The generation of parents who let their children walk home alone, settle their own playground disputes, and sit with the sting of a failed test without rushing in to fix it were doing something that developmental psychology has spent decades trying to reverse-engineer. They weren’t following a parenting philosophy. Most of them would have been puzzled by the term “helicopter parent” because the concept of hovering over a child’s experience simply hadn’t occurred to them. And yet, the psychological architecture they were building in their children turns out to be one of the most reliable predictors of adult resilience we have.

I’ve been thinking about this because of a conversation I had a few weeks ago with Margaret, 59, an operations consultant I’ve known for about eight years here in Singapore. We were having dinner near Tanjong Pagar, and she mentioned something about her grandson in Melbourne. He’s seven. His school had recently sent home a guide for parents on “emotional scaffolding strategies” during homework time. Margaret read it twice, then set it down and said: “When I was seven, my father told me the stove was hot. I touched it anyway. He watched me cry, handed me a cold cloth, and said ‘now you know.’ That was the entire curriculum.”

That sentence has stayed with me.

The construct nobody talks about

American psychologist Julian Rotter developed the concept of locus of control in the 1950s, describing it as the degree to which a person perceives outcomes as contingent on their own actions versus determined by external forces. People with an internal locus of control believe their choices shape their lives. People with an external locus of control believe life happens to them: luck, fate, powerful others, systems beyond their influence.

Rotter’s framework emerged from social learning theory, and research suggests his 1966 monograph became one of the most cited publications in personality psychology. What made his work so durable was its predictive power. Internal locus of control has been linked, across decades of subsequent research, to greater resilience, lower rates of depression, stronger academic and professional achievement, and more adaptive coping under stress. Research suggests external locus of control correlates with learned helplessness, passivity, and a vulnerability to anxiety that compounds over time.

The mechanism is deceptively simple. When a child reaches for something hot and gets burned, and an adult doesn’t intervene to prevent the burn or catastrophize after it happens, the child encodes a specific lesson: my actions have consequences, and I can learn from them. Repeat that pattern across hundreds of small failures and recoveries throughout childhood, and you get an adult who instinctively believes they have agency. They don’t freeze when things go wrong. They problem-solve. They recover.

When a parent intercepts every potential failure, cushioning the child from discomfort before it lands, the child encodes a different lesson: the world is dangerous, I can’t handle it alone, and someone else needs to manage my experience for me. That child grows into an adult who looks outward for rescue. Who waits for permission. Who apologizes before stating a preference.

What the 1960s accidentally got right

I don’t want to romanticize a decade. The 1960s produced plenty of neglect that was genuinely harmful, emotionally absent fathers, mothers trapped in roles they didn’t choose, and a cultural silence around childhood suffering that left real scars. Writers on this site have explored how emotional distance in fathers gets misread for decades before a child can see the complexity underneath.

But within the ordinary, functional households of that era, something specific was happening that we’ve largely abandoned. Children were expected to navigate boredom, conflict, failure, and physical discomfort without adult mediation. A kid who forgot their lunch went hungry until dinner. A kid who picked a fight with the wrong person learned, viscerally, about miscalculation. A kid who didn’t study failed the test and sat with the shame of it.

None of this was designed. It was simply the default. Parents had neither the time, the cultural expectation, nor the psychological vocabulary to intervene in every micro-experience of their child’s day. And the result, accidentally, was a generation that developed a robust sense that their own behavior mattered. That they could affect outcomes. That failure was information, not identity.

Over nearly two decades of building companies across multiple countries, I’ve watched this pattern play out in professional settings with striking consistency. The people I’ve worked with who recover fastest from failure, who adapt when plans collapse, who don’t spiral into victimhood when things go wrong, tend to share a common quality. They believe, at a bone-deep level, that what they do affects what happens next. That’s internal locus of control. And almost invariably, when I ask them about their childhood, they describe parents who let them fall.

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The overcorrection

The shift began with good intentions. Attachment research from John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth demonstrated that secure attachment to caregivers produces healthier emotional development. That finding was real and important. But somewhere between Bowlby’s original insight and the parenting culture of the 2010s, “secure attachment” got translated into “constant intervention.” Responsiveness to a child’s emotional needs became indistinguishable from preventing a child from ever experiencing distress.

