I believe that most kids (atleast here in Western Europe) are indeed being spoiled and overprotected to an extent that is not helping them.
Physically we see kids at primary school on fat bikes while they only have to cover 500m - 1km to school (ofcourse they will struggle with obesity if they never learned to move).
Every kid is different, which all needs to have a name (ADD, ADHD, ASS, HG) but school needs to present tailormade approaches on each kid. Sounds good right? But I feel that is also labelling the kid as different and depriving them from the opportunity to just make social contacts and become more flexible. Later in life no1 will care about the label but will only notice the lack of social skills that came from being overprotected.
Fully recognize your “it is hard” example when it comes to learning also with my own kids haha.
My perspective on our own childhood difficulties and how it also helped us:
- I believe that the theory of a window of tolerance is pretty accurate, we can benefit from being under stress as it provides a strong stimuli - but as long as it is within your window of tolerance. If the stress / or agony is too much you get overwelmed and you don’t learn anything or even experience harm. Growth leads to expanding your window , bad experiences lead to a smaller window.
That being said I do believe that some childhood hardship provide a great stimuli for development but only to an extent. In a dysfunctional family , kids don’t learn to develop themselves they soley learn to survive by using coping methods that will be difficult to let go in their own adult life. So, a little hardship yes, but within a safe (both physical aswell as emotional environment).