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I spun around at the all-too-familiar soft shattering sound. A glass ornament had rolled off our dining room table and landed on the floor in a thousand pieces.

For once, it wasn’t me who had clumsily dropped one of our Christmas ornaments, as is my typical holiday tradition. As we swept up the fragments, I realized this ornament was beyond repair. Truly fragile. Broken for good.

After my Thanksgiving essay on familial estrangement, many of you asked that I explore the idea of fragility and psychological safety, and how these forces shape different generations. So, focusing on fragility in this essay, let’s dive in.

An old story tells of a hunter who sets a bear trap in the woods. The next morning, instead of a large black bear, he finds a tiny cub with its paw caught in the iron teeth. The hunter approaches gently, bends down, and tells the terrified cub, “This is going to hurt, but then you’ll be free.”

He tightens the trap first, intensifying the cub’s pain, before the cold metal prison finally gives way and snaps open. The cub bolts, limping toward freedom.

The hunter knew something counterintuitive: sometimes the trap must tighten before it releases.

Humans experience something similar with consequences. Every choice produces an outcome, and we learn, like Pavlov’s dog salivating at the bell, what leads to reward or discomfort. We touch a railing with a “Wet Paint” sign because we need to feel the paint to learn the lesson. A child burns their tongue on hot food because curiosity outranks their parent’s words of caution. These moments strengthen us.

But what happens if we’re stripped of the core experiences that teach the most fundamental truths? If we never get near wet paint, we never learn that touching it leaves a mess and that sometimes the mess is how we learn. 

Maybe even the cub’s gruesome moment was necessary. Better to learn as a small cub that traps exist than to discover it full-grown when the consequences are far more serious and life ending.

In past essays, we have explored the power of linguistics, whether it is the playground chant of six-seven or the rewording of how we define entire movements or people groups or social identities. Over the past few decades, something subtle but profound happened. We didn’t just parent differently, we renamed the experience of discomfort itself. 

Terms like psychological safety, first introduced by Carl Rogers in the 1950s and later redefined by organizational scholars before entering mainstream culture in the 2010s, began reframing discomfort as potential harm (Rogers, 1954; Edmondson, 1999; Stern, 2023). Emotional safety, which gained traction in counseling and parenting literature throughout the 1980s–1990s, shifted everyday conflict into something requiring careful management. Safe spaces, originating in 1960s social movements, expanded significantly in scope and meaning during the 2010s (Kenney, 2001; Crockett, 2016; Grimes, 2020). And trigger warnings, born on early internet forums in the late 1990s, migrated into academic settings and mainstream discourse by the early 2010s (Herrman, 2014; Britannica, 2025).

Linguistic changes are a leading indicator of behavioral and cultural shifts. The pain of emotional hurt isn’t new, it just got a new name.

Before these terms entered the mainstream, a child seeing a “Wet Paint” sign would likely touch the railing anyway, because that’s how humans learn. A little gooey discomfort meets a little resolved curiosity. Ultimately, it results in insignificant consequences. But once our cultural lexicon began framing discomfort as harm, and uncertainty as something to be avoided, we unintentionally taught kids to steer clear of anything that might distress them.

In other words, we didn’t just say “Don’t touch the paint.” We removed any opportunity for them to even know that wet paint existed.

The rise of this new emotional vocabulary didn’t make children weaker. It changed what they believed discomfort meant. When words like unsafe, triggered, harmful, and overwhelming became part of everyday childhood discourse, normal emotional friction began to feel like something dangerous and something to be sidestepped instead of experienced. We reshaped the meaning of risk. And kids responded exactly as the language trained them to: by avoiding the paint entirely.

But here’s the real problem: when a generation is taught to avoid the paint entirely or worse yet doesn’t know wet paint even exists, they miss the very experiences that create anti-fragility. 

Nassim Nicholas Taleb popularized the term anti-fragile, arguing that some systems grow stronger under stress. Becoming anti-fragile requires friction, unpredictability, and bumps in the road. Taleb says in his book Antifragile,

Human development is no different. Children develop resilience through scraped knees, risky play, and low-stakes failure. Even the term we use to describe traditional childhood play has a negative connotation with the adjective: risky. We’ve rewritten the narrative.

So what is anti-fragile? Well, anti, being the opposite of or against, being fragile. For example, the glass ornament that rolled off my dining room table was fragile. However, a healthy immune system is anti-fragile. Whether you overcome a sickness or you are inoculated against a virus, your immune system builds the stamina to better fight off that ailment in the future. The stressors and pressures don’t break a healthy immune system. Instead, after healing and recovering, the body is arguably stronger than before. It didn’t break when dropped. It is anti-fragile.

Yet over the past few decades, we steadily removed those experiences.  I believe there are three main factors to this: technology + media exposure + parenting.

Technology didn’t create fragility, but it amplified forces we weren’t prepared to manage. Social media, smartphones, and constant connectivity gave parents a level of visibility into their kids’ lives no generation had before. It gave children unprecedented and unfettered access to information and the world.

