When Did Struggling Become Something We’re Supposed to Avoid?

I spend a lot of time talking with parents who want their children to feel good. Of course they do. We want our children to be happy, confident, successful, included, and capable.

When something hurts them, we want to make it better. When they are anxious, we want to reassure them. When they are frustrated, we want to help. And when we see an obstacle coming, almost every instinct we have tells us to move it out of the way.

There is something deeply human about that. But over the years, I have found myself wondering whether, in our understandable desire to protect children from unnecessary pain, we have sometimes begun treating struggle itself as the problem.

A child is frustrated by a difficult assignment, and we jump in. A teenager is nervous about having an uncomfortable conversation, and we help find a way around it. A child forgets something important at home, and we're halfway to school with it before they have had time to figure out what to do. They don't know what to say to the coach, the teacher, or the friend, so we begin writing the script.

None of these things is inherently wrong. Sometimes stepping in is exactly what a child needs. Sometimes the assignment really is too difficult, the anxiety is too great, or the situation requires an adult. Parenting would be much easier if there were a simple rule telling us when to help and when to stand back.

There isn't.

What I have come to believe, though, is that sometimes the struggle itself is where something important is happening.

The uncomfortable space between “I can't” and “I did”

There is a particular moment that can be remarkably difficult for adults to watch: the moment when a child doesn't yet know what to do. They are frustrated. They may complain or insist they can't do it. They may look at us with that expression that says, Please make this easier.

And very often, we can.

Adults have experience, perspective, language, calendars, executive functioning, and authority. We can often solve in thirty seconds what might take a child thirty minutes to work through. But efficiency isn't always the goal. Sometimes a child needs the experience of being uncertain for a while, trying something that doesn't work, regrouping, asking for appropriate help, tolerating some frustration, and eventually discovering that they can move forward even when they don't immediately know how.

I think this is one of the places where genuine confidence develops. We often talk about confidence as though children need to feel confident before they can do something difficult. We reassure them: You can do this. You've got this. And encouragement certainly has its place.

But much of real confidence develops in the opposite direction. We do something difficult while feeling unsure. We tolerate the discomfort. We discover that the feeling of I don't know if I can do this doesn't necessarily mean that we can't.

Confidence doesn't always come before we do hard things. Sometimes it grows because we did them.

Support isn't the same as rescue

This becomes more complicated when a child genuinely has a harder time with something than other children do. A child with ADHD may need more external structure. A child with a learning difference may need instruction delivered differently. An anxious child may need support approaching something that feels threatening. A child whose executive functioning is still developing may need an adult beside them while they learn to plan, organize, remember, or get started.

I am a great believer in support. Much of my work has been devoted to helping adults understand how to provide it well. But support and rescue aren't the same thing.

Good support doesn't necessarily remove the challenge. Often, it makes the challenge manageable enough that the child can remain engaged with it. Instead of asking, How can I make this go away? we can ask, What does this child need in order to keep going?

Sometimes that means breaking something into smaller pieces, providing structure, teaching a missing skill, or helping with the first step. Sometimes it means sitting nearby without taking over. Sometimes it means helping a child figure out what to say rather than saying it for them. And sometimes, absolutely, it means stepping in.

The challenge is knowing which is which.

This is why I've never been particularly comfortable with advice that simply tells parents to “let them struggle” or “let them fail.” Not all struggle is useful, and failure is not automatically character-building. A child who is drowning academically doesn't become resilient because we let them keep drowning. A child who is repeatedly humiliated, chronically overwhelmed, or asked to do something without the skills necessary to do it may not be learning perseverance at all. They may be learning that they are incapable.

There is an important difference between productive struggle and overwhelming struggle. Productive struggle stretches us while leaving some pathway forward. The challenge is real, but so is the possibility of working through it. When the demand consistently exceeds what a person can manage, the lesson may become something very different: I can't do this. Something is wrong with me. There is no point in trying.

So perhaps the better question isn't whether we should allow children to struggle. It's this:

How much support does this child need to stay in the struggle without being consumed by it?

That amount changes constantly. What a six-year-old needs from us should not be exactly what a sixteen-year-old needs. Two children of the same age may need very different levels of support. And the same child may need substantial help in one area while being perfectly capable of navigating another independently.