The result is what a Forbes analysis described when examining Rotter’s framework in contemporary professional contexts: a growing population of adults who perceive outcomes as controlled by forces outside themselves. Who struggle with dissatisfaction at work because they feel powerless to change their circumstances. Who default to blame, anxiety, or paralysis when facing setbacks their childhood never equipped them to metabolize.

I don’t mean this as generational warfare. Every generation inherits the overcorrection of the one before. Many 1960s parents who let their kids figure things out may have been reacting to the authoritarian rigidity of the 1940s and 1950s. Today’s interventionist parents are reacting to what they perceived as emotional neglect in their own upbringing. The pendulum keeps swinging. But the psychological evidence suggests the sweet spot is closer to where the pendulum was in the 1960s than where it is now.

The cost nobody calculates

Here’s what I keep coming back to. When you rescue a child from a consequence, you’re not just solving a problem. You’re communicating something about their capacity. You’re telling them, through your behavior, that they cannot handle this. That the world is too much for them. That they need you standing between them and reality.

A child who receives that message enough times internalizes it. And then, twenty or thirty years later, they sit across from a therapist and say some version of: “I don’t know why I can’t make decisions. I don’t know why I’m so afraid of getting things wrong. I don’t know why I feel like I need permission to live my life.”

The answer is often that nobody ever let them practice. Nobody let them touch the stove.

Margaret told me something else that evening that I’ve been turning over since. She said her grandson’s parents (her daughter and son-in-law, both in their mid-thirties) are terrified of damaging him. They read everything. They attend workshops. They have a family therapist. And yet, Margaret said, the boy can’t tie his shoes without asking if he’s doing it right. He checks his mother’s face before answering any question. He has, at seven, already learned that his own judgment isn’t to be trusted.

“They love him so much they’ve made him afraid of himself,” she said.

I know they mean well. That’s precisely what makes this so difficult to discuss. The parents doing this aren’t cruel or lazy. They’re often the most devoted, most informed, most psychologically literate parents in history. They’ve simply confused protecting a child’s feelings with protecting a child’s development. And those two things, it turns out, often work in opposite directions.

What I’ve started noticing

My partner and I have a whippet. She’s a simple creature in the best sense. When she encounters something unfamiliar on our morning walks near Boat Quay, she approaches it, sniffs it, sometimes startles, and then she recalibrates. Nobody rushes in to reassure her. Nobody removes the unfamiliar object. She figures it out, and then the next time she encounters it, she’s less afraid.

I realize I’m comparing a dog to a child, and I know the analogy breaks down quickly. But there’s something in that basic loop: encounter, discomfort, recovery, learning. That loop is where internal confidence gets built. Every time you complete that loop, you encode a small piece of evidence that you can handle things. Interrupt the loop enough times, and the evidence never accumulates.

Research on laughter in father-child relationships has even shown that shared laughter between fathers and children builds secure attachment in ways distinct from maternal bonding, suggesting that the playful, slightly rougher, slightly less protective engagement style traditionally associated with fathers may serve a specific developmental function. The father who lets a child stumble during roughhousing, then laughs with them as they get back up, is building something. The message is: you fell, and it was fine, and we’re both still here.

I’ve written before about the weight of being the last person who remembers a certain version of your childhood. Part of that weight, I think, comes from knowing that the world those memories describe no longer exists. A world where a kid could walk to the corner store alone at eight. Where falling off a bike and bleeding was a Tuesday, not a trauma. Where parents loved their children fiercely and also, crucially, left them alone long enough to discover what they were made of.

That world built something in people. Something we’re now spending enormous therapeutic resources trying to reconstruct in adults who never got the chance to develop it naturally.

Internal locus of control. The quiet, unglamorous belief that what you do matters. That you can handle what comes. That you don’t need someone standing between you and the full weight of your own life.

Margaret’s father, with his cold cloth and his three-word curriculum, understood something it’s taken psychology sixty years to articulate. Sometimes the most loving thing you can do for a child is let the stove be hot.