Nursery cameras streamed every wiggle of a newborn. Real-time vitals turned already nervous new parents into anxious analysts. GPS tracking meant parents always knew where their teenager was. Smartphones created permanent reachability and instant access to every possible fear.

For most of human history, children took risks outside adult view. Those stumbles and recoveries were quiet, unmonitored, and natural. They built competence and confidence. As soon as parents could see everything in real-time, they felt obligated to manage everything. It is natural, as a parent to want to protect.  But the reality is humans aren’t built for that level of vigilance. Neither are children.

Meanwhile, media became a fear multiplier. News outlets and social algorithms learned long ago that fear travels fastest. Stories of abductions, assaults, school threats, and freak accidents, still statistically rare, dominated every feed.

All the while, language changed again. Words like unsafe and trauma migrated from clinical research to everyday headlines and scrolling commentary. What once was “challenging” or “unpleasant” increasingly became “dangerous.”

So when Gen X parents who were already predisposed to be more attentive than their own parents, began raising children, they were met with:

Combine those forces, and overprotection didn’t just happen, it became irrationally rational. But the developmental consequences were enormous.

Research on risky play shows that children need age-appropriate exposure to uncertainty, minor danger, and problem-solving to build resilience (Sandseter & Kennair, 2011). When we remove opportunities to climb too high, explore too far, or attempt something just beyond their abilities, we interrupt the natural learning loops that produce confidence.

Kids aren’t naturally fragile. A baby learns to walk by falling hundreds of times. They test limits. They try things. They don’t break easily. But if we remove the conditions that allow competence and confidence to develop, they simply never get the opportunity to become anti-fragile.

Put differently: kids didn’t suddenly become fragile, the environment they were raised in kept them from becoming strong.

Growing up, I spent time with many families in my community. Two that come to mind let their kids roam freely, play in dirt, climb trees, wade into the creek, wander the neighborhood, get messy, get hurt, and recover. Another two families lived on the opposite end of the spectrum: wash your hands constantly, bundle up if there’s a breeze, don’t even look at a tree lest you be tempted to climb, lather on sunscreen while wearing UV blocking clothing on a cloudy winter day, or better yet, stay inside and play computer games where nothing unpredictable could happen.

Want to know which kids were always sick? The overly protected ones.

Want to know which kids grew up to become attorneys, executives, and community leaders? The ones who climbed trees.

We all had similar opportunities, similar schools, similar neighborhoods. And yet we developed very differently.  Now, this is a far cry from a scientific study and lacks any academic rigor apart from casual observation. But it reveals something we intuitively sense: anti-fragility is built through exposure, not avoidance.

Every well-meaning generation tries to give their children a better life than they had. Parents in the post-war era wanted to give stability. Their children wanted presence. Later generations, equipped with new technology, new vocabulary, and new fears, wanted emotional safety.

The intentions were good. They always are when the cultural pendulum swings. But along the way, we forgot what actually makes a person strong.

We wrapped childhood in cameras, warnings, GPS trackers, filters, restrictions, and protective vocabulary. We tried to keep kids safe from pain we could now monitor more closely and fear more vividly.

But in doing so, we shielded them from the very experiences that allow a human being to grow.

And here’s the part I don’t want us to miss: there is no such thing as a fragile child.

Kids learn to walk by falling. They learn boundaries by walking to the edge. They learn failure and getting back up again by trying things slightly beyond their ability. They adapt. They recover. They bounce.

Stealing a candy bar at age six means a stern talk and a forced apology. But stealing at age twenty-six leads to a criminal record.

Falling off a bike when you’re riding around a corner too fast teaches caution. Crashing a car on a rainy highway because you never learned to manage risk is far more devastating.

But when a child never experiences loss, conflict, failure, risk, or consequences, when every obstacle is padded or pre-removed, the lessons breed a fragility mindset. That fragility follows them into adulthood, where the stakes are exponentially higher.

When we erase small childhood consequences, we unintentionally guarantee larger adult ones. The bear cub versus the momma bear.

The ornament that shattered on my dining room floor broke because it was never designed to withstand impact. Humans, to a reasonable extent, are. They were built to fall, fail, climb too high, misjudge speed, get hurt a little, and grow stronger through it. Of course, as parents and caregivers, we must not be negligent or irresponsible or inattentive or naive. At the same time, kids don’t need every experience to be bubble-wrapped throughout childhood. They need wet paint. They need small stakes. They need the trap to tighten before it opens.

And here’s where I feel there is hope. If we crafted the environments that promoted fragility, we can build the environments that create strength. We can reintroduce low-risk, high-growth experiences. We can let kids feel the sting of consequences, the wobble of independence, the uncertainty of trying something new.

We can trust that they are far more capable than we’ve allowed them to be. Kids aren’t fragile. They just haven’t been given enough chances to prove it.