Antifragile. It's my new favorite word. Fragile things (and people) need to be protected from chaos and adversity. Robust things (and people) withstand chaos and adversity. Anti-fragile things (and people) explicitly gain from experiencing disorder. Consider bones. Without consistent stress and pressure, they become brittle and thin. Trees grown in a biodome collapse under their own weight: in the absence of wind, their root system does not spread and strengthen.
"Kids are anti-fragile." I found that sentence in Jonathan Haidt's book, The Anxious Generation, and it resonated with everything I believe about parenting. Kids need dirt, they need scrapes, they need to get the short end of the stick sometimes. They need to have their desires frustrated by circumstances and figure their own way to handle it. They need opportunities to develop their frustration tolerance.
We don't need to manufacture opportunities for our kids to be frustrated, but we can relax our instinct to remove obstacles, disorder, and inconveniences from their lives. We can empower them to address obstacles in their own messy, inefficient, sometimes ineffective ways. Then to try again. Kids are anti-fragile. It's our job to keep them safe, but not too safe. It's our job to give them room to grow.
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