Give Children Every Advantage. Not Every Comfort.

My children have grown up with considerable privilege. They have travelled. They have had access to sport, languages, activities and experiences I am enormously grateful we could give them.

Perhaps because of that, I became very conscious early on of something I did not want privilege to do: I didn’t want it to make their world smaller.

I have never believed that children need artificial hardship. I see no virtue in making a child’s life unnecessarily difficult simply because difficulty supposedly builds character. If you can give your children a beautiful childhood, wonderful experiences and opportunities that will enrich their lives, give them those things.

But there is an enormous difference between giving a child advantages and using those advantages to remove ordinary responsibility, effort and difficulty from their life.

Comfort Is Not the Problem

We lived for many years in Switzerland, surrounded by families whose children had access to extraordinary opportunities, including some of the country’s best-known private schools. Over the years, I often saw a peculiar kind of helplessness develop when adults became very good at making life easy for children.

I knew children who could ski beautifully but couldn’t buy their own ski pass. Children who couldn’t lace their own shoes at eight or find their way around at fourteen, without a phone telling them where to turn.

None of this made me think they had been given too much. It made me wonder whether too much had been done for them.

I wanted something different for mine. I wanted them to be comfortable in beautiful places AND capable outside them. I wanted them to enjoy being looked after AND know how to look after themselves. I wanted them to have opportunities without confusing those opportunities with an entitlement to a life in which other people took care of the difficult bits.

Privilege should expand a child’s world, not protect them from it.

Resources Should Remove Limitations, Not Responsibility

That distinction has influenced countless small decisions in our family. If one of my children wanted to swim, I was happy to sign them up for swimming. But at five, they could pack their own swimming bag.

We have had help in our home. That has never meant that somebody else should clean up a mess a child has just made. Run through the house in muddy shoes and you know where the vacuum cleaner is. Spill something and you clean it up. For me, this is basic living hygiene. It has nothing to do with whether someone else could technically be paid to do it.

The same applies to activities. As my children became capable of getting themselves places, I increasingly expected them to do so. When we lived in Switzerland, my six-year-old and her seven-year-old sister could take public transportation to an activity together. That was appropriate in the environment we lived in, and I watched their confidence grow by leaps and bounds because they were trusted.

I was also very conscious of not filling their lives with activities simply because the activities were available. Children need time, boredom and freedom, too. I have written separately about how many activities a child should have, because more opportunity does not automatically mean more development.

The principle is simple: I can provide the opportunity without taking over the child’s part of it.

Don’t Remove the Growth From the Opportunity

When one of my sons was twelve, he flew from Switzerland to South Africa by himself to visit his grandparents. That trip was a privilege. It also involved changing planes at Heathrow.

Anyone who knows Heathrow can imagine how delighted a twelve-year-old might be about that prospect.

He was nervous. We talked about it beforehand, and we laughed about it, once he had successfully made his way through and could enjoy having done it. I didn’t send him through Heathrow because I thought navigating a huge airport would build character. I sent him because he had somewhere wonderful to go and I believed he was capable of getting there.

The difficulty was simply part of the opportunity. I don’t manufacture hardship for my children. I simply don’t remove every difficulty that life naturally puts in their way.

There is a great deal of growth hidden inside those ordinary difficulties: finding the right platform, asking someone for help, realizing you packed the wrong thing, getting lost and finding your way again, speaking to an unfamiliar adult, working out what to do when the plan changes.

If we remove all of that because we can, we may also remove precisely the experiences through which children discover that they can manage.

Not Every Problem Needs More Resources

Recently, my sixteen-year-old passed a set of exams with results well below what we knew he was capable of. There was no question of ability. He simply hadn’t put in the work.

He is resitting the exams, and tutors were immediately suggested to us. I said no.

If I had watched him work seriously and struggle to understand the material, my answer would have been different. If the problem were something he genuinely could not master alone, I would happily get him the help he needed. But his problem wasn’t a lack of teaching. It was a lack of effort.

Hiring a tutor would have been an easy response. It just would not have addressed the actual problem. First, the work is his. If he reaches the point where he has done that work and needs expertise he cannot provide for himself, then we can reconsider.

Resources should remove limitations. They should not remove responsibility.

Privilege Can Become a Bubble

When you have the ability to make things easier for your children, it is tempting to do exactly that. You can drive them instead of letting them work out the bus. Replace the forgotten item instead of letting them manage without it. Speak to the adult on their behalf. Pack the bag. Remember the deadline. Smooth over the disagreement. Hire someone. Fix it.

Individually, none of those things is particularly consequential. But childhood is made up of thousands of these small moments. Taken together, they determine whether a child experiences himself as someone who can handle life or someone for whom life is handled.

A child can have an extraordinarily privileged upbringing and emerge remarkably unprepared for anything outside the environment that privilege created. That, to me, is not much of an advantage.

Give Them Every Advantage

I want my children to enjoy the life their father and I have built. I have no interest in apologizing for comfort or withholding wonderful things in the hope that deprivation will make them better people.

I want them to travel, learn languages, play sports, eat in beautiful restaurants, see extraordinary places, receive an excellent education, develop interests and discover what they are good at. I want them to have experiences that enlarge their understanding of what life can be. And I want them to know how fortunate they are.

But alongside all of that, I want them to buy the ticket, pack the bag, clean the mess, find the way, ask the question and do the work. The point of giving children advantages is not to make sure nothing is ever difficult for them. It is to give them more of the world to step into.