My Job as a Parent Is to Make My Kids’ Lives a Little Harder

Lately, I’ve been trying to make life harder for my children. Or rather, I’m trying to stop making it easier. When they encounter an obstacle, I resist the urge to intervene: to fit the puzzle pieces together for my red-faced toddler, or help him clamber up a playground ladder; to conjure up a constant stream of activities to fill my kindergartener’s weekend afternoons, or at least let her watch TV. I let them struggle with the existential question of how to pass the time, which in human history has only recently been derailed by a culture of insistent parental attention and now the grasping clutches of stultifying technology.

After decades of parents letting their children roam neighbourhoods in unsupervised packs, the 1990s saw parenting norms shift toward “intensive parenting,” marked by high levels of involvement and constant engagement; letting your kids have a modicum of independence became a sign of negligence. Parents started shadowing their toddlers around the playground; at birthday parties, there are often more adults than kids; and children are increasingly deposited at school by car.

The pressure to do these things, as a parent, is ubiquitous and deeply internalized. Helicopter parenting—hovering anxiously over your children, in person and by surveilling their devices—can feel obligatory when everyone else is doing it. Bulldozer parents knock over perceived obstacles in their child’s way, intervening with everyone from teachers who give out tough homework assignments to other kids on the playground who aren’t taking turns. These actions are the product of love, but also anxiety: we want our kids to be happy and safe, and we also want to be perceived by our fellow parents as responsible and engaged.

Each individual act of intervention, each minor adjustment you make to your child’s path that prevents them from a meltdown or a disappointment, can feel like the right move. But in the long run, experts warn that these controlling practices may hinder healthy emotional and psychological development. And as technology has seeped into every aspect of our lives, screens are there to soothe and distract, fulfilling the expectation set by parents of constant intervention.

Increasingly, I am convinced that an inability to confront even a moment of boredom, discomfort, or frustration without self-soothing through screen or sensory distraction has ruined the best minds of my generation. But there’s still hope for kids—and maybe it requires us doing less for them instead of more. I’ve turned my attention to a particular coping method: obstacle parenting.

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Obstacle parenting is making things slightly more difficult for my kids than they need to be, and letting them figure it out. My kindergartener is interested in computer games, so we let her play them—not on an iPad but on a 1997 Macintosh. Her interest in Lemmings or SimTower lasts less than half an hour before she gets frustrated or bored; these games, released more than three decades ago, were not designed to be wildly addictive or hold her attention forever, and they’re not particularly easy for a five-year-old to master. But slowly, she’s getting better at them. I don’t want the games to be flashier or faster; I don’t want them to enrich her or educate her or even simply entertain her. I just want her to figure something out by herself, especially if it’s hard or boring.

Jonathan Haidt, a New York University professor and author of The Anxious Generation, has argued that social media has sparked a “great rewiring of childhood,” which has led to an explosion of mental illness and suffering among teens and young adults in recent years. Haidt has linked this shift—away from childhood freedom and exploration, toward structure and supervision—to the crisis among youth, who he argues are deprived of real-world opportunities to explore without their parents and develop confidence and self-reliance. Instead, they’re at home, staring at their phones.

In Canada, those aged fifteen to twenty-four are the loneliest age cohort; around one in five teens who rated their mental health positively in 2019 no longer felt that way by 2023. Teenagers are less likely to have sex or do drugs these days, a development that also reflects the fact that they spend far less time with their peers than they used to. No one disputes that there is a crisis, though Haidt’s conclusion—that social media is to blame—has been widely critiqued. In Nature, Candice L. Odgers, a University of California, Irvine professor specializing in child mental health, argues that existing research does not support the claim that social media causes mental health issues; rather, youth with mental health issues use these platforms differently.

Whether or not one is convinced by Haidt’s theory, it’s not feasible to ask parents to keep devices out of their kids’ hands forever, nor has abstinence ever been a particularly effective strategy for harm reduction of any kind. Over the past few years, many jurisdictions across Canada, including the Vancouver School Board last year, implemented bans on phones in classrooms. Patti Bacchus, a former school board chair of the VSB, called bans like these a “1960s solution to a 2023 problem.” “I would rather educate and make students become critical thinkers,” she told the CBC, pointing out that such policies place an additional burden on teachers who are already stretched thin. It’s possible to think that restricting addictive items in educational settings is probably a good thing—you can’t smoke in high schools anymore either—and also believe that there has to be something more effective than simply removing the screen.

As Kathryn Jezer-Morton wrote in The Cut, the difference between 2025 and the halcyon 1990s “isn’t that everyone was more laid-back then about unstructured time. It’s that unstructured time itself was possible without being swallowed by the screens’ gaping maws.” It’s an apt metaphor; the screen swallows everything else if you don’t resist it. Rachel Kushner, writing about her teenage son Remy’s passion for building hotrods in Harper’s, notes that none of his peers appreciate his car; only the security guard at his high school does. He tells her that kids these days don’t have hobbies. “Why is that?” Kushner asks him, and he answers: “The internet.”

