The risk of never becoming comfortable with risk (and developing the resilience that comes with doing so).
Parents hover so closely, and offer their advice so readily, because they understandably want to save their children from the pain of failure. They may worry that a scary or painful experience will make their children more skittish about risks in the future. Certainly, a very traumatic experience can scar a kid for life, but failures that fall short of that — as the vast majority do — actually have the very opposite effect.
Research by Ellen Sandseter reports that “injurious falls from heights between ages 5 and 9 were associated with the absence of height fear at age 18” and “that the amount of separation experiences before age nine correlated negatively with separation anxiety symptoms at age 18.” From this and similar data, Sandseter concludes that rather than “scary” experiences making children more anxious, they actually habituate and desensitize children to risks and failure, providing what she calls an “anti-phobic” or “inoculation” effect.
Even when the risk a child takes has a negative result, they find that the consequence was really not so bad. When a kid falls off his bike and scrapes his knee, he learns that it hurts, but not for long. Time heals all wounds and some wounds don’t need much time to heal. Consequently, he gets back on the bike with a knowledge that scraped knees are no big deal and not something to excessively fear. He becomes inoculated against future anxiety in this area, and becomes a more resilient kid.
In the absence of these kinds of firsthand experiences with risks — and this goes not only for the physical kind, but financial, academic, emotional, and social too — fears can begin to loom ever larger in the imagination, until they become paralyzing phobias. Without exposure to the minor bumps, scrapes, and setbacks that come with taking risks, children don’t become habituated to them and learn the coping mechanisms necessary to confidently and rationally assess and manage risk. They lose the ability to distinguish the dangerous from that which is simply unfamiliar. They fail to gain a deep, intrinsic understanding of just how powerful their potential for resilience really is.
The result is excessively risk averse and neurotic adults who shrink from taking on any task they’re not already sure they’ll succeed at, and who fall apart when beset with failure; as Sandseter posits, “our fear of children being harmed by mostly harmless injuries may result in more fearful children and increased levels of psychopathology.” And in fact, mental disorders, from depression to anxiety, have been on the rise amongst young adults — perhaps for this very reason.
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