Help Parents Foster Independence and Resilience in Children
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/06/27
Nicole Runyon, LMSW, a child psychotherapist and parenting coach, emphasizes the overlooked psychological needs of children in today’s digital age. She advocates for allowing children to face discomfort and challenges as essential to developing resilience, emotional regulation, and independence. Overprotection, excessive screen time, and lack of real-world interaction hinder children’s development. Runyon’s four-part developmental framework—movement, cognitive growth, emotional development, and self-connection—guides parents in fostering healthy growth. She stresses the importance of boundaries set with love and intention, and critiques popular parenting trends that overindulge or under-discipline, warning they undermine self-trust and emotional strength in children.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What are the overlooked psychological needs of children today?
Nicole Runyon: Children today are missing opportunities for true, authentic, in-person connection with others. Parents are often physically present, but emotionally distracted, whether by work, stress, doing the tasks of development for their children, or the ever-present pull of our devices.
Parents today are often overprotective of their children. Developing minds need the chance to struggle, solve, and succeed on their own. We’ve become so focused on protecting our kids from discomfort and failure that we’re denying them essential experiences that build confidence and resilience. When we swoop in to solve every problem, we send the message that they can’t handle life’s challenges. Instead, children need us to believe in their ability to figure things out, to let them try, fail, and try again.
Jacobsen: You emphasize the importance of discomfort. How does this help with long-term mental strength?
Runyon: Discomfort is the training ground for mental strength. Every time a child faces a challenge, whether it’s a math problem they can’t figure out, a disagreement with a friend, or rejection from a sports team or audition, they’re given an opportunity to build healthy coping skills and regulate their own emotions. When parents solve their child’s problem, they’re robbing their kids of the opportunity to learn to navigate these situations themselves. Parents are also sending the child the message that they don’t trust their child to figure it out on their own. This leads to a lack of self-trust in the child.
Children who are allowed to experience discomfort within the safety of loving support grow into adults who don’t crumble at the first sign of stress.
Children need frustrating developmental tasks starting early, through all phases of development, or they can’t learn to trust themselves.
Jacobsen: How have screens shifted the developmental landscape for kids, emotionally and socially?
Runyon: The constant barrage of digital stimulation, whether from YouTube, games, or social media, gives kids a quick burst of dopamine, that “feel-good” brain chemical. But the adolescent brain isn’t equipped to set healthy limits on this kind of instant gratification. This can lead to a cycle of needing to check devices and social media when they’re bored, and even spiral into anxiety, depression, and withdrawing from loved ones.
Socially, screens have made it so face-to-face interactions happen less often than they used to. Kids miss out on the small but critical moments like reading body language and facial expressions, and resolving conflicts in real time that build better social skills and empathy. The more time spent in the digital world, the harder it becomes for children to navigate the complexities of real-life relationships and emotions.
Jacobsen: What is your four-part methodology?
Runyon: This is a four-part framework that explains how children develop holistically. These four stages are:
Primitive reflexes and movement
Cognitive development
Social emotional development
Connection to the self
It’s important that children move through these stages of development as naturally as possible, without the distractions of digital technology to which most of today’s children are exposed. If one stage of development does not go well, it makes it harder for children to progress to the next stage and develop properly.
Jacobsen: How does each stage contribute to building resilient, independent children?
Runyon: Primitive reflexes and movement — Healthy childhood development starts with movement and sensory exploration. When children crawl, climb, and move freely, they’re not just building muscles; they’re wiring their brains for balance, focus, and self-regulation.
Cognitive development — If movement goes well, the brain is scaffolded (meaning the brain is protected and can develop the way it needs to) and ready for brain growth. This opens neuropathways, enabling children to experience the stages of cognitive development, where they learn to think, problem-solve, and make sense of the world. 90% of cognitive development happens before age 6. The remaining development takes place in the prefrontal lobe, which doesn’t fully develop until 25. When kids are young, cognitive growth happens when they are allowed to struggle, try, fail, and try again. We don’t build resilience by making things easy for our children. We help them build it by letting them wrestle with challenges, ask questions, and discover solutions themselves.
Social emotional development — This stage is about allowing children to learn, recognize, and express their feelings in a healthy way. This happens through real life experiences and interactions with other kids and adults around them. This development especially happens in challenging situations, like a disagreement with a friend at school. Proper social emotional development happens when parents take a step back and allow kids to work out problems on their own. When we hover or rescue, we rob them of the chance to grow. But when we support them through struggle and celebrate their perseverance, we raise kids who are not only emotionally healthy, but also independent and ready to take on the world.
Connection to the self — Each time a child seeks autonomy and independence and is supported in it, they develop a connection to themselves. They emerge as an individual and separate from their parents or caregivers. Resilience and independence are grounded in self-awareness. The two-year-old finds the word “no,” the nine-year-old questions the existence of Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, and the sixteen-year-old begins to think about his future.
Kids today are robbed of many opportunities to think freely because of technology and social media, where questions can be answered in a few clicks, no outside thinking required. This is getting even more concerning with the rise of artificial intelligence.
Jacobsen: What boundaries foster — not hinder — mental health and independence in children?
Runyon: The boundaries that truly support a child’s mental health and independence are not about rigid control or endless rules. They’re about guidance, safety, and respect. When set with intention and love, boundaries become the scaffolding that children need to grow into resilient, self-reliant adults.
Jacobsen: How do early childhood experiences shape a child’s ability to manage emotions?
Runyon: The way caregivers respond to a child’s needs literally shapes the architecture of the developing brain and teaches children how to regulate their feelings. When children feel safe and understood, they learn to identify, express, and eventually soothe their own emotions, building resilience and confidence for life’s challenges. Witnessing how a parent responds to situations also builds a child’s ability to manage their own emotions. If a parent handles stressful situations calmly and with understanding, the child will learn to as well. On the other hand, inconsistent, unresponsive care, or consistent negative responses to stressful emotional situations can leave children struggling to cope with stress and harder emotions.
Jacobsen: What are common pieces of popular parenting advice that are actually harmful?
Runyon: The most damaging trend among new parents is giving kids access to a screen at very young ages. Excessive screen time and social media use has been normalized to the point of damaging kids’ mental health and their social development.
Every parent wants to give their kids the world, but there is such a thing as too much. When you overstuff a kid with activities, enrichment, and unbridled screen time, it can create kids that are overwhelmed, anxious, and don’t get the downtime they desperately need. Children need downtime, unstructured, tech-free time to play, imagine, and simply be themselves.
Gentle parenting is damaging to children because it doesn’t allow for a container of safe boundaries and structure. Children who are gentle parented don’t learn to work through hard things. This prevents them from developing a sense of agency and self-trust.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Nicole.
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