Written By: Satata Karmakar | Updated : June 8, 2026 12:11 PM IST
how being overprotective affects your child's health
As parents, protecting children often comes from love, instinct, and the deep desire to shield them from pain. We want to make things easier, prevent heartbreak, and ensure they never struggle more than they have to. But somewhere along the way, protection can quietly turn into overprotection. While the intention is care, the impact can sometimes be limiting. Because children don't build resilience by avoiding challenges; they build it by experiencing life, making mistakes, and discovering that they are capable of finding their way through difficult moments.
In this article, Aanandita Vaghani, Founder and Mental Health Counsellor at UnFix Your Feelings, tells us more about how being extra protective can affect your child's overall health and wellbeing.
Here are the top mistakes that one usually commits while parenting a child - mistakes while trying to protect the kids from any wrong:
It makes sense that no one wants to see their child struggle. But when we constantly step in, fix, or soften every difficult moment, the child never learns: I can handle this. Confidence doesn't come from an easy life but from navigating hard moments and realising you survived them.
Protection can sometimes look like control. Choosing their friends, their subjects, their path; all in the name of "knowing better." But over time, this chips away at their ability to trust their own judgment. What this really teaches is: Someone else knows my life better than I do.
Not talking about mental health, relationships, failure, or mistakes doesn't protect children - it isolates them. They still experience these things given the exposure in our world they just learn to deal with them alone.
"I don't want you to go through what I did." It comes from a real place. But sometimes, in trying to prevent their pain, we end up limiting their life. Your story is not their script. Protection shouldn't come at the cost of possibility.
A child who "listens" all the time isn't always a child who feels safe. Sometimes they've just learned that it's easier to comply than to express.
According to Aanandita Vaghani, real safety looks like being able to disagree, to feel, to speak without fear of losing love.
Over the years, I have learned that the shift from "How do I protect them from everything? to "How do I help them trust themselves through anything?" changes everything.
The goal of parenting was never meant to be creating a life where children never fall; it was meant to be helping them learn how to stand back up. The strongest form of protection is not removing every obstacle from their path, but giving them the confidence, emotional security, and trust to navigate those obstacles themselves. Because eventually, they won't need someone walking ahead clearing the road; they'll need to believe they can walk it on their own.
