icture a child and a parent in a supermarket aisle. The boy is exhausted, wants a tub of ice cream and on being refused, drops to the floor and starts shouting—past the point of reason; past the point of words. His mother stands beside him. She does nothing. Her face is firm, quietly upset, faintly disapproving but she remains calm, letting the storm pass. He cries harder. She waits.

Twenty minutes later, you find them leaving together. No ice cream; no concession; no lectures; no giving in. Nobody filmed them leaving and the scene will never go viral. Yet, it is more educational than almost anything that makes parenting advice.

What happened in that aisle was neither permissive nor controlling. It was repair.

Research on child-parent attachment—rooted in the work of John Bowlby and later, developed by Mary Ainsworth—consistently explains that the quality of a relationship is defined not by absence of conflict but by how conflict is resolved.

When a parent acknowledges a rupture and tries to reconnect, it becomes a teaching moment that no consequence could teach: that relationships survive difficulty; that feelings can be expressed without destroying the bond; and that the people who love you will come back. This shapes not just how a child feels in the moment but how they relate to others for the rest of their life.

These small acts of repair show a child how to rebuild a connection after conflict.

The question of what makes a good parent has itself become a source of anxiety. The honest answer may be this: parenting is not about always getting it right. It is about what you do when things go wrong.

Somewhere along the line, parenting became a performance; a series of ‘correct’ decisions to be made in real time, with an audience. Social media has made it worse. Parenthood now appears as a sequence of curated experiences and ordinary reality looks like a disappointment by comparison. This has produced many anxious, guilt-ridden parents straining toward impossible standards, sometimes missing what actually matters in the process.

Consumer culture has complicated the picture by linking parenting quality to spending: the right school; the right activities; and the well-known tuition. The downside is that parents who cannot provide these things are made to feel inadequate, consciously or not. The result is what might be called a ‘guilt economy,’ in which saying ‘no’ feels like a destitution, and love gets confused with indulgence.

Indulgence, however, is not love.

Saying yes to everything; rescuing from every difficulty; soothing every frustration; removing every obstacle produces children with a low tolerance to disappointment and a limited capacity to cope. The same logic applies to boredom. Stuart Brown’s research on unstructured play tells us that children benefit from time that is not organised for them—from problems that an adult does not immediately fix. This may be unpopular but the evidence supports it.

Imagine a teenager coming home after an unexpectedly disappointing exam result. The knee-jerk response is to express disappointment, attach consequences and make a lesson of the moment. But that instinct, however well-intentioned, misreads what the moment calls for. What is needed first is presence before prescription: being with the child in their disappointment before reaching for the teachable moment. This can be something as simple as sitting quietly beside your child or softly saying, “I’m here with you.” Offering a comforting hand or just your steady presence says more than advice ever could and often reassures an overwhelmed child and parent more than any immediate solution.

The goal is not to protect children from disappointment. It is to build the capacity to take a hit, pull yourself up and try again—a life skill that must be consciously cultivated and not left to chance. There is an important difference between a helpful and a harmful consequence. A manageable consequence teaches something. An overwhelming one causes damage. A child who loses a toy learns a lesson. A child who loses their sense of safety learns something far more serious.

There is something called naturalistic consequences, not artificial punishments but reality doing its quiet work, which are among the most effective and most underused tools available to parents. The broken toy is not immediately replaced. If the homework is forgotten at home, the child has to explain themselves to the teacher. These are not harsh penalties. This is life, functioning as it should.

Another area where parents struggle to decide is the age-appropriate responsibility for caring for their personal belongings and helping with household chores, which builds genuine competence. This is something that praise alone can’t reproduce. This brings us to the concept of praise itself, which merits scrutiny.

Constantly telling a child they are brilliant or talented binds their self-worth to a fixed trait they cannot act on. Praising effort, process and persistence—an approach supported by Carol Dweck’s decades of research on growth mindset—gives children something they can actually use: the understanding that what they do shapes who they become.

None of this is easy to say; some of it is easier said than done. Not every parent has the luxury of this debate.

Parents working multiple jobs; carrying unprocessed life; navigating inflation; illness or isolation, are not failing because they haven’t read the right book. The conditions that make parenting hard are structural and no individual advice adequately addresses them. The standards being applied are not individualised; they assume time, money and emotional bandwidth that many parents simply do not have.

What can be said for every parent, regardless of circumstance, is this: warmth costs nothing. A moment of genuine attention, however imperfect or unplanned, is worth more than a curated experience that distracts. Research consistently shows that a parent’s confidence in their own judgment plays a significant role in their engagement with their children. Shame corrodes that confidence. Empathy restores it.

As a society, through collective effort, we owe parents more than judgment. We owe them empathetic, practical support that meets them where they are, not where we think they should be.

The parenting industry will continue generating content, frameworks and anxiety in roughly equal measure. Most of it misses the point. The point is not to be a perfect parent or to have a stress-free household or that no child ever struggles. It is a child who knows, somewhere in their bones, that when things go wrong between the two of you or out in the world, it is possible to come back, repair and keep going. Parents who hold that as their standard will regularly fall short of it. That is not a problem. That is the whole point. Each time they return, acknowledge what happened and reconnect, they are teaching a life skill. Unlike most of what parenting culture sells, this one is free.

Dr Aisha Sanober Chachar is a consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist and co-founder and director of Synapse Pakistan Neuroscience Institute.

Dr Ayesha Mian is a consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist and co-founder and CEO of Synapse Pakistan Neuroscience Institute.