When your child hits a wall, what do you do? Do you wait to see how they handle it, or does something in you immediately start looking for a way to smooth it over? When they’re upset about something at school, are you already thinking about who you can call? When they’re nervous about something new, do you find yourself quietly taking on more of the load so they don’t have to feel the weight of it?
Most parents never set out to do this. It doesn’t feel like a habit. It feels like love. And for solo parents especially, it makes even more sense. Your kids have already been through things they didn’t choose. The last thing you want is to add more difficulty to their life. So you step in. You soften the edges. You handle what you can handle so they don’t have to.
But loving them well and equipping them well aren’t always the same thing — and if you’re honest, sometimes the question worth asking is whether stepping in is really for them, or for you.
Robert Beeson, Founder & CEO of Solo Parent, Elizabeth Cole, single parent, and Amber Fuller, a counselor with a Master’s in Marriage and Family Therapy (MMFT) and single parent, sit down together to work through what it actually looks like to raise kids who can face hard things. Not kids who never need help, but kids who have been given enough practice with discomfort that they don’t crumble when life pushes back. It’s a conversation that’s equal parts practical and convicting, and it asks the question that most parenting conversations avoid: are the ways we’re showing up for our kids actually building them — or are we, little by little, getting in the way?
Solo parents know this struggle in a particular way. When your kids have already walked through disruption, grief, and change, your instinct is to give them a break from hard things. You want their life at home to feel safe and predictable, free of friction. But removing all friction has a cost. Studies show that anxiety actually increases in kids who are repeatedly rescued from discomfort. The very thing you’re doing to protect them may be reinforcing the belief that they can’t handle difficulty. And as this world speeds up, as everything from answers to distractions becomes instantly available, the muscle that learns to push through and figure things out is being asked to do less and less work.
Ask yourself honestly: are you stepping in because your child genuinely needs you, or because watching them struggle is painful for you? And is there a version of showing up for them that coaches without rescuing?
Key Insights from this episode:
- Struggle builds the muscles your kids need to handle real life
- Being with your child in hard moments is different from doing it for them
- Courage is a practice, and you can build it into everyday family rhythms
Struggle builds the muscles your kids need to handle real life
Somewhere along the way, discomfort became the enemy. Not just for kids, but for all of us. Instant answers, delivered food, every inconvenience engineered away. What that has quietly produced is a generation that mistakes ease for safety and avoids hard things not out of laziness, but out of a genuine lack of practice. Avoidance has become a strategy, and it starts early.
When kids aren’t given the chance to sit with difficulty, to push through something without a shortcut, they don’t build the internal capacity to handle what’s coming. The interpersonal skills that come from working through tension are quietly shrinking. COVID accelerated this. Developmental windows got missed. Kids who weren’t able to practice the uncomfortable moments of social interaction, of speaking up, of sitting in uncertainty, came out the other side with weaker muscles for all of it. As Amber Fuller puts it, we’re raising kids who are avoiding discomfort at almost any cost.
It shows up in small, everyday moments. A 13-year-old faced with a social situation that needed a direct, kind conversation chooses to go quiet and hope the problem dissolves. A teenager trying to find a job fills out an application and considers that enough, genuinely puzzled why a follow-up call would be necessary. Both situations point to the same thing: when the world has conditioned us to submit a form and wait, making that follow-up call feels foreign. Not lazy. Just unpracticed.
And the research bears it out. When kids are regularly rescued from discomfort, their anxiety doesn’t decrease. It increases. Because what they absorb, beneath every rescue, is the message that they couldn’t have handled it. That the situation was too much for them. And then the next challenge arrives, and the belief is already in place: this is too much for me.
Solo parents also carry a particular weight around what they can’t provide. You can’t always say yes to every opportunity, every activity, every thing your kid wants that their friends seem to have. There are moments where your kids have to earn something because you simply can’t hand it to them, or figure something out because you’re stretched too thin to do it for them. That guilt is real. But so is this: the limitation of resources, both time and money, that solo parenting often brings is not a deficit. It can be one of the most formative gifts you give them. Pushing through, figuring it out, working for something — those experiences build real capacity. Not the kind that comes from a class or a lecture, but the kind that comes from the body knowing it has done hard things and survived.
