Are Schools Too Quick to Blame Parents for ‘Coddling’? Why We Need More Curiosity and Less Cliché

I attended my daughter’s orientation day for Year 7 recently, keen to hear about how the school planned to support students during what is a major transition in their schooling journey. As I listened to several staff speak about wellbeing, I found myself feeling grateful that the emotional contours of the transition were being acknowledged. But by the time the third staff member told us—yet again—that we must be careful not to “coddle” our kids, I felt my patience starting to fray.

Each repetition of this message carried the insinuation that parents, left to our own devices, are anxious, meddling, or misguided. It is a sentiment many parents know too well.

This kind of attitude towards parents is nothing new. In fact, commentaries warning about indulgent or “overly soft” parents can be traced back to the 1600s. Every generation thinks the next has been ruined by parental weakness. It’s an age-old script that gets recycled over and over. The question is whether educators realise they too can slip into this prejudice—and how unhelpful it can be.

As both a parent and a psychologist, I find the assumptions about parental incompetence to be at odds with what I observe in families. Parents today are not necessarily floundering ignorantly in the dark. Many are direct consumers of parenting literature, as well as related podcasts and research. They are parenting with more information, more self-awareness, and more intention than any generation before them. Their decisions are often grounded in unprecedented access to developmental psychology, neuroscience, and attachment-related content. Thus, we should not be too quick to judge parents’ actions as naïve or misguided.

In fact, it needs to be said that, while parents have evolved, schools have not always kept pace. Many of the families I work with are in the challenging position of having to educate their child’s school about neurodiversity, sensory needs, or the developmental limitations of children. It is not unusual for parents to know about attachment theory, or the downsides of outdated behaviourism practices that remain common in classrooms. It can be disheartening for those parents to be dismissed as troublesome or overprotective when, in reality, they are in fact knowledgeable about evidence-based strategies that many schools have not yet adopted.

In addition to the above, it is important for anyone who works with children to understand that children are inextricably embedded within family relationships. They cannot exist independently of their caregivers. Thus, asking parents to suppress their involvement—or deriding it as coddling—is paddling upstream. Parents are, by evolutionary design, supposed to be responsive to their children’s cues – this is essential to healthy development and secure attachment. That responsiveness does not magically stop at the school gate, and nor should it. Instead of resisting the natural instincts of parents to advocate, support, and understand their children, schools could make far more progress by honouring that instinct, partnering with it, and using it as a valuable source of insight.

Unfortunately, the fear of “coddling” has long been something of a cultural obsession, but it is not nearly as endemic as people assume. In my twenty years as a therapist, I have never had a client whose difficulties stemmed from having been “coddled”. Not once. This, of course, does not mean it never happens, but the point is that what therapists see, overwhelmingly, are not the consequences of coddling, but of emotional neglect, under-involvement, misattunement, and chronic criticism. These are the problems that are over-represented in the therapy room. The problem in our society is not too much parental care. It is too little relational connection and too few spaces where children feel deeply understood.

In short, I worry when schools repeatedly warn parents not to “coddle” their kids. It suggests that they might be too quick to default to covert judgement the moment a parent sends an email or asks for a meeting. That reflex suggests that teachers might be a little too ready to dismiss a parent as interfering rather than assisting. What if, instead, we assumed that most parents reach out because they genuinely sense something is wrong? What if we made space for the possibility that parents know things about their children that teachers simply cannot observe in the classroom?

Curiosity must sit at the centre of any meaningful partnership between home and school. Curiosity, not judgement. Collaboration, not condescension. When a parent advocates for their child, they are rarely doing so without due consideration - as most of us are keenly aware of the potentially negative profiling that awaits us. But it is important to remember that parents have a unique relationship with their child, giving them insight that that others do not have. Dismissing that attunement as anxiety or coddling is not only disrespectful; it risks missing crucial information about a child’s wellbeing.

As a parent, I am clear on this: when it comes to deciding whether my child needs my help, I will take my cues from her, not from the cultural stereotypes about “soft modern parents.” And not from the reflexive warnings about coddling that echo through school halls at parent information sessions. But it would be nice to feel like my input was welcomed and valued rather than feel the sting of an internal eyeroll from staff.

Teachers and parents both want young people to flourish. That shared goal should be the anchor point. If we can all step away from old prejudices about overprotective parents and, instead, lean into mutual respect and curiosity, we might finally create the kind of partnership that children truly need—one where we understand that student wellbeing is supported, not in spite of parental involvement, but because of it.