If you’ve ever watched a toddler take their first wobbly steps, you know the instinct: reach out, steady them, make sure they don’t fall. It’s natural. We want to protect our kids from pain, danger, and failure. But in the last 30 years, that protective instinct has quietly transformed into something else—something that may be doing more harm than good.
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls it safetyism: the over-prioritization of safety—not just physical safety, but emotional safety. It’s the idea that if a child might get hurt, scared, or upset, we should remove the risk entirely. But in doing so, we’ve begun to prepare the road for the child, instead of preparing the child for the road.
The Age We Let Kids Roam
Haidt often asks his audiences a simple question: “At what age were you first allowed to leave the house without an adult? To walk to a friend’s house, go to the park, or run an errand?”
For Gen X and Baby Boomers, the common answer is six years old—first grade. You could ride your bike to the store, explore the neighborhood, or roam the woods with friends. Yes, you might come home with scraped knees or a bee sting, but that was part of growing up.
For Gen Z (born 1996 and later), the answers are strikingly different: 10, 12, even 14 years old. Many spent their entire childhood under near-constant adult supervision, even in safe suburban neighborhoods. The shift happened in the 1990s, fueled by fears of crime (despite falling crime rates) and reinforced by a culture of “better safe than sorry.”
Why Risk Is Necessary
The problem is that children are what Haidt calls antifragile. Like bones or immune systems, they get stronger when exposed to manageable stress. When you protect an antifragile system from all shocks, it actually becomes weaker.
Think about playgrounds. In Britain, some schools have begun adding risk back into play: loose construction materials, tools, climbing structures with real heights. Why? Because risk teaches problem-solving, courage, and resilience. Kids learn to assess danger and adjust their behavior.
Compare that to the ultra-safe, lawyer-approved playgrounds common in the U.S., where every edge is rounded and every surface padded. These may prevent scrapes, but they also prevent kids from learning how to avoid bigger injuries in the future.
As Haidt puts it: “Every day you learn how not to get hurt—or you don’t, and you stay dependent on protection.”
The Emotional Side of Overprotection
Safetyism isn’t just about physical safety. Increasingly, it’s about emotional comfort. The same instinct that keeps kids from climbing trees also shows up in shielding them from uncomfortable ideas, disagreements, or criticism.
But life is full of friction. If we never let young people practice navigating small conflicts, they struggle when they encounter big ones. Anxiety rises. Confidence falls.
This isn’t theoretical—rates of anxiety and depression among young people have tripled since the early 2010s. Haidt links this to two forces: overprotection in childhood and the explosion of social media in adolescence. Without the real-world resilience built through independence and play, online slights and comparisons hit harder.
Preparing the Child for the Road
The alternative to safetyism isn’t neglect—it’s intentional freedom. It’s giving kids the chance to test their limits in age-appropriate ways, to learn that bumps and bruises heal, and to discover that they are more capable than they think.
Here are three simple shifts any parent or educator can make:
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Allow Gradual Independence
Start with short, safe solo outings—walking to a friend’s house, biking around the block—and build up from there. Treat independence like a skill to be learned, not a cliff to be jumped off. -
Reframe Risk as Learning
When your child faces something challenging, resist the urge to jump in immediately. Ask: “What’s your plan?” or “How could you try it another way?” Risk doesn’t have to mean recklessness; it’s a tool for growth. -
Model Calm in the Face of Fear
Kids take cues from us. If we panic at every scraped knee or awkward conversation, they’ll learn to fear those moments too. Show them that discomfort is normal, temporary, and often the doorway to mastery.
The Motto to Remember
One of Haidt’s favorite lines is this:
“Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.”
We can’t pave the world flat or pad every sharp corner. Nor should we try. The road will always have bumps. The goal isn’t to remove them—it’s to raise travelers who can navigate them with skill, courage, and joy.
By trusting kids with more freedom, more responsibility, and yes, more risk, we give them the tools to handle the road ahead—wherever it leads.