Enter generative AI, the ultimate black hole for curiosity. With each new study about the ruinous effects of generative AI, I become more disturbed by the future of utter technological dependence that looms before my own young children. In high schools and universities, students are using tools like ChatGPT to do their assignments and write their essays, bypassing learning, creativity, and critical thinking in the process. A recent study led by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientist found that use of large language models (LLMs), a type of AI that powers ChatGPT, for writing has “potential cognitive costs”: over four months, the researchers found that subjects using LLMs “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioural levels.”

Even more depressing is the fact that many young people understand these tools are bad for them, and use them regardless: a survey of 423 Canadian students found 59 percent were using AI for their schoolwork, despite a majority of these users saying they weren’t learning as much, and that they felt as though they were cheating. Another poll, of US adults aged eighteen to twenty-seven, found that nearly half wished the social media platforms they use, like Twitter and TikTok, had never been invented. In a recent New York Magazine story about ChatGPT use, a first-year university student in Ontario said she thought she might be addicted to ChatGPT and social media. Her habitual use of both had created a bleak cycle: to compensate for watching hours of TikTok videos (“until my eyes start hurting”) instead of doing schoolwork, she would use AI to hastily complete her essays. For many users, these apps are not tools; they are traps.

Of course, technology is always evolving, and I know that by the time my kids are teenagers, there will be many new addictive, ruinous platforms to worry about. That’s not to say my kids are exempt from the grasping reach of AI; just recently, Mattel, the maker of Barbie and Hot Wheels, announced a “strategic collaboration” with OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, to “bring the magic of AI to age-appropriate play experiences.” But the specifics of technology are less worrisome than what it exploits and reveals: a dearth of curiosity, an unwillingness to rise to challenges, a lack of self-confidence. These aren’t innate qualities; they are cultivated, partly through our well-intentioned efforts to help our kids at every step.

Each new generation of parents has attempted to correct the mistakes of generations past. Sometimes this is good in a straightforward way—the invention of car seats, for example, and the decline of spanking—but it also feels often like we are being offered marketing in lieu of certainty, as new trends arise to soothe the persistent, existential anxieties of parenting. Baby-led weaning can prevent picky eating and obesity; gentle parenting can teach them to manage their child’s emotions. These strategies suggest that the solution lies in more parental involvement and participation. Obstacle parenting is a different tack, one that only requires me to stand between them and whatever technology seeks to dull their senses; the goal is simply that they learn they can use their own brains to handle the challenges or problems that arise.

I’m far from the only parent to think of this. In The Atlantic, Rheana Murray chronicles the collective efforts of a group of parents in Portland, Maine, to install landlines for their children to use for scheduling and conversation. “Very rarely do we ask kids to be still and communicate,” one parent explained. Nor do we give them enough freedom to move independently, though cities around the world are trying to change that by building adventure playgrounds designed for riskier, more imaginative play. The narrow tunnel slides and climbing structures of some of these newer designs, including sθәqәlxenәm ts’exwts’áxwi7 (Rainbow Park) in Vancouver, make it harder for parents to climb after their kids. You have to let them figure it out.

I n essence, obstacle parenting is about cultivating focus and endurance, two skills lost in the outsourcing and immediacy of newer technologies. The effort of those parents installing landlines succeeds because it’s collective, and a reminder that we didn’t always rely entirely on parents to nurture their own children. There was an expectation of a wider community to support adults: friends and relatives, neighbours and teenage babysitters. But we also let kids have more access to their peers, without mediating or closely supervising every interaction. Structural interventions, like the riskier playgrounds, help too; they’re a physical reminder that parents shouldn’t be expected to figure all of this out on their own. The decline of third spaces is a collective problem; so are unsafe streets that make the prospect of letting your child walk to school alone prohibitively terrifying.

Obstacle parenting isn’t just about kids confronting physical challenges. I see it more as an exercise in parental restraint, leaving my kids alone when they’re focused; telling them to wait a few minutes if they ask me for help and seeing if they can find a solution alone; allowing myself to be surprised at what they can create or imagine without my prompting.

However, now I need to confront the question of what to do with myself when I’m giving them space. And if we want our kids to resist the siren song of tech, we need to demonstrate that it’s possible. This is where many adults, even those of us who find it easy to set limits on our children’s screen time, struggle most. In part, this is due to the fact that my phone has come to serve so many essential functions in my life. But whether I am working, scheduling a doctor’s appointment, responding to a loved one’s critical update, or reading a Wikipedia summary of a horror movie, all my kids see is me staring into my phone. In a perfect imitation of my own incessant gesture, my younger child could swipe my phone to open the camera before he could walk. The real challenge of obstacle parenting is not about tackling my children’s tech exposure, but my own.

On a recent flight from Toronto to Vancouver with my daughter, I realized we would be travelling screen-free whether I liked it or not; my phone was almost dead, and I needed the last gasp of battery power to call my husband for a ride when we arrived. But we had a colouring book, a sketch pad, and a pack of pencil crayons, which carried us through most of the flight. We drew pictures together and made up word games, chatting about our favourite parts of the trip, discussing the best way to draw a horse: legs first or head?

Four hours into the flight, I walked down the darkened aisle to the bathroom at the rear of the plane; it seemed like every silent face, adult and child, was lit by the glow of a screen. I returned to my seat. Our games were exhausted. “I’m bored,” my daughter said. “Sometimes you have to be bored,” I replied. We opened the window to look at the clouds outside. She leaned on my shoulder, and we waited together to land.