We Can't Coddle Kids to Greatness

The struggle isn't the obstacle standing between a student and learning. The struggle is the mechanism for learning.

By J. Daniels · Acceleration Academics| May 1, 2026

Picture telling your personal trainer you got a great workout in. You drove to the gym. You walked the whole floor. You talked to everyone there about their sets, took notes, watched closely, and left with a thorough understanding of exactly what everyone did.

Your trainer would laugh at you. You didn't work out. You observed a workout. You are exactly as strong as when you walked in.

Nobody confuses watching the gym with going to the gym. And yet we do precisely that with learning, all the time, and we have built much of modern education around it.

There is a kind of difficulty that has gotten a bad name it does not deserve. Not pain. Not suffering. Not stress for its own sake. Exertion. The strain of reaching for something just past what you can already do. That exertion is not the thing blocking a student from learning. It is the learning.

So when we set out to help kids by removing every obstacle, smoothing every difficulty, and eliminating every frustration, we are not making learning easier. We are removing the very mechanism by which learning happens. Decades of memory research point the same direction: the conditions that feel harder while you are in them are often the ones that produce real, durable learning (Bjork, 1994).

Learning Is Not a Spectator Sport

A muscle grows because you force it to work against resistance. There is no version of this where you watch someone else lift and your own arm gets stronger. The body adapts only to the loads it actually carries.

The mind is no different. When researchers compared active learning, where students work the material themselves, against passive lecturing, where they sit and receive it, the gap was not subtle. Across 225 studies, students in passive classes were one and a half times more likely to fail than students who had to do the work (Freeman et al., 2014).

Here is the part that should stop us cold. When the same lesson is taught both ways, the students learning actively actually learn more, but they report feeling like they learned less (Deslauriers et al., 2019). The passive version feels smoother. It feels like understanding. That feeling is exactly what fools us, because the comfortable lesson and the effective lesson are not the same lesson.

Watching is not doing. Only one of them builds anything.

We Made Them Safe and Called It Strength

Somewhere along the way, we decided the kindest thing we could do for students was to clear the path in front of them. Remove the hard problem. Soften the failure. Make sure no one ever sits in the discomfort of not yet being able to do something.

The intention is good. The result is the opposite of what we intended. By building environments where a student never meets a real obstacle, all in the name of keeping them safe, we strip away the one thing that lets a person handle the unfamiliar and keep themselves safe out in the world. We have stunted their potential in the name of security.

Children are not fragile in the way we treat them. They are antifragile, to borrow Nassim Taleb's word: like an immune system that needs exposure to germs, or a tree that needs wind to grow deep roots, they require stress, setbacks, and stumbles in order to develop strength (Haidt & Lukianoff, 2018). Overprotect them and you do not produce a strong, safe child. You produce one with no practice at being uncomfortable, and the research bears this out: overprotection is linked to weaker coping, not stronger.

Worse, it feeds on itself. The more we shield a child, the more fragile they become, and the more fragile they seem, the more we feel we must shield them. The first genuine obstacle they meet, in a job, in a relationship, in a crisis, arrives when they have had no reps. We did not protect them. We disarmed them.

Twenty Years of Treating Effort as Waste

For two decades, we have been quietly reducing cognitive load in the name of efficiency. Easier delivery. Easier grading. Easier management. And, of course, easier completion.

I think about this every time I remember a class I taught years ago. It was remedial seventh-grade math, and the room was loud. Students argued over answers, challenged each other, and defended their reasoning at the board. It was messy, inefficient, and cognitively alive. A veteran teacher passed by, looked in, and told me what she did instead: "I just put them on Khan Academy."

Quieter. Easier. More controlled. And notice what counts as the inefficiency being optimized away: the human interaction. The teacher. The argument at the board. In the pursuit of a smooth, low-friction classroom, the people become the load you reduce.

But not all of that load is waste. The effort of working something out yourself, the part that feels slow and hard, is not an inefficiency in the system. It is the part that builds the mind. Strip it out and you have not streamlined learning. You have automated it away.

And it does not end at the software. A student trained to offload the thinking does not suddenly start thinking on their own later. They hand the work to whatever will take it, and increasingly that means AI that is confidently, frequently wrong. A 2025 study of 666 people found that heavier reliance on AI tools tracked with weaker critical thinking, with cognitive offloading as the mechanism, and that the youngest users were the most dependent and scored the lowest (Gerlich, 2025). In a controlled experiment, students using AI to help them write showed measurably lower cognitive engagement than those working unaided.

We are teaching kids to outsource the one muscle we never let them build.

What the Gym Knew All Along

You get stronger by lifting something genuinely hard, right at the edge of what you can manage, again and again, until it stops being hard. Then you add weight. That is the entire mechanism. There is no shortcut where comfort produces capability.

And the lifting builds something past the muscle. It builds proof. The kid who struggles against a hard problem and finally beats it walks away with evidence in hand: I did that. I can do hard things. That belief is not installed by being told you are capable. It is earned by doing something difficult that genuinely could have gone the other way. Real confidence comes from mastery experiences, from succeeding at the hard thing, not from reassurance (Bandura, 1997).

You cannot hand a child that kind of confidence. You cannot coddle it into them. They have to win it against something real. Which means every obstacle we remove in the name of kindness is a repetition we have quietly stolen from them, one more chance, gone, to prove to themselves what they are capable of.

We can't coddle kids to greatness. Greatness gets built the way strength gets built: against resistance, by the person doing the work. Remove the resistance and you have not made the work easier.

You have made it disappear.

References

Bandura, A. (1997). Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control. New York: W. H. Freeman.

Bjork, R. A. (1994). Memory and metamemory considerations in the training of human beings. In J. Metcalfe & A. Shimamura (Eds.), Metacognition: Knowing About Knowing (pp. 185–205). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Deslauriers, L., McCarty, L. S., Miller, K., Callaghan, K., & Kestin, G. (2019). Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(39), 19251–19257.

Freeman, S., Eddy, S. L., McDonough, M., Smith, M. K., Okoroafor, N., Jordt, H., & Wenderoth, M. P. (2014). Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(23), 8410–8415.

Gerlich, M. (2025). AI tools in society: Impacts on cognitive offloading and the future of critical thinking. Societies, 15(1), 6.

Haidt, J., & Lukianoff, G. (2018). The Coddling of the American Mind. New York: Penguin Press.