Overparenting Is Holding Kids Back—Here’s What to Do Instead

Co-authored by Reut Shachnai

Our culture encourages speed and performance. These values might be good for business, but not so much so for the daily lives of young families. Parents today are not only severely pressed for time, but also under constant duress to secure a specific kind of future for their children—a future they believe depends primarily on academic skills and school performance.

But here’s the thing: the growing minds of young children aren’t built for optimal efficiency or predetermined outcomes. Young children’s minds are in fact wonderfully messy, and their exploratory nature has evolutionary benefits that fuel learning and innovation. Left to their own devices without adult intervention, young children can learn more information (e.g., more functions of a novel toy), and sometimes solve novel problems even better than adults.

Over the past few decades, however, we have increasingly come to view childhood as a high-stakes race, where every milestone must be met and every challenge swiftly overcome. This performance-based mindset leaves little room for the type of curiosity and exploration that are at the very core of a growing mind. Instead, it has led to a rise in “overparenting”—stepping in to solve problems that kids could handle on their own (e.g., tying their shoes, doing their homework). Although well-intentioned, this habit can backfire, diminishing children’s motivation as early as preschool.

How to step back

So, what can we do? Is it possible to help parents step back and embrace their children’s messy, mistake-filled learning process? If so, can even small shifts in perspective make a real difference, or is the culture of performance too deeply ingrained to budge?

These were the questions we set out to answer in our recent study published in Child Development. We explored whether reframing tasks as learning opportunities could reduce overparenting in parents of preschool-aged children.

In our first study, we surveyed parents of 4- and 5-year-olds, asking how likely they were to take over on various tasks. Some tasks were academic, like solving puzzles or tracing letters; others were more everyday and non-academic, like cleaning up toys or putting on clothes. Parents also reported how much they thought their child could learn by attempting each task independently. Our results revealed that parents were more likely to take over on non-academic tasks, perceiving less potential for learning in those moments.

But surveys can’t establish cause and effect, so we designed a follow-up experiment to test whether framing everyday tasks as learning opportunities could lead parents to step back. We conducted these studies with parents and children at a children’s museum. The task? Getting dressed in hockey gear—a non-academic activity that is challenging for most preschoolers (and also novel to children since the study was not run in Canada!). Importantly, we had confirmed beforehand that 4- and 5-year-olds could complete the task on their own. Any parental intervention, therefore, wasn’t necessary.

A parent putting the hockey gear on their child

Source: Reut Shachnai and Julia Leonard

Before watching their child attempt the task, parents read one of two brief notes. In one condition, the note emphasized the big-picture learning benefits of the task, like building self-confidence and problem-solving skills. In the other, the note didn’t mention learning at all, focusing instead on how this task might benefit children’s interactions with the museum.

We found that the parents who read the learning-focused notes stepped back significantly, completing nearly half as many dressing actions for their children as those in the control group. They also offered more positive encouragement—“You’ve got this!”—instead of jumping in to fix things. The message was clear: reframing everyday tasks as opportunities for growth helped parents resist the urge to overparent, suggesting that parents’ performance-based mindsets are indeed malleable.

Focus on learning

Our findings highlight a simple but powerful idea: when parents see everyday tasks as meaningful opportunities for learning, they’re less likely to intervene unnecessarily. This, in turn, gives children space to develop independence, persistence, and resilience—qualities that will serve them far beyond preschool.

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So, to parents juggling the chaos of family life: the next time you’re tempted to swoop in and finish a task for your child, pause. Ask yourself, What might they learn if I let them try? In those messy, imperfect moments, your child’s curiosity and capability just might surprise you.

Importantly, however, real change requires more than just individual efforts. As a culture, we might need to reevaluate how we’ve come to define a meaningful childhood—moving away from a narrow focus on efficient milestones and achievements, and toward an appreciation of the slower, messy process through which young minds grow. Such a cultural shift would not only benefit children, but also give parents the freedom and confidence they need to let go.

Reut Shachnai is a PhD candidate in psychology at Yale University, where she studies social barriers to children's motivation and persistence. She holds a bachelor's degree in education and linguistics from Bar-Ilan University and master’s degrees in special education and developmental psychology from Tel Aviv University and Cornell University.