Our kids are covered in bubble wrap

WITH the long summer holidays stretched out before us, here's a question to ponder. Are we breeding a Princess and the Pea generation of children? Like the delicate princess in Hans Christian Andersen's fairytale whose physical sensitivity stretches to feeling a pea under 20 mattresses and 20 featherbeds, our children are being cocooned from the first sign of physical discomfort.

Driven by the best of intentions, we are also cosseting children from emotional discomfort. Life in a bubble of self-esteem built by loving parents for a young child may seem like a proper shield from the harsher edges of reality. Until the bubble bursts in later years when those children-turned-teenagers-turned-adults are greeted by the real world. Maybe we are not doing our kids any favours by protecting them so much. Just maybe we are actually doing them some harm.

Playgrounds are now so safe they are no fun. Little schoolgirls are instructed not to run down a hill in case they fall over. Enormous gyms are now padded wall-to-wall, whereas only a few years ago kids were trusted to work out how to avoid brick walls.

School sport is cancelled at the first drop of rain, leading my astute 11-year-old son to remark that the dirtiest he gets at school is when he spills his chocolate milk on his shirt during lunch.

Then, a few weeks later, I find myself sewing up the pockets of my 17-year-old daughter's basketball shorts because she has been instructed by sports teachers that open pockets are a danger on the basketball court.

Trying to gauge the danger posed by an open pocket is not easy. But then so many of these "princess rules" that apply to our children are nonsensical. Likewise, trying to protect kids from intellectual and emotional distress is not always sensible. In the "all must have prizes" era, merit cards are awarded to children by well-meaning teachers for the most mundane things. At the age of five or six, my son received a merit card "for spelling approximations". How brilliant he was for mastering a word with so many syllables! Alas, "spelling approximations" meant he spelled other, much shorter words close enough to the correct spelling to earn a merit card at his well-meaning "all must have prizes" school.

Any suggestion that we should not always protect children from harm or guard them from the anguish of failure will be met with howls of derision. Inevitably, schools have a stack of well-intentioned mattresses called rules because parents increasingly expect and demand that their children are protected from all and every form of discomfort.

Invariably, the schools hand out merit cards to all their young charges because parents demand their child be marked as brilliant from a young age. And why shouldn't parents do their utmost to protect their children and boost their self-esteem?

As parents, we muddle through trying to do our very best. There are only a few certainties. First, a plethora of well-meaning parenting books say a hundred different things. The books, if we read them at all, pull us this way and that. Intuitively, all we know is that rearing a child is a great privilege, yet an onerous responsibility, exasperating yet uniquely rewarding, exhausting yet exhilarating, emotionally and physically draining, yet heart-warming and heart-stirring, frightening at times, hysterically funny at others.

The second certainty we learn early on is that each child is idiosyncratically, brilliantly and frustratingly different from any other, thus rendering any how-to-raise-a-child book doubly useless. Regrettably, yet magically, there is no generic way to raise a child.

That said, a piece in The Atlantic Monthly, How to Land Your Kid in Therapy by Lori Gottlieb, makes for compulsive reading if you're a parent.

Gottlieb, a psychotherapist and mother, started to meet patients who shouldn't have been in her office. They were young and healthy, well-educated, good jobs, great apartments, plenty of friends and close to their parents. But time and again they presented to Gottlieb as feeling "adrift". One 20-something woman was racked with indecision, couldn't sleep at night and felt "less amazing" than her parents had always assured her she was. There was, she said, "a hole inside me". There was no preoccupied father or bossy mother. These young people described their parents as "adoring" and the "best friends in their whole world".

Gottlieb was stumped. Then she delved into the national movement in happiness-seeking where "nowadays, it's not enough to be happy if you can be even happier". She wondered whether as parents, by trying so hard to make our kids happy, by trying to protect them from any kind of discomfort, we are denying them happiness as adults.

Paul Bohn, a psychiatrist at the University of California, Los Angeles, told Gottlieb she was right: Based on what he sees in his practice, Bohn believes many parents will do anything to avoid having their children experience even mild discomfort, anxiety, or disappointment -- "anything less than pleasant", as he puts it -- with the result that when, as adults, they experience the normal frustrations of life, they think something must be terribly wrong.

Call it our "discomfort with discomfort", says Dan Kindlon, a child psychologist and lecturer at Harvard. Kindlon tells Gottlieb that if kids are prevented from experiencing distress, they won't develop "psychological immunity". A small child needs to be able to fall over and get back up on their own before parents rush in with comfort. As Gottlieb writes, the child then learns "that was scary for a second, but I'm OK now. If something unpleasant happens, I can get through it."

Instead of parents ringing up schools to complain about their kids missing out on the top cricket team, children need to learn failure. If they don't learn at an early age, Kindlon says, "by the time they're teenagers, they have no experience with hardship. Civilisation is about adapting to less than perfect situations, yet parents often have this instantaneous reaction to unpleasantness, which is 'I can fix this'."

And we need to encourage earned accomplishments. Narcissism can be cute and harmless in a three-year-old, Gottlieb says, but it becomes a real problem when, as young adults, away from parents and teachers, the young adult doesn't get constant praise for their brilliance.

Gottlieb's piece is filled with the best advice parents will find. Read it here. And then relax. Realising that it may be better not to fix everything for our children is liberating for us and for them. With summer holidays upon us, let your child get into a few scrapes.