IT’S been termed the “wussification of a generation”.

Children as old as four can’t fall without face-planting, teenagers can’t deal with failure, and university students don’t know how to score themselves a job.

Their creators have been dubbed “bulldozer”, “helicopter” and “uber” parents. But, rather than a gold standard in parenting, an overbearing need to protect children from everything is stunting their development well into adulthood.

SCHOOL: How parents do more harm than good

And the latest Australian Early Developmental Census released this week reveals it’s happening before they even get to school.

Jam-packed with information on how the nation’s five-year-olds are placed on entering school, the results provide a solid platform to address some of the real learning difficulties being experienced across the country.

And one shock finding shows while more children have been meeting their language and communication milestones over the past nine years, those same children are on a slide when it comes to their physical, social and emotional maturity.

In plain English, it means they’re more anxious, aggressive, selfish, irresponsible, won’t share, don’t respect property, understand boundaries, lack fine and gross motor skills and have a meltdown when left alone by their parents or a teacher.

And it’s not those who usually lag behind – it’s boys from privileged backgrounds.

Experts say the cold, hard facts bear out what they’ve been warning about for years and the biggest life lesson learnt by a generation of cotton-wool kids is that they are fundamentally helpless.

media_camera Child psychologist Dr Michael Carr-Gregg says children aren’t developing skills like anger management, problem solving, decision making, conflict resolution and independence.

Child psychologist Dr Michael Carr-Gregg, whose book Strictly Parenting includes a chapter titled The Unfortunate Rise of Crap Parenting, says parents are placing “psychological training wheels” on their children.

Many parents believe their job is to shelter their children from every bad thing, but risk-taking, sadness, failure and the occasional scrape provide valuable life lessons. And the result is children and teens who don’t develop skills such as anger management, problem solving, decision making, conflict resolution and independence.

“It’s this learnt helplessness and the way I refer to it is the wussification of a generation,” Carr-Gregg says.

“We’re not remembering our own childhood where, to put it really simply, we learnt to ride a bike by getting on the damn thing and falling off a couple of times.”

While problems start young and stunt a child’s school education, they are also apparent at universities and workplaces, where parents are bizarrely negotiating university marks and work contracts for their adult children, he says.

media_camera The census found it’s not those who usually lag behind who are being harmed by helicopter parenting – it’s boys from privileged backgrounds.

“The job of a parent is to prepare a child for the real world and if we protect them too much when they are young, they will fail to develop the skills, the knowledge and the strategies to cope with life way after we’ve gone.”

Child development expert and University of Sunshine Coast psychology lecturer Dr Rachel Sharman says kindy teachers and physios are noticing children extraordinarily lacking ordinary skills, such as the fundamental ability to cope with falling over, as they are shepherded through life.

“They haven’t even developed the quite basic skill of putting their hands in front of their face when they fall, so they face-plant,” Sharman says.

“I kid you not, this is apparently an epidemic.

“This is what people need to get into their head: These skills don’t appear magically by themselves. They are learnt and they are learnt by experience.”

She says it is good to let children fall, fail, socialise and work fights out themselves, rather than interfering and having “great, long Magna Carta committee meetings with three-year-olds”.

And they also need the truth, rather than a mistaken belief they are good at everything that impeded the development of a healthy self identity.

media_camera Many parents believe their job is to shelter their children from every bad thing, but risk-taking, sadness, failure and the occasional scrape provide valuable life lessons.

Sharman doesn’t buy the argument that children are more stressed now than ever before.

“Don’t forget there were a generation of kids who went through World War II and the Depression,” she says.

“I mean come on, we are living in a first-world country.

“What we’ve got is this psychologically fragile generation of people coming through who haven’t learnt to fail, they haven’t learnt resilience and they cannot cope with basic life stuff.”



National Children’s Commissioner Megan Mitchell says parents can teach their children about resilience by explaining the concept of “not crying over spilt milk”.

She says, ideally, parents don’t hover, but stay connected.

“You can talk to children about the risk they face and help them manage the challenges they come across,” she says.

“I also think there’s a really important message for children about seeking help and talking to a trusted adult if you’re worried because children can internalise stress.

“It’s really important, especially for boys, to learn to seek help and have their voice heard.”

Kidsafe Queensland chief executive Susan Teerds says a lot of common sense had disappeared in recent years in the quest to keep children safe.

Although her organisation focuses on preventing accidents, Teerds says tears, grazes and broken arms must remain part of life.

The real goal is to protect children from real danger – the kind that can’t be mended – by minimising risk rather than removing it. That means encouraging children to climb trees but choosing one with grass underneath, rather than concrete.

“You can’t wrap kids in cotton wool. They’re always going to get hurt,” she says.

“Most of the kids’ learning is done from birth to four or five years so if things go wrong in that gap, things can be wrong for a very long time.”

Email Jessica Marszalek

Extreme Parenting Extreme parenting is under the microscope on Sunday Night. Supplied: Seven Network

Originally published as How parents are turning kids into wusses