First point: no sane parent wants their child to suffer.
Second point: most sane parents are not willing to cause their child suffering deliberately.
Third point, completing the paradox: a child who does not develop a certain resistance to measured suffering has a far higher chance of growing into an unhappy adult.
I know what is going through your head. You are struggling with the word suffering. Fine. Let us replace it with frustration. Better?
Do not be under any illusion: a human being who does not get what he wants or needs experiences something bad and painful. Call it suffering or frustration or anything you like — it makes no difference.
What does make a difference is that the conversation about children's mental health changed completely from the eighties onwards, from the point at which helicopter parenting was developed.
Once, the criterion for the mental health of a small child or a grown adult was resilience.
Resilience refers to your capacity to withstand life's frustrations in a balanced way, without significant emotional upheaval.
And here is the mechanism nobody explains, which makes this more than a matter of toughening children up.
Resilience is not a belief about yourself. It is an accumulated body of evidence — a private archive of occasions on which something was hard, you were not rescued, and you turned out to be able to bear it.
A child who is consistently spared never builds that archive. Which means that at twenty-two, facing the first genuinely difficult thing, they are not weak in any moral sense. They are simply looking for evidence they can survive it, and finding none, because it was removed for their own good, one small rescue at a time.