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Parents today spend more time with their children than at any point in recent history, yet childhood anxiety and depression are surging. How could more parental attention produce more fragile kids?
In a recent article in Open Inquiry in Mental Health, clinical psychologists Camilo Ortiz and Matthew Fastman argue that intensive parenting—what’s commonly called helicopter parenting—is a major contributor. By shielding children from manageable challenges, well-meaning parents deprive them of the very experiences they need to build competence, confidence, and emotional resilience (Ortiz & Fastman, 2025).
Ortiz and Fastman document the clinical problem convincingly. But their article raises a deeper question: Why does shielding children from manageable challenges do so much damage? The answer comes into focus when you consider what kind of world the developing brain was actually designed for.
Designed to Explore
For more than 95% of our species’ evolutionary history, children grew up with a degree of independence that would alarm any modern parent. In hunter-gatherer societies—the social ecology in which our developmental psychology was forged—children as young as three routinely joined mixed-age peer groups, explored their environments, and navigated physical risks with minimal adult oversight (Konner, 2005). These patterns persist today across most non-industrialized societies (Lancy, 2015), suggesting that the intensively supervised model of childhood is the historical anomaly, not the other way around.
Through free play and independent exploration, children naturally dose themselves with manageable amounts of fear: climbing a little too high, wandering a little too far, negotiating a conflict without an adult stepping in. In doing so, they practice regulating the negative emotions that accompany those experiences (Gray, 2011). Each small fear encountered and survived updates the child’s sense of what they can handle. Remove those opportunities, and you remove the training ground through which emotional resilience is built. By preventing this process, parents deprive children’s brains of experiences needed to build tolerance for discomfort.
Why Parents Overprotect
So why do parents keep stepping in? Ortiz and Fastman point to a pattern called parental accommodation, in which parents modify their behavior to help their child avoid anxiety-related distress, a pattern that is nearly universal among parents of anxious children (Lebowitz et al., 2013). The parent feels the spike of anxiety, steps in, and feels immediate relief. The child’s anxiety drops briefly, too, but then comes back stronger because the child never got the chance to find out the fear was overblown.
Our threat-detection systems evolved for environments where children regularly encountered genuine physical dangers and where parental vigilance was often lifesaving. But in many of today’s safest environments where intensive parenting is most common, that same threat-detection machinery has expanded well beyond real hazards, to social awkwardness, minor academic setbacks, and everyday discomfort (Sandseter & Kennair, 2011).
Breaking the Cycle
To solve this issue, Ortiz and Fastman highlight two evidence-based approaches: exposure therapy, which involves gradually facing feared situations to recalibrate anxiety, and SPACE (Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions), which targets parental accommodation directly.
But their most intriguing suggestion is Independence-Focused Therapy (IFT), which leans directly into children’s evolved desire for autonomy. In IFT, children choose “independence activities”—riding a bike to the park alone, shopping for groceries, taking a train—and they do them without parental involvement. Rather than confronting a child’s specific fear, IFT builds general competence through experiences of genuine independence. Early data suggest it reduces anxiety broadly, even for fears unrelated to the specific activities (Ortiz & Fastman, 2024).
Large empirical studies haven’t yet been published, but IFT is theorized to work because it re-creates something like the developmental conditions our brains evolved for, conditions in which children regularly did things on their own, felt the manageable thrum of uncertainty, and discovered they could handle it.
Now if only we could learn to let them.
