Our Biggest Resilience Mistake

ISSUE 1 | TERM 3 | 2026

By Dr Justin Coulson

It’s a quiet Tuesday. I’m pushing my granddaughter on a swing at the local park.

Nearby, a group of older kids piled onto one of those big dish-shaped swings – the kind designed for several children at once. It snaps under the combined weight of five teen boys too big for a kiddy swing.

It was unintentional, but final. The boys looked at me guiltily and began trying to fix it. I suggested they leave it. I explained that “a half-repaired swing is more dangerous than a broken one”. They nodded and moved on.

A few minutes later, two young girls – probably aged about four – wandered over to investigate. One of them wanted a turn. She couldn’t work out what had happened, but instead of giving up, she disappeared and came back with a friend – and a piece of rope. (I have no idea where they found the rope, but it was long enough and in great condition.)

The two girls crouched down together, studying the mechanism, trying to reconnect what had broken. I watched on, absorbed. They had no idea what they were doing. But they were completely alive and engrossed in the problem.

After about five minutes one of the girls’ dads arrived. He took one look at the situation and stepped in to help. Within about thirty seconds, both girls had stepped back. Then they drifted away. Then they were gone.

He thought he was being helpful. What he’d actually done was take the problem away from them.

That’s the tension at the heart of parenting young children. Our instinct to help – which comes entirely from love – can subtly rob our kids of the very experiences that build them.

Antifragile

Nassim Taleb is a statistician and philosopher who thinks about risk and uncertainty. He identifies three kinds of systems:

Fragile ones – the type that break under pressure.
Resilient ones – the kind that absorb a shock and return to where they were.
Antifragile ones – which use stress as fuel. They don’t just survive difficulty. They grow because of it.

Most of us are trying to raise resilient kids. Taleb invites a more interesting question: what if we aimed higher?

We just never see it

Fragility rarely announces itself. A child whose parents have smoothed every conflict, intervened in every struggle, and removed every meaningful obstacle can look perfectly capable – right up until the moment they aren’t. The problem isn’t that these kids lack love or support. It’s that they’ve never had the chance to build internal architecture for stress.

When difficulty finally arrives – and it always does – they have no practiced response. Weakness was never allowed to become strength.

Resilience versus antifragility

Resilience means returning to baseline. It’s recovery. It’s important, and we should cultivate it. But antifragility is the capacity to be changed by hard experiences in ways that leave you better equipped, not merely restored.

A child who can’t get the puzzle piece to fit, who tips the block tower and watches it fall, who negotiates over a toy with another child without an adult stepping in; that child is not just getting through it. They’re learning about persistence, about frustration, about problem-solving, in ways no amount of coaching from the sideline could teach. The difficulty was the lesson.

Presence without rescue

This doesn’t mean leaving young children to struggle alone, or treating every hard moment as a teaching opportunity to be narrated and managed. This is not a “toughen up” message. Chronic stress without support is damaging, not developmental.

The antifragile environment is one where a child encounters age-appropriate difficulty and knows they’re not alone in it.

The parent’s – or educator’s – role shifts from problem-solver to context-setter. You’re not fixing the situation. You’re providing the secure base from which they can engage with it themselves.

That might mean watching a toddler wrestle with a stuck lid rather than opening it for them. Letting two three-year-olds negotiate over the same toy rather than immediately moderating. Sitting with a child who is frustrated rather than redirecting them away from the frustration. You’re nearby, not in between.

The children who adapt when things don’t go to plan, who try again after something falls apart, who bring a friend and a piece of rope and have a go anyway are rarely the ones who had everything smoothed out for them. They’re the ones whose small struggles counted for something. Who felt the weight of a problem, and discovered they could carry it.

Those two little girls at the park didn’t fix the swing. But they were completely, joyfully alive in the attempt. Until the moment they weren’t… because someone arrived to do it for them.

The most important thing we can offer children in the early years isn’t solutions. It’s the experience of their own capability.

Learning and Teaching

Term 3 Overviews