How to Raise an Adult

01Why Good Intentions Create Fragile Adults

It is entirely natural to want the absolute best for our children, shielding them from pain and smoothing their path to success in an increasingly unpredictable world. However, an overwhelming desire to protect and propel them forward is inadvertently stripping them of the very survival skills they need to thrive. When Julie Lythcott-Haims served as the Dean of Freshmen at Stanford University, she began to notice a deeply troubling trend among the incoming classes. These were some of the brightest, most accomplished young people on the entire planet, boasting flawless grade point averages, perfect standardized test scores, and resumes packed with extraordinary extracurricular achievements. On paper, they were absolute perfection. Yet, in person, many of them were remarkably incapable of handling the basic tasks of daily living. They were brilliant young minds who did not know how to resolve a minor disagreement with a roommate, how to navigate a setback on a mid-term exam, or even how to ask a professor a simple question during office hours. When faced with these minor bumps in the road, these highly intelligent students would inevitably do the exact same thing: they would pull out their smartphones and call their parents to fix the situation. This phenomenon is what we now commonly refer to as helicopter parenting, though it has evolved into something even more intense—the concierge parent. The concierge parent does not just hover; they actively manage, schedule, curate, and intervene in every aspect of their child's existence. They are the ones tracking assignment deadlines on school portals, editing history essays late into the night, and calling college administrators to complain about a less-than-stellar grade. While this level of intense involvement is almost always born out of deep, unconditional love and a genuine desire to see the child succeed, it creates a devastating invisible harm. We are essentially sending our children the underlying message that they are simply not capable of handling their own lives without our constant supervision and intervention. To understand how we arrived at this highly anxious state of parenting, we have to look back at the cultural shifts that occurred over the last few decades. In the 1980s, the concept of "stranger danger" began to dominate the evening news, plastering the faces of missing children on milk cartons and terrifying parents into keeping their kids permanently under lock and key. At the exact same time, the self-esteem movement gained massive traction, convincing educators and parents alike that children needed constant praise and protection from any form of emotional discomfort in order to grow up healthy. Fast forward to today, and we have an entire generation of parents who view their children as fragile projects that need to be carefully managed and shielded from the harsh realities of the world. We stopped letting them walk to school, we stopped letting them play outside without adult supervision, and we completely took over the management of their social and academic lives. The tragic irony of this intense oversight is that by trying to ensure their ultimate success, we are actively destroying their self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is a fundamental psychological concept; it is the deep, internalized belief that "I can figure this out." It is the core foundation of true self-confidence. You cannot hand a child self-efficacy on a silver platter, and you certainly cannot buy it for them with expensive tutors or private coaches. Self-efficacy is only earned through the messy, often frustrating process of trying something, failing, making adjustments, and eventually succeeding on one's own. When we cut a teenager's meat for them—metaphorically or literally—we are robbing them of the opportunity to develop the very competence they will desperately need when they eventually leave our homes. We have to start asking ourselves some difficult questions. When was the last time we let our children struggle with a trivial problem without instantly jumping in to offer the solution? Our intentions are undeniably pure, but we must recognize that constantly acting as a snowplow to clear their path is ultimately leaving them profoundly vulnerable to the realities of adulthood.