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https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-do-less-for-your-children
How to do less for your children
Being an intensive parent will make you anxious and stifle your children’s development. Help them by learning to let go
by Peter Gray, professor of psychology and neuroscience
Are you an intensive parent? Intensive parents run themselves ragged minding and serving their children. They may feel compelled to drive their kids everywhere they need or want to go, serve as their alarm clock and calendar, choose their extracurricular activities, make sure they get to those activities, monitor their schoolwork, guard them from every possible harm, and on and on. They may do all this not just for young children, but even for teenagers.
The practice of intensive parenting was first named and described by the sociologist Sharon Hays, though in The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood (1996) she called it intensive mothering, acknowledging that mothers, far more often than fathers, take on parental burdens. She defined it as adherence to the belief that a good mother is devoted first and foremost to her children and provides care that’s ‘child-centred, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labour-intensive, and financially expensive’.
Intensive parenting began to proliferate in the 1980s among wealthy families with resources to support it and then trickled down to others. By the mid 2010s, surveys revealed, most parents in the United States agreed with most of the tenets of intensive parenting, even if they lacked the time and money required to abide by those tenets (similar attitudes show up from Britain to Sweden to Japan, even if the details vary).
Not surprisingly, other research has found that parents who hold strong intensive parenting beliefs experience more anxiety and guilt than those who don’t. If you are attuned to every problem your child might face and believe your child’s future depends on your continuous protection and guidance, you are likely to feel anxious indeed. And if you can’t realistically do all that you think you should do, or if you blame all your child’s foibles on yourself, you will feel guilt.
Over the years in which intensive parenting has proliferated, children as well as parents have become increasingly anxious and depressed. Elsewhere, I and colleagues have summarised multiple lines of evidence that overprotection, too much guidance, and too little independence underlie the rise of young people’s mental health problems. Research indicates that doing less for children and expecting and allowing them to do more for themselves is good for parents and children alike. What follows are some steps you might take to decrease your parenting burdens and empower your children to do more.
Key points
Intensive parenting has costs for parents and for children. This increasingly popular form of parenting is about total devotion to one’s children and the belief they need constant protection and guidance. It fosters guilt and anxiety in parents, increases the risk of mental health problems in children, and frustrates their maturity towards independence.
Recognise your children’s need for independence. If you have internalised contemporary societal beliefs about all you ‘should’ do for your children, the idea of doing less for them will likely make you feel guilt and anxiety. Combat these feelings by reminding yourself that children, like other juvenile mammals, are born with natural instincts to become independent. Child-raising is about supporting this process.
Enable independent adult-free play. Children are innately motivated to play away from adult control, especially with other children. That’s how they learn to make their own decisions, negotiate with peers, make friends, create rules, solve problems, and in other ways take charge of their own lives.
Encourage participation in chores. Children are also naturally motivated to be helpful and it’s best to encourage this when they are very young, even before their ‘help’ is truly helpful. As they grow, it will be empowering for them, and feel good, to be part of the home team, contributing to the home economy. When possible, allow your children to choose which chores to take as their responsibility.
Expect ever more self-management from your children. Beyond age four, aim to gradually reduce the managing role you play for your children. For example, if your nine-year-old wants to participate in a certain scheduled activity, it should be up to the child, not you, to create a way to remember to go to that activity and arrange a way to get there (which may or may not involve you). The earlier children learn to take responsibility for their own actions and choices, the happier they will be.
Rather than banning activities, teach safety rules. Much of the increased work of modern parenting derives from fears, such as of ‘stranger danger’ and traffic. To guard against overprotection, avoid ‘worst-first thinking’ and teach your children safety rules – such as walking with friends, never entering a stranger’s car, and looking both ways when crossing the road.
Recognise your children’s need for independence
If you have internalised contemporary societal beliefs about all you ‘should’ do for your children, you may feel anxious or guilty about doing less. One way to combat those feelings is to remind yourself regularly that the goal of child-raising is to enable young people to become fully functioning independent adults. To achieve that, your children must become ever more able to care for themselves and ever less dependent on you.
Mammals, including our young human mammals, are born completely dependent on parents for survival, but they are also born with instinctive tendencies to exert as much independence as they can. They are born with drives to explore and play in ways that allow them to learn about their environment and practise skills essential to adulthood. When you do less for your children, you are freeing them to follow their natural drives to do more for themselves, to take greater control of their own lives.
Enable independent adult-free play
As I have expounded upon in my book Free to Learn (2013), children are innately motivated to play away from adult control, especially with other children. That’s how they learn to make their own decisions, negotiate with peers, make friends, create rules, solve problems, and in other ways take charge of their own lives. When we adults intervene in play, we undermine it. Playworkers (professionals who enable children’s play) in the UK have a great term for unhelpful adult intervention in play: they call it the ‘adulteration’ of play – as when an adult imposes overbearing rules on a previously fun game or turns the situation into a lesson.
Independent play is essential for children’s happiness as well as learning. Much of the joy of play, away from adults, derives from the sense of independent accomplishment. Children acquire from adult-free play what psychologists call an internal locus of control: that is, a sense that they can solve their own problems, control their own destinies. Numerous studies have shown that people of any age who have a strong internal locus of control are much less likely than others to suffer from anxiety or depression in response to life’s inevitable challenges and setbacks.
Encourage participation in chores
Beyond play, children are also naturally motivated to be helpful. Research has shown repeatedly that little children want to help. In a classic study, Harriet Rheingold observed children, ages 18 to 30 months, interacting with their mother or father as the parent conducted routine housework, such as folding laundry, sweeping the floor and clearing the table. She found that all these toddlers – 80 in all – voluntarily helped do the work, without being asked. In Rheingold’s words: ‘the children carried out their efforts with quick and energetic movement, excited vocal intonations, animated facial expressions, and with delight in the finished task.’
