit with it by myself, either.
I’m in my late thirties now and my parents are still the first two calls I make when something goes sideways. It took me an embarrassingly long time to work out why. They were reliably there without ever taking the problem off my hands.
When Overparenting Does Harm
There’s a growing body of research showing that parents who intervene excessively—often called “overparenting”—can unintentionally harm their children’s long-term emotional health and family relationships. Chris Segrin and his team at the University of Arizona surveyed 538 parent and young-adult-child pairs and found that overparenting correlated with poorer communication quality and lower overall family satisfaction. Further, it indirectly predicted a heightened sense of entitlement among grown children.
Similarly, a study involving nearly 300 undergraduates linked over-controlling parenting with increased depression and lower life satisfaction. The researchers traced these outcomes to unmet needs for independence and competence. These findings, while correlational, repeatedly suggest that parents who clear every obstacle for their children risk creating more distant and less resilient relationships.
Small Disappointments Are the Cheap Ones
One useful way to think about parental support is through the lens of “disappointment currency.” Small setbacks in childhood—like missing a birthday party or losing a friendship—are low-cost experiences that prepare children for bigger challenges later on, such as job loss or emotional hardship.
Having managed a small restaurant group for years, I witnessed this firsthand. During interviews, kitchen staff who had never faced real setbacks often froze or took criticism personally, while those who had experienced disappointments handled pressure calmly and effectively. This aligns with Segrin’s findings that overparenting is linked to less effective coping strategies in adulthood, including emotional suppression and withdrawal (Segrin et al., 2013).
They’re Reading Your Face, Not Your Lecture
Stanford psychologists Kyla Haimovitz and Carol Dweck investigated how children develop beliefs about their own abilities. Contrary to expectations, children weren’t influenced by their parents’ verbal messages about intelligence but rather by their parents’ emotional reactions to failure (Haimovitz & Dweck, 2016).
Parents who treated setbacks as learning opportunities had children who believed ability could grow with effort. Conversely, parents who showed visible anxiety or disappointment led children to believe ability was fixed and simply measured by success or failure. This research highlights that the tone and emotional presence of parents in moments of failure communicate more than any resilience speech.
Struggle Is Not the Same as Being Left Alone
Encouraging children to struggle does not mean abandoning them. Attachment theory distinguishes between a caregiver as a secure base and a safe haven. The secure base enables children to explore, while the safe haven provides comfort when things go wrong. Both are essential. Without a safe haven, a child may explore but feel emotionally unmoored.
John Gottman’s research further shows that parents who recognize and validate a child’s negative emotions—naming feelings and sitting with them—help their children develop better emotional regulation (Gottman et al., 1997). Ignoring or rushing past emotions yields poorer outcomes.
Educational psychologist David Wood and colleagues coined the term “scaffolding” to describe balanced support: the caregiver holds the parts of a task too difficult for the child, enabling them to manage what they can, and gradually withdraws support as competence grows (Wood, Bruner & Ross, 1976). The withdrawal of support is often the hardest part for parents but is critical for fostering independence.
What This Looks Like on a Tuesday
Practical communication can make all the difference. Asking a simple question like, “Do you want help or do you want company?” respects the child’s autonomy while offering support.
It also helps to name the child’s feelings aloud and then pause, resisting the urge to immediately problem-solve or lecture. Children have already internalized the lesson; turning their struggle into a teaching moment can feel dismissive.
Finally, letting small setbacks remain small—forgotten homework, a lost match, a party they weren’t invited to—teaches resilience by not inflating minor disappointments into crises.
My mother never explained any of this to me. She simply refused to book the flight home and then emailed me every week for five years. I still have every one of those emails, saved in an account I’ve never closed, and I ring her on Sundays.
For more insights on why parents who let their children struggle with small disappointments earn genuine appreciation in adulthood, read more here.
