When my first child was an infant, the doula handed me an article that championed benign neglect. Children, the article proposed, need to be left to their own devices to work things out. Parental intervention at every little grunt discourages resilience. This made sense, so I tried. Really hard. At least until I thought the baby needed me. And then I picked that baby up.

As my children grew older, I read books like Michael Thompson’s “Homesick and Happy: How Time Away From Parents Can Help a Child Grow.” Authors like Mr. Thompson argue for what today’s parents might call negligence. He explains that our omnipresence guarantees neither our children’s happiness nor their resilience. It’s for us, not them. He’d advocate that you let your discomfort linger beyond that first moment you think your baby really needs you, in the name of teaching her that she can take it. I wholeheartedly agreed — as long as the children learning that hard lesson weren’t my own.

And clearly they weren’t, which means that now that my older kids are teenagers, they struggle more than they should with teenage disappointments: a bad grade, the snobbish brushoff, not getting the part or being selected to the team or accepted to the college of choice. Because I didn’t practice enduring their discomfort, my kids didn’t practice either.

A friend who visited with her 13-month-old daughter recently reminded me of my younger self: the one who hated to disappoint her children, and struggled to set limits — or believe that they could learn to respect them. As the child lurched across the floor in her new red shoes, my friend chased after her. Her girl is just at the age to pick up something she knows she should not eat, wait a beat and lift that very thing to her mouth. “No!” the small girl hears from her mother in an excited, agitated screech. Before the tot can do more than beam impishly, her mom lunges toward the forbidden object to wrest it from her assured yet slippery grip.

I doubt that baby will hear “no” many more times, other than for safety purposes. As my friend described a recent stint of baby wakefulness from 2 to 5 a.m., she caressed her daughter’s tiny pigtails, worried and besotted in almost equal measure. She forcibly intervenes to ensure small objects stay away from the toddler’s airways, but most of her daughter’s actions are met with fond parental acquiescence. Do I sound as if I’m criticizing my friend? How could I?

Not only was I that mom 16 years ago (more than I should be or want to be), I still am that mom.

The way I understood parenthood was this: I’d do anything for my baby with a little attempted benign neglect thrown in for good measure. Unfortunately for all of us, as the babies grew, so did my willingness to “help.” I lay motionless for hours because the clingy preschooler couldn’t bear to be alone at bedtime. I pulled the shirt over the child’s head or put the food on the kids’ plates … and cleared the plates. I showed up and took photos at the performances and class presentations, packed close as sardines to all the other hovering parents. I’ve cheered and I’ve pestered. I’ve labored to avert all kinds of natural consequences. I’ve worried and worried. I thought I was supposed to do all that; I wanted to do all that. It didn’t really occur to me I could do something else and still be a “good” or even a better parent.

During those years between routine extrication of choking hazards from my first born’s chunky hands and now, I never gained fluency with the two-letter word “no.” I tried to make everything better — way too often. I never mastered the “oh well” shrug, because I was unable to tolerate my children’s disappointment. Had I been able to say “no,” my life would be easier, and so would my children’s.

Had I been able to comprehend the part about how critical it is to foster a little more dispassion in myself for the kids’ sakes, I think we’d all be happier now. But here we are. I’ve finally begun to practice benign neglect — the wordless shrug, the see-one-performance-not-all-of-them, or the questions about the game I didn’t attend. And, very reluctantly, I’ve finally begun to say “no.” Even more reluctantly, they’ve finally begun to hear it.

To disengage is a struggle — for me. But I remind myself that if I can’t learn to let go now, I’ll be unequipped to support the kids when they (not long from now) go anyway. Despite my subversion of it for all these years, I deeply value their independence. It’s time to place my faith in them in practice, not simply in theory. With a long way still to go, at least I finally believe my attempts to nurture independence to be sincere.