It is best to start expecting and accepting such help while children are very young, even before their ‘help’ is truly helpful. Cross-cultural research has shown that in cultures where parents routinely allow little children to ‘help’, the children continue to help, voluntarily, as they grow older and the help becomes real. If you wait until your children are older to ask them to help, it may be harder to get their compliance. By then they may have developed the attitude that all work is your responsibility, not theirs.
As with independent play, chores too can be good for children’s immediate and long-term happiness. Nobody wants to be always a recipient and never a giver, and that applies to children as well as adults. It is empowering and feels good to be part of the home team, contributing to the home economy. Moreover, becoming an independent adult is less scary if you’ve been learning to play your part in a household throughout your childhood and adolescence.
Of course, it’s always valuable to discuss, as a family, who will take responsibility for which chores and so, when possible, allow your children to pick their own. Part of autonomy is choosing how you will contribute to the household. Volunteering to do something feels great; being ordered to do the same thing does not. As they get older, you’ll probably find your children like to take on increasingly complex and challenging tasks. Not just washing dishes, but cooking dinner, for example.
Expect ever more self-management from your children
Part of growing up is learning to manage one’s own day-to-day life: that is, how to make plans and follow through on them. You may need to play a large managing role for a child under the age of four, but beyond that age you would do yourself and your child a favour by gradually reducing that role and expecting more self-management from your child.
For example, if your nine-year-old wants to participate in a certain scheduled activity, it should be up to the child, not you, to create a way to remember to go to that activity and arrange a way to get there (which may or may not involve you). If the child fails in this and misses the activity, that is a learning experience. Similarly, if your child has school homework, it should be up to the child, not you, to manage its completion. Even if they sometimes fail at this, they will learn more from having this responsibility than they would have learned from the homework they missed. It is up to the school, not you, to set the consequences for such failure. The earlier children learn to take responsibility for their own actions and choices, the happier they will be.
Rather than banning activities, teach safety rules
Much of the increased work of modern parenting derives from fears. Media attention to rare tragedies has led parents, and society at large, to believe that children are at great risk if not guarded constantly, especially outdoors. This is why parents feel they must drive their children everywhere, rather than let them walk, bike or take public transportation, and must monitor essentially everything their children do.
A major fear, which began to accelerate in the 1970s and ’80s, is ‘stranger danger’ – the fear of a child being abducted or even killed by a stranger. In fact, such cases have always been and still are exceedingly rare. Studies by the US Department of Justice in 1997 and 2011 revealed an average of about 100 abductions of children by strangers per year, of which fewer than 8 per cent resulted in death. That may sound like a lot, but with roughly 74 million children in the US, 100 abductions per year amounts to fewer than 1.5 abductions by strangers per million children, and roughly 0.13 deaths per million from such abductions; stranger abductions are also rare in other countries like the UK and Australia. (For comparison, the probability of a person being hit by lightning in any given year is approximately one in a million.)
Of course, every such case is tragic for the family concerned, but if we controlled our children’s lives to avoid all such statistically rare dangers, we would not allow them to do anything. There is some danger in everything we or our children do. To avoid all danger would be to avoid life. To guard against overprotection, it is important to avoid what my colleague Lenore Skenazy refers to as ‘worst-first thinking’ – that is, the tendency to imagine the very worst that could happen and then to act as if that is likely to happen.
Another parental fear inhibiting children’s independence is that of traffic. In most neighbourhoods, traffic is a more realistic danger than strangers, but children can be taught how to deal with it safely. In past decades, even in big cities with much traffic, children as young as five or six regularly walked to school and to friends’ houses without adult accompaniment, without mishap.
Teaching children safety rules is a far better way to assure their long-term wellbeing than depriving them of the skills and confidence they gain from independent activities. Look both ways before you cross the street; if a stranger tries to entice you into their car, don’t do it; there is safety in numbers, so, when possible, it’s better to walk with friends. Before allowing a young child to walk independently to a routine destination, it may be good to walk with the child at least once, pointing out potential dangers and how to keep safe along the way. In today’s world, a mobile phone can add to children’s safety; a child can call for help if needed.
The value of teaching safety rules applies not just to strangers and traffic, but to all sorts of activities you might otherwise ban for your children. Children can be taught how to use sharp knives safely, how to use the oven and, in our digital age, how to avoid entanglements on the internet. When you help your child engage safely with the world in which they’re growing up, you facilitate their march toward adulthood.
Final notes
In her book The Gardener and the Carpenter (2016), the esteemed developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik encourages us to think of being a parent as a relationship, not a job. It is, admittedly, a job when children are infants; infants need essentially constant care. But as children grow older, we should recognise and honour their abilities and needs to do ever more for themselves. Parents who respect children’s needs for more independence find that their children return the favour and respect the parents’ needs for more free time. As in any loving and caring relationship, two-way communication is essential. One of the best ways to foster your child’s independence is to ask: ‘What would you like to do, independently, that you haven’t done before?’ I have learned from parents that this question can lead to responses that are freeing for parent and child alike: ‘I would really like to start walking to school by myself,’ or ‘I would love to cook dinner sometimes for the family.’
Peter Gray is a Boston College research professor of psychology and neuroscience, specialising in children’s psychological development. His most recent book is Restoring Childhood: How to Set Kids Free in an Age of Anxiety (forthcoming, September 2026).
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