The Courage to Expect More From Our Children

As educators and parents, we often face a difficult question: Do we allow children to opt out, or do we help them aim high?

At first glance, the compassionate response can feel obvious. When a child looks uncomfortable, anxious, or overwhelmed, our instinct is to ease the pressure. We might say, “That’s okay, you don’t have to answer,” or “You can sit this one out.” In the moment, it feels kind. It removes the tension and protects the child from discomfort.

But over time, I have come to wonder whether this instinct sometimes protects adults more than it protects children.

In many classrooms, an unspoken truce can develop: students agree not to cause trouble, and teachers agree not to demand too much. Participation becomes optional, attention becomes aspirational, and improvement slowly fades into the background. The classroom stays calm, but something important is lost.

It is easy to see how this happens. Asking a reluctant child to participate can feel uncomfortable — for everyone in the room. Teachers feel the tension. Parents worry about pressure. Adults begin to question whether insisting is the right thing to do.

Yet learning rarely happens without a degree of discomfort.

Real growth sits just beyond the edge of what feels easy. Persistence, resilience, and confidence are not developed in moments of comfort. They are built when children stay with something long enough to discover that they can do more than they first believed.

This idea is strongly supported by the work of Dr Pamela Cantor, whose research into Whole Child Development highlights how learning and development are deeply intertwined with challenge, relationships, and the brain’s capacity to grow. Cantor argues that children thrive in environments where they experience strong relationships alongside meaningful challenge. These experiences help build the cognitive, emotional, and social capacities that support long-term learning and resilience (Cantor et al., 2019).

In other words, children do not develop resilience by avoiding challenge. They develop it through guided experiences of overcoming it.

Similarly, educational thinker Kath Murdoch has long emphasised the importance of intellectual challenge in learning. Inquiry-based classrooms are not places where children simply follow their interests with ease; they are spaces where students grapple with ideas, test theories, revise their thinking, and learn to tolerate uncertainty. Murdoch describes this as the “messy” but deeply productive nature of learning, where curiosity, reflection, and challenge are central to developing capable and independent learners (Murdoch, 2015).

The question, then, is not whether discomfort exists. The question is what we do when we encounter it.

If we step back every time a child hesitates, we may believe we are protecting them. But in reality we might be protecting ourselves — protecting ourselves from awkwardness, from conflict, or from the emotional weight of pushing a child beyond what feels comfortable.

Over time, repeated opting out can quietly become part of a child’s identity. They become the quiet one, the one who doesn’t answer questions, the one who sits at the edge of learning rather than participating in it. What begins as kindness can gradually turn into limitation.

This is where the role of adults becomes crucial.

The goal is not to bulldoze children or to ignore their emotions. There is no place in education or parenting for humiliation, public shaming, or cold insistence. Instead, what children need most is warm persistence.

Warm persistence means refusing to collude with withdrawal while also refusing to shame a child for struggling. It means narrowing the challenge, offering support, allowing thinking time, and acknowledging effort. It means saying, in effect, “This is hard, but I know you can do it, and I’m here with you.”

When adults hold that line with care and clarity, something powerful can happen.

Children begin to see that difficulty is not a signal to stop. It is part of the learning process. They start to realise that effort matters, that mistakes are manageable, and that persistence can lead somewhere meaningful.

As parents, this tension is especially real. Watching our own children struggle can be incredibly difficult. Our instinct is often to step in and remove the obstacle.

Yet some of the most meaningful growth our children experience comes when we resist that instinct and instead walk beside them through the challenge.

Perhaps the goal is not to remove pressure from children’s lives, but to help them learn how to manage it.

Because when young people realise that they can persist through difficulty — that discomfort does not define them and does not defeat them — something fundamental changes.

They don’t just achieve more.

They begin to believe in themselves.

And that belief may be one of the most important lessons we can help them learn.

References

Cantor, P., Osher, D., Berg, J., Steyer, L., & Rose, T. (2019). Malleability, plasticity, and individuality: How children learn and develop in context. Applied Developmental Science, 23(4), 307–337. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888691.2017.1398649

Murdoch, K. (2015). The power of inquiry: Teaching and learning with curiosity, creativity and purpose in the contemporary classroom. Seastar Education.