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The Resilience We Built When No One Was Watching

What if the very struggles we try to shield our kids from are the same ones that build strength? A look at how growing up with less supervision created more resilience.

By Farley Ledgerwood

March 2, 2026
5:08 am
Los Angeles, CA

Psychology says the 1960s and 70s accidentally produced one of the most emotionally durable generations in modern history — not through better parenting but through benign neglect that forced children to self-regulate, problem-solve, and develop emotional calluses that modern comfort has made nearly impossible to grow. Growing up, kids disappeared for hours and nobody called the police. I spent entire summers roaming the neighborhood with a pack of other kids, coming home only when the streetlights came on. My parents had no idea where I was most of the time, and that was completely normal.Compare that to today, where we track our kids’ every movement through smartphones and worry if they’re out of sight for five minutes. We’ve engineered childhood into this carefully controlled experience, thinking we’re doing better.

Growing up, kids disappeared for hours and nobody called the police. I spent entire summers roaming the neighborhood with a pack of other kids, coming home only when the streetlights came on. My parents had no idea where I was most of the time, and that was completely normal.Compare that to today, where we track our kids’ every movement through smartphones and worry if they’re out of sight for five minutes. We’ve engineered childhood into this carefully controlled experience, thinking we’re doing better. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: we might have accidentally weakened an entire generation in the process.

The accidental experiment that worked

The 1960s and 70s weren’t trying to create emotionally resilient kids. Parents back then weren’t reading child psychology books or attending parenting seminars. They were just trying to get by, often working multiple jobs, dealing with their own struggles. Kids were left to figure things out on their own.Cher Hillshetlands, an author who’s studied this phenomenon, puts it perfectly: “This bred self-reliance—one of the core mental strengths now in shorter supply.”Think about it. When I was young, if I got bored, nobody entertained me. There was no iPad, no scheduled activities every afternoon. I had to create my own fun. Sometimes that meant building a fort in the woods. Sometimes it meant getting into arguments with other kids and figuring out how to resolve them without adult intervention.Research shows that permissive parenting in the 1970s, characterized by reduced discipline and increased autonomy, led to children developing self-reliance and problem-solving skills. We weren’t special. We were just left alone enough to develop these abilities naturally.

Building emotional calluses the hard way

You know what happens when you protect your hands from everything? They stay soft. The first time you try to do real work, you get blisters. But if you work with your hands regularly, you develop calluses. Those calluses protect you.The same principle applies to emotions. Growing up as the middle child of five in a working-class family in Ohio, I learned early that not every disappointment warranted a meltdown. My father worked double shifts at a factory. If I scraped my knee or didn’t get picked for the team, there wasn’t always someone around to comfort me immediately.Dr. Marc Brackett, Director of Yale’s Center for Emotional Intelligence, notes that “This forced development of internal emotional regulation is something psychologists now recognize as crucial for mental health.”We had to learn to self-soothe. We had to figure out how to bounce back from setbacks without someone constantly validating our feelings. Was it always pleasant? Hell no. But it built something invaluable: emotional durability.

The patience nobody teaches anymore

Here’s something that’ll sound crazy to younger folks: we used to wait for things. Not just minutes or hours. Sometimes days, weeks, or months. If you wanted to watch a specific TV show, you had to be there when it aired or you missed it forever. If you wanted to buy something, you saved up for months.Studies suggest that children of the 1960s and 1970s developed patience and frustration tolerance due to fewer choices and less immediate gratification, leading to greater emotional endurance.My own kids, now adults themselves, grew up in a different world. Sarah, my oldest, can get anxious if Amazon takes three days instead of two to deliver. It’s not her fault. The world trained her to expect instant everything. But those of us who grew up waiting? We developed a different relationship with time and desire.

Solving problems without Google or grown-ups

What did you do when you got lost before GPS? You figured it out. You asked strangers for directions, looked for landmarks, maybe even accepted that you’d be late. You developed intuition and problem-solving skills because you had to.Research indicates that children growing up in the 1960s and 1970s developed emotional resilience through unstructured play and self-directed problem-solving, fostering independence and coping skills.Every summer, we’d build elaborate tree houses with zero adult supervision. Did we occasionally fall? Sure. Did someone sometimes hit their thumb with a hammer? Absolutely. But we learned to assess risk, to help each other, to solve problems creatively with whatever materials we could find.Today’s kids often don’t get these opportunities. Everything is supervised, safety-proofed, and structured. The playground equipment is designed to eliminate any possibility of injury, but also any opportunity for real risk assessment.

The unintended consequences of comfort

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying we should go back to the complete hands-off approach of the past. I missed too many of my own children’s school plays and soccer games due to work, something I still regret. There’s value in being present and engaged as a parent.But we’ve swung so far in the opposite direction that we’ve created a generation that struggles with basic emotional regulation. They’ve never had to develop those calluses because we’ve protected them from every possible discomfort.When everything is comfortable, nothing prepares you for discomfort. When every problem is solved for you, you never develop problem-solving skills. When every emotion is immediately validated and soothed, you never learn to self-regulate.The irony is striking. In trying to be better parents than previous generations, we may have accidentally handicapped our children emotionally. We gave them everything except the chance to develop resilience.

Final thoughts

The 1960s and 70s weren’t perfect. Far from it. But that imperfection, that benign neglect, that lack of constant supervision and comfort – it created something valuable. It forced kids to develop emotional skills that no amount of therapy or self-help books can easily replicate later in life.The challenge now isn’t to recreate the past but to find ways to give kids controlled doses of discomfort, independence, and problem-solving opportunities. Because those emotional calluses? They’re not signs of damage. They’re protective layers that help us navigate life’s inevitable challenges.Sometimes the best thing we can do for our kids is less, not more. Sometimes the struggles we protect them from are exactly what they need to grow strong.