As children grow, what once required us to do something for them can gradually become something we do with them, then something we prompt from the sidelines, and eventually something they can manage on their own. The goal isn't independence at all costs. The goal is growth.

What a butterfly can teach us about struggle

There is a reason I keep thinking about butterflies when I think about all of this.

Before becoming a butterfly, a caterpillar forms a protected place where an extraordinary transformation can occur. Butterflies form a chrysalis; many moths surround themselves with a silk cocoon. Inside, the familiar caterpillar disappears from view while an enormous biological transformation takes place.

And then, when that transformation is complete, the butterfly still isn't simply released into the world. It has to emerge.

That process takes effort. When the butterfly first emerges, its wings are small, soft, and crumpled. It must expand them and give them time to harden before it can fly. What looks from the outside like a creature struggling is actually part of a much larger developmental process.

I think about that when we are tempted to make every difficult thing easier for someone we love.

Our instinct is often to open the cocoon. We see the struggle and think, I can help. I can make this faster. I can make this hurt less. I can do this part for you.

Sometimes we should. Human beings are not butterflies, and children should never be left to struggle simply because struggle is supposedly good for them. There are times when the loving and appropriate response is absolutely to intervene.

But there are other times when our intervention can unintentionally remove an experience the person needs to have for themselves: the frustration of trying again, the uncertainty of not knowing immediately what to do, the experience of solving a problem, repairing a mistake, having a difficult conversation, or discovering, after wanting to give up, I can do this.

Perhaps our role isn't always to open the cocoon. Sometimes it is to make sure the cocoon is safe, to stay nearby, to know when help is truly needed, and to recognize when what looks like struggle is actually growth in progress.

We don't outgrow our discomfort with struggle

Of course, none of this ends when childhood does.

Adults avoid struggle all the time. We procrastinate when we aren't sure how to begin. We avoid conversations we know we need to have. We stay in familiar situations because uncertainty is uncomfortable. We abandon things we're not immediately good at. Sometimes we even interpret the feeling this is hard as evidence that this must not be right for me.

Modern life may make this a little more complicated. So much of our world is designed to remove friction, and much of that is wonderful. We can get directions without getting lost, answers without searching very long, food without cooking, entertainment without waiting, and countless small problems solved almost immediately.

I have no desire to make life unnecessarily difficult in the name of building character. But when so much can be made easier, discomfort can begin to feel like evidence that something has gone wrong.

Sometimes it has. And sometimes we're simply in the middle of something hard.

Being able to tell the difference is a skill worth developing at any age.

Maybe the goal isn't to make it easier

When someone we love is struggling, the question that comes naturally is often, How can I make this better? I've come to think there is another question worth asking alongside it: What would help this person move through this?

Those questions can lead us to very different places. Making it better may mean solving the problem. Helping someone move through it may mean offering encouragement, structure, information, perspective, or simply our presence while they figure out what comes next.

For a child, that might sound like, I know this is frustrating. Let's figure out the first part together. For a teenager, it might mean helping them think through how to approach a teacher without sending the email ourselves. For an adult we care about, it may mean resisting the urge to offer a solution before we've even asked what kind of help they want.

Sometimes the most supportive thing we can communicate is simply, I see that this is hard, and I believe you can stay with it.

There is tremendous respect in that message.

I don't want children to struggle for the sake of struggling. I don't want adults to, either. What I want is for us to become better at recognizing which struggles require intervention, which require accommodation, which need support, and which simply need enough time and space to unfold.

Some things can only be learned from the inside. We cannot give another person the experience of discovering, I didn't think I could handle that, but I did. We can encourage them. We can scaffold the experience. We can make sure the challenge is reasonable. We can stand nearby. And when it doesn't go well, we can help them recover and figure out what comes next.

But we can't have the experience for them.

Perhaps that is one of the harder parts of loving someone, especially loving a child. We want so much to protect the people we love from pain that it can be difficult to remember that discomfort and harm are not the same thing.

Sometimes our job is to remove the obstacle. Sometimes our job is to provide a handrail. And sometimes our job is simply to stay close enough that someone knows they don't have to face the hard thing alone.

The challenge is understanding which one is needed.

Understanding changes everything.