I’m a 73-year-old grandmother, and honestly, these 7 parenting moves from my millennial kids drive me crazy

My granddaughter is three years old, and last Tuesday she wanted the blue cup instead of the red one.

What followed was a twenty-minute conversation about feelings, choices, and the importance of using our words. I stood at the kitchen counter and watched.

I have raised four children. When my kids wanted the blue cup, I handed them the red one, and they drank out of it. Nobody went to therapy. They’re all fine.

I love my children more than I can say. I love watching them with their own kids—the tenderness of it, the effort, the way they show up every single day.

But I am seventy-three years old, and I have watched enough of this to know that something has gone sideways.

These are the things that drive me the craziest. Said with love, and with the full weight of someone who has been doing this a lot longer than they have.

1. They negotiate with toddlers like they’re in a boardroom

My son once spent forty-five minutes explaining to his two-year-old why it was time to leave the playground.

Forty-five minutes. I timed it.

The child cannot read a clock. He cannot negotiate a contract. He is two. He does not need a presentation about why the park closes and what we’ll do when we come back, and how his feelings about leaving are completely valid and understood.

When I was raising my kids, I said it was time to go, and we went. There was crying. There were protests. We went anyway.

My other granddaughter, who is five, has learned to tell her father she doesn’t want to go to bed because her body isn’t ready yet. She heard him say that once. He gave her the language, and she turned it on him.

He sat with her for half an hour, talking it through.

I understand that children have feelings that deserve acknowledgment. But there is a wide canyon between dismissing a child’s feelings and conducting a full mediation session every time you need to leave a parking lot. They’ve fallen into the canyon, and they can’t find their way out.

2. They’ve scheduled every minute of the kid’s life

Swimming on Monday, coding on Tuesday, Mandarin on Wednesday, something called creative movement on Thursday that I do not fully understand, and a playdate on Friday that was confirmed three weeks in advance.

My grandchildren are six and eight.

I asked my daughter once what they do on Saturday mornings when nothing is scheduled. She looked at me like I’d asked in a foreign language. Then she pulled out her phone to check.

When I was raising my kids, they went outside. They rode their bikes until dinner. They made up games I didn’t supervise and came home dirty and tired and completely fine.

The best thing that ever happened to them was a long stretch of summer where there was absolutely nothing to do, and they had to figure out what to do with themselves.

I watched my grandson last spring during a rare free afternoon—he didn’t know what to do with himself for the first twenty minutes, then found a stick and spent two hours building something in the backyard I couldn’t entirely identify. He was completely happy. He didn’t need anything from me except to be left alone.

That is how children learn who they are. Not from Mandarin class.

3. They turn every scraped knee into a therapy session

My grandson fell off his bike last summer.

It was a small fall—he scraped his palm, and I’ve seen worse from a handshake. He looked up at his mother, and I watched her face do something that prepared him to be much more upset than he actually was.

She rushed over. She held his face in her hands. Tell me where it hurts. Tell me what you’re feeling right now. That was really scary, wasn’t it?

He cried for twenty minutes.

I think he would have cried for four if she’d said you’re okay, buddy and handed him a bandage. Children take their cues from us. They always have. When we acted like something was manageable, they decided it was manageable. When we acted like every minor injury was a crisis requiring processing, they learned to treat minor things like crises.

My kids fell off bikes. They looked at me. I said walk it off. They walked it off.

They are grown adults now who handle adversity without falling apart, and I do not think that is a coincidence.

4. They apologize to the child every time they say no

My daughter told her son he couldn’t have a second piece of cake. Then she apologized for it.

She actually said she was sorry. Then she explained at length why the decision had been made, what her reasoning was, what she hoped he’d understand about nutrition and treats and balance and the difference between wanting something and needing it.

No is a complete sentence.

I said it to my children constantly, and I didn’t explain myself every time, and I certainly didn’t apologize for it. They grew up knowing that the world contained limits, that people in authority sometimes said no, and that the appropriate response was not a fifteen-minute negotiation.

That lesson has served them well in every job they’ve ever had. I suspect their children are not going to have it. And I think, on some level, they know that—and it keeps them up at night on top of everything else.

5. They photograph everything and experience almost none of it

I was there when my youngest granddaughter took her first steps.

My daughter was there too—sort of. She was there with her phone out, trying to capture it, worried about the angle, checking whether the video had saved correctly.

She missed about half of it, watching it through a screen instead of her own two eyes.

I don’t have a photograph of my youngest’s first steps. I have the memory of it. I know exactly what the room smelled like and what she was wearing and the specific way she looked up at me when she made it all the way across the kitchen floor.

That memory is mine, and it is not going anywhere.

I understand wanting to save things—I do—but there is a difference between saving a moment and replacing a moment with its documentation. They document everything. I sometimes wonder if they’ll actually remember any of it when the kids are grown.

6. They’ve removed every obstacle before the child can meet it

My oldest grandson wanted to pour his own juice last year, and his father said he wasn’t ready yet.

He’s seven.

I learned to pour things at roughly that age because my mother handed me a pitcher and stepped back. Did I spill? Yes. Did I learn? Also yes.

They smooth everything in front of these children like they’re rolling out a carpet. They resolve every conflict before it develops. They answer every question before the child sits with not knowing. They make everything so manageable that the children are never actually asked to manage anything.

My children failed at things constantly.

The spilled juice, the lost game, the friendship that fell apart, the test they didn’t study enough for. I didn’t love watching it. But I let it happen because I understood, in a way my kids seem to have forgotten, that learning to recover from failure is more useful than never failing.

You cannot give a child that skill. They have to earn it themselves, and they can only earn it if you get out of the way long enough to let them try.

7. They’ve confused anxiety with attention and both with love

Here is what I want them to know.

All of it—the scheduling, the negotiating, the documenting, the apologizing, the hovering—comes from love. I know that. I see it every single day. These are not careless parents. They are the most attentive parents I have ever witnessed in seventy-three years of living, and that is precisely the problem.

At some point, attention became anxiety.

The more they read about what children need, the more they worried they weren’t providing it. The more they worried, the more they did. The more they did, the more there was to manage. They are exhausted. My grandchildren are overscheduled, and underleft-alone, and everyone in the house is tired in a way I recognize, and it has nothing to do with how much they love each other.

Love is not the same as vigilance. It took me a long time to understand the difference myself.

I raised my children with less information, more instinct, and a faith I couldn’t always explain that they were going to be okay. They were. Their children will be too.

I just hope they let themselves believe it before the kids are grown and gone and they’re standing in a quiet house, wondering where the time went.

Editor’s Note: This piece is part of our “As Told to Bolde” series where we share personal stories from individuals we have interviewed or surveyed. For more information on how we create content, please review our Editorial Policy.