Is This Their Struggle—or Mine?

How achievement pressure and our own histories can blur the line between what our children feel and what we fear.

Your child comes home hurt by a friend, disappointed by a grade, or crushed they didn’t make the team. These moments are painful, but they are also a very normal part of development. In a community where there can be pressure to do a lot—and do it well—ordinary struggles can begin to feel like signs that they are falling behind.

Growing up in this area comes with tremendous opportunities, including strong schools, sports, and other enrichment activities. Alongside those opportunities can come a quieter message: they should be doing more, achieving more, and struggling less. When what we see most clearly are their peers’ accomplishments, it can be easy to lose sight of how much frustration, disappointment, and uncertainty are actually a very important part of growing up.

Not every struggle means something has gone wrong. Children need experiences of frustration, disappointment, and uncertainty because that is part of how they develop persistence, flexibility, and confidence in their ability to cope. Struggle is not simply an obstacle to development. It is an integral part of human development.

For many parents, knowing this intellectually does not necessarily make it easier to watch. Our first impulse is often to make things better. We want to fix the friendship, call the coach, or email the teacher. Sometimes those interventions are exactly what is needed. But sometimes the urgency to act belongs partly to us.

The culture around us can raise the stakes. Our own histories can magnify them further. If we were bullied, overlooked, academically frustrated, or left to manage distress on our own, watching something similar happen to our child can feel intensely familiar. We may quickly assume that they are hurting in the same way we once did and feel compelled to protect them from it.

But what looks familiar to us may feel very different to them. A parent who felt excluded growing up may become deeply worried when a daughter is left out of a birthday party. A parent who was cut from teams may feel alarmed when a son spends a season on the bench, while someone who struggled in school may react strongly to a disappointing report card. In each case, the child may be genuinely upset, but the parent may also be responding to an older experience of their own. That reaction can become even stronger when it seems like everyone else is moving forward with ease.

This is especially easy to do when we are trying to give our children something we did not receive ourselves. One of the harder tasks of parenting is not simply helping them through disappointment, but noticing what happens inside us while they are disappointed. Before deciding what they need, we may need to ask ourselves: What is happening for them right now, and what is this situation stirring up in me?

A child cannot borrow our steadiness if we have been pulled completely into the fear with them. When we can make enough room for our own reactions, we become better able to tell the difference between a moment that calls for us to intervene and one that asks us to stay close while they work through something hard. We can help them understand that a setback does not mean they are falling behind, even when everyone around them seems to be moving forward with ease. We do not need to protect them from every hard thing that comes their way. Sometimes what helps most is not removing the difficulty, but helping them discover that they can move through it.