26/07/2026
Why Parents Should Stop Solving Every Problem for Their Children!
In 2019, a team of researchers at the University of Minnesota published findings from a long-term study tracking children from toddlerhood into early adulthood. One of their most striking discoveries was not about academic performance or social development. It was about a quality they called "executive function" — the ability to plan, make decisions, regulate emotions, and work through challenges independently.
Children who scored highest on measures of executive function in early childhood consistently showed better outcomes across nearly every dimension of adult life: educational achievement, employment, relationships, mental health, and the ability to navigate setbacks without becoming derailed by them.
What predicted strong executive function most reliably? Not enrichment programmes, not tutoring, not structured activities. The strongest predictor was something far simpler and far less comfortable: the experience of being allowed to struggle with age-appropriate challenges — and working through them without an adult immediately intervening.
This finding makes intuitive sense when you examine it carefully. Executive function, like any other capacity, develops through exercise. The exercise it requires is the experience of facing a genuine challenge, working out what to do, attempting something, adjusting when it does not work, and eventually arriving at a resolution. Every time an adult removes that process — however lovingly, however efficiently — the exercise does not happen. The capacity does not develop. And the child arrives at the next, harder challenge with less practice than they needed.
The research on this is not new, and it is not contested. What is contested — or at least, what most parents find genuinely difficult — is the practical implication: that one of the most important things we can do for our children is to solve fewer of their problems, not more.
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