How to Raise Antifragile Kids, According to Experts

Picture this: Your little one, brow knitted in concentration, hoists a leg onto a chair. Until this very moment, grown-up hands have always been ready and waiting to assist with this arduous task. Then, as if in slow motion, the other foot leaves the ground. What do you do? Alleviate the struggle with a boost? Or…wait?

Suppose you’re like Laura Birek, a self-described expert catastrophizer who is descended from a long line of worriers. In that case, you might scan the scene for risks of bodily harm while wicking away beads of sweat. The chair could topple; the limbs could slip. But in reality, the chair stands on a plush patch of grass (not over a snake pit), so there might be a tumble and a few scrapes in the worst-case scenario.

“And he'll learn how to do it for the next time,” says Birek, a mom of two boys, ages 4 and 2. The chair incident was an IRL experience for her, and her first instinct was to intervene, but she actively resisted that urge. “He's not going to be able to move confidently in the world if I'm constantly swooping in trying to keep him safe,” she says.

For parents like Birek, the benefits of stepping back when children are taking on age-appropriate challenges — even though it might cause discomfort for both parent and child
— align with tenets of antifragility. This mindset approach emphasizes leaning into challenges. An antifragile parenting style focuses on building a child’s strength and capabilities by allowing them to overcome obstacles. It follows the adage: “Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.”

Experts have always touted antifragile principles — think about the tolerance-building benefits of tummy time. The parenting style has been gaining widr traction among experts who see a need for it. Raising antifragile kids means finding balance, says Lori Holden, a parent educator from Denver, Colorado and author of Adoption Unfiltered.

“It's not hands-off,” she said. “We don’t want to go so far in protecting them that we prevent them from learning to do things for themselves. But we also don’t want to be too hands-off in situations they don’t yet know how to navigate safely. We’re looking for a Goldilocks space.”

Are Kids Today More Fragile?

To understand antifragile parenting, we must first unpack fragility and ask: Are kids more fragile today?

“I do think we can raise kids who are quite fragile,” says Deborah MacNamara, Ph.D., a clinical counselor at the Neufeld Institute in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Helicopter parenting, the practice of hovering over a child’s every move, gave rise to lawnmower/snowplow parenting — a tendency to clear away obstacles through actions as small as climbing onto a chair or as large as faking college admission credentials for them. According to a 2019 New York Times poll, a significant number of parents reported being involved in the lives of even adult children with regards to everyday tasks like making appointments.

In his six years of coaching high school sports, Eric Bartoszek has seen many different degrees of overly involved parents who, with all the best intentions, seek to remove obstacles and fight battles for their children. As head girls’ basketball coach at Rock Canyon High School in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, he says the most common question he (0r any coach) gets is: Why isn’t my child getting more playing time?

“I think if I say, 'Your kid needs to work on defense,' and the response is, ‘Well, my kid plays the best defense they can — you should just give him or her more playing time,’” Bartoszek says. “I would say it's the opposite of that. Playing time is earned in practice not in games..”

Deloris Jordan set one of the best examples of antifragile parenting when her son Michael (yes, the NBA legend) came home devastated after having failed to make the high school varsity basketball team. She didn't call a meeting with the school's athletic director. She told her son to work harder. If sports are a metaphor for life, the disappointments are just as crucial as the accomplishments.

“You need to face adversity to succeed,” said Bartoszek. “If all you do is win easily and don't experience challenges, you can't learn how to grow.”

Antifragility: The 21st-Century Superpower

Nassim Nicholas Taleb coined the term “antifragile” to explain theories on successful socioeconomic models in his 2012 book, Anifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder. Since its publication, ideas about antifragility have become popular in the military, the sports and fitness industries, and psychology.

Being antifragile, Taleb explains, means gaining strength through adversity. To be antifragile, you need to seek challenges to emerge as a better version of yourself.

“I think it’s the 21st-century superpower,” says Tracy Dennis-Tiwary, Ph.D., a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the City University of New York. “In an ever-changing world with evolving obstacles, the 21st-century skill is going to be uncertainty and distress tolerance and the ability to problem-solve when uncomfortable.”

Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.

Suppose change and uncertainty, as the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, are the only constant. What happens when parents continually remove obstacles from kids' paths?

“As we try to protect our kids, we're actually preventing them from building those skills,” Dr. Dennis-Tiwary says.

How to Raise Antifragile Kids

First, an acknowledgement: Raising kids is hard. In the trenches of modern parenting, amid the cross-fire of conflicting advice and trends, we can feel as if we're losing the battle against stress and guilt.

“I don't think our culture supports and lends enough confidence to parents,” says Deborah MacNamara, Ph.D., clinical counselor and developmentalist.

But the key to antifragile parenting is to do less — not more — for children.

“You can't be at their beck and call all the time. That's not really showing them what the world is going to be like,” Holden says. “So, part of what we need to teach them is how to navigate the world as it is.”

In Holden’s home with adult children, she calls the process “gradually turning over the reins.” It sounds a lot like thinking out loud. When her kids were ready to learn to drive, the first lessons were to listen to Holden narrate her decision-making while behind the wheel. This fall, her 20-year-old son left home for college after a summer spent with a few check-ins — not handholding — about financial aid.

“We don't rescue them," Holden says. "We don't solve it for them. We narrate our own thoughts about it, so that they can hear us solving the problem, age-appropriately, of course."

Other parenting philosophies focus on the parent, but antifragile parenting spotlights the child. Who do you want your child to be? How can you get them to that goal? The good news is that a person can become antifragile at any age.

“It's within us as parents to adapt and to learn,” Dr. MacNamara says. “And it’s within our kids to adapt as well.”

For Birek, antifragile parenting is about providing her children with space to explore their world independently. When her son was 5 months old, he rolled around the perimeter of the baby-proofed playroom floor. In his exploration, he often found something new to capture his attention. Sometimes, he got stuck in a spot and snuffled in frustration.

“My instinct was to go get him, but you take a breath and you wait to see,” Birek says. “And a lot of times, he really surprised me with his abilities.”

And in the real-life chair-climbing situation, she reports, no child was hurt. Score one for the antifragile approach!