When you’re in your 60s now and younger folks ask for advice about handling stress or disappointment, there’s this weird disconnect. They’re looking for strategies, apps, techniques. Meanwhile, we’re sitting there thinking, “You just… deal with it?”

That’s not meant to sound dismissive. It’s genuinely how many of us were wired growing up. And here’s the kicker: psychologists are now saying this wasn’t despite our childhoods but because of them. We weren’t given healthier, more nurturing environments. We were just left alone to figure things out.

The freedom of benign neglect

Remember those long summer days when your parents had no idea where you were from breakfast until dinner? That wasn’t exceptional parenting by today’s standards. It was just Tuesday. Or any other day, really.

Growing up as one of five kids in Ohio, I can tell you firsthand that parental attention was a limited resource. My father worked double shifts at the factory, and my mother had her hands full just keeping everyone fed and clothed. If I had a problem with a kid at school, nobody was scheduling a meeting with the teacher. The assumption was I’d work it out or learn to live with it.

Peter Gray, a psychologist who studies childhood development, notes that “when children are left to manage their own time, they naturally learn how to tolerate frustration.” That rings true. We had hours of unstructured time where boredom was our problem to solve, not our parents’.

Learning resilience through trial and error

Here’s something modern parents might find shocking: we failed constantly as kids, and nobody swooped in to fix it. Forgot your lunch money? You went hungry until you got home. Didn’t study for a test? You dealt with the bad grade. Lost your baseball glove? You figured out how to borrow one or sat out the game.

This wasn’t cruelty. It was just life. Our parents had their own struggles, and cushioning every blow for their kids wasn’t on the agenda or even considered necessary.

I remember sharing a bedroom with two brothers and the constant negotiations over space, privacy, and who got the top bunk. No parent mediated these disputes. We sorted it out ourselves, sometimes peacefully, sometimes not. But we learned something crucial: discomfort doesn’t kill you.

The thing is, when you’re forced to sit with discomfort repeatedly as a child, you develop a kind of emotional callus. Not numbness, but durability. You learn that bad feelings pass, problems eventually resolve, and life goes on whether you’re ready or not.

The unexpected gift of low expectations

Nobody expected childhood to be particularly happy or fulfilling back then. Kids were small people who needed to be fed and kept reasonably safe until they could contribute to the household. Happiness was a nice bonus, not the goal.

Sounds harsh? Maybe. But it also meant we didn’t grow up believing the world owed us constant satisfaction. When things went wrong, we didn’t immediately assume something was broken that needed fixing. Sometimes life just sucked for a while.

Research has found that authoritative parenting in childhood is associated with better physical and mental health in midlife, suggesting that supportive, low-intervention parenting may foster resilience. The key word there is “low-intervention.” Our parents supported us by teaching us to support ourselves.

Why modern adults struggle with what we took for granted

Have you ever watched a younger colleague completely unravel over something you’d consider a minor inconvenience? There’s a reason for that disconnect. They were raised to believe that discomfort is a problem to be immediately solved, preferably by someone else.

When every childhood upset triggers adult intervention, kids never learn their own capacity to endure and overcome. They never discover that they can feel terrible and still function, that they can be scared and still act, that they can fail and still recover.

I survived three corporate restructures in my career. Each time, I watched younger colleagues panic while those of us from my generation just shrugged and adapted. We’d been adapting our whole lives. Change and uncertainty were old friends, not existential threats.

The modern emphasis on protecting children from all distress has created adults who genuinely don’t know they can handle distress. They’ve never had to. Every problem had a solution provided by someone else, every disappointment was cushioned, every failure reframed as a learning opportunity before they could even feel the sting.

The cost and benefit of emotional self-sufficiency

Let me be clear about something: I’m not romanticizing the past. Plenty of kids from my generation could have used more support, more understanding, more intervention. Some of us carry scars from being left to handle things we weren’t equipped for.

But for those of us who made it through relatively intact, we emerged with something invaluable: the deep knowledge that we can handle whatever comes. Not because we’re special or strong, but because we’ve been handling things since we were seven years old and nobody was watching.

This emotional self-sufficiency shows up in small ways every day. We don’t need constant validation. We can be alone with our thoughts. We can make decisions without polling six friends. We can fail without falling apart.

Is this healthier than the modern approach? That’s debatable. But it’s undeniably different, and in a world that seems increasingly fragile and anxious, there might be something to learn from it.

Final thoughts

The irony isn’t lost on me that the generation raised with the least emotional support might be the most emotionally resilient. We weren’t given coping strategies or taught emotional regulation. We just had to cope and regulate.

Today’s parents are trying so hard to give their kids perfect childhoods, to eliminate all suffering and smooth every path. The intention is beautiful. But in removing all tolerance for discomfort, they might be removing the very thing that builds genuine resilience: practice.

Sometimes the best gift you can give a child isn’t protection from difficulty. It’s proof they can survive it.