Parents Should Support Rather Than Rescue Children From Ordinary Disappointment to Build Resilience
Source: "Stop rescuing your kids from disappointment. You're doing them no favors | Fox News." October 24, 2026. www.foxnews.com
The Gist
The author says parents shouldn't swoop in to fix every disappointment their kids face, like not getting invited to a party. Kids build resilience by feeling bad, coping, and finding their own solutions, and constant rescuing teaches them they can't handle things. Parents should acknowledge the feeling, hold back from fixing it, and help kids think through what to do next.
Conclusion
Parents should stop reflexively rescuing their children from ordinary disappointments and instead validate their feelings while letting them work through the problems themselves, because this builds resilience and long-term mental health.
Premises
- Mental health is based not on the absence of negative emotions but on the ability to handle them.
- Resilience and competence develop through practice and experience, which requires encountering manageable challenges and the real possibility of failure.
- Children cannot learn to recover from disappointment if they never get the chance to feel it.
- When parents repeatedly intervene to solve their children's problems, they signal that the children cannot handle things without them, undermining self-efficacy.
- Constant rescuing also reinforces avoidance (children learn that unpleasant emotions are intolerable) and creates unrealistic expectations that the world will accommodate their preferences.
- Modern culture pathologizes ordinary negative experiences (sadness as depression, meanness as bullying, frustration as dysregulation), which pressures parents to intervene rather than let life unfold.
- Reflexively removing demands prioritizes short-term relief over long-term growth.
Assumptions
- The disappointments at issue are ordinary and manageable (e.g., social exclusion from a party), not serious harms, abuse, or clinical disorders.
- Children's coping skills develop primarily through unassisted experience of adversity, rather than through other routes such as modeling or direct teaching.
- Parental intervention in the form of rescuing typically signals incompetence to the child and is not neutral or beneficial.
- Parents are currently over-intervening at a meaningful, widespread rate (the 'default to the phone call').
- Short-term emotional relief and long-term growth are in tension, so the trade-off must be made in favor of growth.
- Validating feelings and asking guiding questions is sufficient support for most ordinary disappointments.