Being with your child in hard moments is different from doing it for them
The instinct to step in is not the problem. Stepping in to do it for them is. That distinction is where the real work of parenting courageous kids lives, and it’s a harder line to hold than it sounds.
It starts small. A kid who wants to mow neighbors’ lawns has to go knock on the door and ask. A parent can help them think through what to say, practice it with them, and then step back and let them walk up to that door alone. When the yard turns out to be bigger than expected and the price needs to change, that’s another conversation the kid has to go have — not the parent. Those moments feel minor in the grand scheme of things, but they’re not. Every time a child does something uncomfortable and comes out the other side, they deposit something into their own sense of what they’re capable of.
As kids get older, the stakes get higher and the temptation to step in gets stronger. A teenager trying to follow up on a job application genuinely doesn’t know what to say when someone answers the phone. The easy move is to make the call yourself or hand them a script and walk away. The better move is to sit with them, help them think through the key points, and let them dial. That’s not hovering. That’s coaching. The difference is who picks up the phone.
By the time they’re young adults, presence without rescue looks different again — quieter, more hands off. When Amber’s daughter, registering for college classes for the first time, said she didn’t know what to say to her advisor, the answer wasn’t to take over the Zoom call. It was simply to be in the room, close enough that she knew she wasn’t alone, far enough that she had to handle it herself. And she did. What she walked away with wasn’t just a completed registration. It was the internal experience of having done something she didn’t know she could do.
Beyond being present, there’s one more move that makes a real difference — letting your kids know why you’re holding back. Kids who know you’re intentionally pushing them toward something, who hear “I’m not going to do this for you because I know you are capable,” receive something different than kids who just feel abandoned in difficulty. The message shifts from “you’re on your own” to “I believe in what you’re capable of.” You don’t have to make a speech about it every time. But circling back afterward and naming what you saw — “I noticed how you handled that, that took courage” — is the mechanism that makes the experience stick. Behavior that gets noticed gets repeated.
Courage is a practice, and you can build it into everyday family rhythms
Courage doesn’t have to wait for a big moment. In fact, if it only shows up in big moments, you’ve missed most of where it gets built.
With back-to-school season arriving, the conversation turns practical. The small, everyday moves that build courage into kids before the high-stakes moments come are simpler than you might think. Social courage is one of the most trainable, and most overlooked, forms of it. Encouraging your child to walk up to someone on the playground who’s alone, to say their name and ask if they want to play, is a small act that carries real weight. It costs something. It requires them to take a risk with no guaranteed outcome. That’s the practice. And over time, those small acts compound.
Trying out for things, even when you don’t know if you’ll make it, builds the same muscle. The willingness to walk into an audition, a tryout, or a new club with no certainty of success, is courage. And for solo parents who know the logistical weight of one more activity, one more commitment, one more driving schedule, it’s worth saying: it doesn’t have to be elaborate. The courage-building moment is in the trying, not the activity itself.
One of the more counterintuitive pieces of this conversation is that honesty and courage are more connected than they might seem. Ghosting, avoiding the teacher’s question, making an excuse instead of an apology — all of these are courage avoidance in disguise. When you build honesty as a practice in your kids, even in small, low-stakes moments, you’re closing off the side exits that discomfort usually slips through. You’re asking them to face things directly. That builds a different kind of confidence than any skill or achievement can.
And the simplest shift of all: change the question at the end of the day. Instead of “how was your day,” ask “where did you have courage today?” What you name, you shape. Kids who are asked to look back on their day for courage will start to see themselves as people who have it.
The Long Game Is Worth Playing
You are doing more than managing today’s moment. Every time you sit next to your kid instead of in front of them, every time you let them make the call and feel the weight of it, every time you ask them where they found courage today, you are building something that will outlast their childhood.
Solo parents carry a particular guilt around what they can’t provide. Not enough time. Not enough money. Not enough presence. But the constraints solo parents carry can be formative, not just limiting. Kids who have to figure things out, who have to earn something, who have to navigate difficulty with a parent in the room but not in the way, often develop a capacity that more cushioned childhoods don’t.
That doesn’t make the hard moments easier in real time. But it does mean there is purpose in the friction. There is something being built every time your child doesn’t get rescued. The work of raising courageous kids is long, imperfect, and deeply worth it. And the fact that you are asking these questions, reading these conversations, thinking through what it means to parent with intention, is itself an act of courage.
