/Relationships

There is a silent crisis settling into middle-class families. Not hunger, not war. It is young people reaching adulthood without knowing how to handle almost anything. And parents, by being too present, never let them learn. Anxiety, difficulty coping with frustration, inability to resolve conflict, emotional dependency. These are the diagnoses appearing more and more in young people between 15 and 28. The question dividing experts, and that will divide anyone who reads this, is simple: where does all of this come from? There is an enormous difference between showing affection and overprotecting. Giving love is essential, everyone agrees on that. But preventing your child from feeling any discomfort is something else entirely. In practice, it is a form of emotional neglect disguised as care. And it is perhaps the hardest form to identify, precisely because it looks like love. When a mother calls the school to sort out a conflict her son had with a classmate, when a father does his daughter's university assignment because she is under pressure, when parents never let their child face the consequences of their own choices, they are raising adults who do not know how to live in the real world. A world that will not treat them with the same softness. There is a concept in psychology called external locus of control. In plain language: it is when a person believes that whatever happens to them always depends on outside forces, never on themselves. It is the young person who blames the teacher, the boss, the system, everyone else. Always someone else. This pattern appears very frequently in people who were overprotected in childhood. Because they never had the real experience of acting and seeing the consequences of that action. A child who never learned to lose does not know how to be an adult. And an adult who never learned to lose becomes a problem, for themselves and for everyone around them. Now, here is where it gets uncomfortable. There are patterns of parental behavior that cause real psychological harm, even when done with love. There is the father or mother who sees their child as an extension of themselves. The child's success is their success. The child's failure is a threat to their identity. The young person grows up not knowing where they end and where the other person begins, and that has serious consequences for relationships and for how they see themselves. There is the anxious parent, who without meaning to sends the child the message that the world is dangerous and that they cannot face it alone. Studies following families over years have shown that children of parents with untreated anxiety are two to three times more likely to develop the same problems. Anxiety, in this sense, is almost contagious within a household. And there is the absent parent who compensates with gifts. This is perhaps the most common. Presence is replaced by consumption. The result is a generation that learned to manage emotions through external things, shopping, social media, validation from strangers online. When I started reading about this topic, what surprised me most was realizing that the problem is not parents who do not love their children. It is parents who love in a way that never lets them grow. The ability to identify and manage what we feel, sometimes called emotional literacy, is not something we are born with. It is taught. And it is taught mainly at home, in everyday conversations, in difficult moments. When parents dismiss a child's emotions, when they say "stop crying over that" or "it is nothing serious," or when they simply fix the problem before the child can process it, they are cutting that process off at the root. A young person who cannot name what they feel cannot ask for help. Cannot communicate in relationships. Cannot calm themselves when things go wrong. And they will look elsewhere for what they never learned to do from within: in isolation, in substances, in risky behaviors, or in an intense emotional dependency on other people just to feel whole. Mental health in young people is not solved by therapy alone, even though therapy helps enormously. It is solved, largely, by parents willing to look at themselves honestly. To heal their own wounds. To understand that protecting a child from all pain is not love. It is fear. And a parent's fear should not become their child's destiny. There are open questions here that have no simple answer. Do parents today overprotect because the world is genuinely more demanding, or because they never learned to tolerate their child's discomfort? What looks like overprotection in a wealthy family is completely different from what happens in a family struggling to survive. And blaming only parents ignores real factors like social media designed to addict, an education system that does not teach emotional regulation, and inequality that generates constant pressure. But it is also true that parents with untreated mental health issues repeat patterns from generation to generation, often without realizing it. That giving everything materially while giving nothing emotionally is still a form of neglect. And that a child has the right to develop autonomy. That is not abandonment. That is respect. Were your parents too protective, or not enough? And where do you draw the line? Leave your thoughts in the comments. This conversation needs to happen.