The other day, a parent described himself to me as a “Train Schedule Dad”, a term I was not familiar with. This is someone who manages family trips and daily life with the precision of a railway conductor. This can be added to the different descriptions of parenting in the 21st century that we have become familiar with over time: the snowplow (also called a lawnmower) parent, who endeavors to remove all obstacles from the child’s pathway; the helicopter parent, hovering above their child, checking every move and surveilling their every movement; and the tiger parent, fiercely driven to ensure their child achieves peak academic and extracurricular success.

As such, a strong paradigm of the 21st century is the overinvolved parent who wishes, perhaps understandably, to pave the path for their child, predicting every step, cushioning every blow, and intervening at the drop of a hat. However, how sustainable is this?

In 2019, Eli Lebowitz at the Yale Child Study Center developed the SPACE program, which focused on stopping “family accommodation”—the habit where parents constantly check on or rearrange schedules to soothe an anxious child. By teaching parents how to step back from this over-monitoring cycle, the study showed a dramatic drop in both the children’s anxiety levels and the parents’ own daily stress. It proved that giving children the space to navigate discomfort is often the best way to heal the whole family.

The point is that this study was not only about the child’s anxiety and also about the parent’s anxiety and how it could be reduced. In fact, when parents let go a bit, their anxiety levels go down and so do those of their children. It turns out that overinvolved parenting creates a huge amount of stress for both parties.

As we enter a particularly complex stage of history, with many “known unknowns” ahead and a pressing need to build up resilience and autonomy in young people, parents have to learn the painful but necessary lesson of letting go. This means allowing their children to fend for themselves, to find their own personalities, and to progress without constant intervention from the adults—who should be supporting them from the sidelines, while understanding the necessity of stepping back.

This will become increasingly vital as we enter a world where the ability to stand on one’s own feet and think for oneself will be critical to human flourishing. Letting go is not easy, but it is healthy, necessary, and par for the course.