The funny part about the “I’m not going to coddle my kids, the real world isn’t going to be nice to them” kind of people is that once their kids are grown and out of the house, they spend years being continuously astonished to learn that people as cold and mean as their parents are actually extremely rare.
You cannot prevent* bad things from happening to children because when you’re little, every bad thing that happens is the worst thing that’s ever happened to them.
You can be the person they come to for comfort, the person they trust to tell them that it won’t always be that bad. That it will get better, it won’t always hurt so much. It doesn’t have to be like this.
Like everything else, trust is a learned skill and if you are cold to children, you become the first person that they learn they absolutely cannot trust.
*this isn’t about safety regulations, always do those












