Childhood anxiety has been climbing for over a decade, and researchers have spent years trying to explain why.

One reason is counterintuitive.

It wasn't that kids were facing too much hardship. In fact, they were facing less. Parents tracking their location, managing their schedules, smoothing over their conflicts before they escalated.

Technology, specifically social media, has introduced new pressures to growing up. Otherwise, struggle has been largely engineered out of childhood. And as a result, kids have gotten more anxious.

Children who never navigate small risks and setbacks on their own don't build the capacity to handle bigger ones later. The scraped knee, the playground argument, or the bad grade nobody rescued them from were common to kids a generation ago. These aren't obstacles to a healthy childhood but a feature of one.

Take them away, and a the child doesn't grow up more protected. They grow up more fragile, because they never got the reps of dealing with struggle.

The framework for understanding why is a biological principle called hormesis.

I recently read Dopamine Nation, by psychiatrist Anna Lembke who describes hormesis as the process by which small, controlled doses of stress make a system stronger. A muscle breaks down under load and rebuilds thicker. A body exposed to mild disease adapts and comes back more resilient. The stress isn't the enemy. In the right dose, it's the mechanism required to improve the system’s strength.

Remove it entirely and the system doesn't get stronger but weaker and unprepared for the bigger, inevitable shocks.

In this way, businesses are like kids.

Because if you're the founder who, like a helicopter parent, can't step away, who approves every decision and catches every ball before it drops, you're not protecting your business. You're over-protecting it like an indulgent parent.

And the reckoning works exactly the way it does with the kid who never got to struggle and crashes out upon their first test in the real world.

As a business grows the stakes only get bigger, exposing the business to greater risk.

The true cost of over-managing it doesn't show up while things are small and manageable. It shows up later, when you try to grow, or step back, or sell, and discover the whole thing depends on you being everywhere at once.

Small doses of struggle, introduced on purpose, while the stakes are still survivable, build a business that can take a hit without you. The goal isn't to manufacture hardship. It's to stop absorbing the hardship that could be doing useful work on your behalf.

Here are the places where you’re probably missing opportunities for your business to become more resilient.

Start with the most common form of over-managing, decision making.

Write down all of the decisions you make in a week. Which vendor, which wording, whether to give the refund, or how to handle the unhappy client. Your team probably checks with you first, because they've learned that checking with you first is safer than being wrong.

You’re like the parent who does the science project. The intentions are good and yes, the work comes out better. However, the kid learns nothing because the struggle that would have taught them got done by you.

A decision made for someone is a decision they don't learn to make.

Push real decisions down to your team now, while the stakes are small enough to survive being wrong. Let a team member choose the vendor. Let them handle the refund. Let them get it wrong sometimes, even if it costs you a little.

A five hundred dollar mistake made by someone who's learning is cheap tuition. Better now than when that same person facing their first real decision on a fifty thousand dollar call, because you finally got sick, or overwhelmed, or simply weren't in the room.

You don't build judgment by protecting people from decisions. You build it by letting them decide, watching them miss, and being there while the miss is still small.

Watching someone make a call you'd have made differently, and saying nothing, is one of the harder things an owner does. That discomfort is the dose and that is the way it’s supposed to feel.

As an owner, you’re likely holding the whole thing together.

When something breaks, you fix it. When a client needs something unusual, you handle it personally. When a process fails, you step in and make it work through sheer effort. The business runs, and it runs because you're the only mechanism running it.

Nothing is written down, because it doesn't need to be. It lives in your head, and you're always there.

This is the parent who knows where everything is, remembers every appointment, packs the lunches, and keeps the whole operation moving. The kids never learn to run any of it, because they've never had to. The parent is the system.

Then Mom gets sick for a week, and the house falls apart.

The hormetic move is to stop arriving.

Not all at once, but in small doses. Let the problem sit long enough that someone has to build the thing that solves it. You don't jump in when the process stumbles. You let the team feel the friction, because the friction is what forces a real system to exist.

Again, there is discomfort in watching something run worse than you could run it yourself. That's the cost.

The businesses that scale, and the ones that eventually sell, are the ones where the owner made themselves removable. Where the systems live outside their head. That doesn't happen while you're the rescue. It only happens when you step back and let the gap become obvious enough that something durable grows to fill it.

A business that relies solely on you is a job. The work now is building a real business that doesn’t.

The third form of over-managing is the most invisible.

You cushion the business from every pinch. A project runs over, so you eat the cost. The team asks for the better tool, the bigger budget, the outside help, and you find a way to give it to them, because you can, and because saying yes feels better than saying no.

The team never feels the limit because you absorb it before it reaches them.

This is the kid who gets money whenever they ask. Not spoiled, exactly. Just never on the other side of a real constraint. They never had to choose between two things they wanted, never had to make something stretch, never had to get resourceful because there wasn't another option. Then they hit adulthood with no instinct for any of it.

Resourcefulness is a muscle that only grows under load.

A team that has never operated under a real constraint doesn't develop the instinct for one. They don't learn to prioritize, because everything gets funded. They don't learn to improvise, because the better option is always available. They don't learn what actually matters, because they've never had to make trade-offs.

In the name of hormesis, let constraints reach them.

Not manufactured scarcity or a poverty mindset. Just the real limits the business already has, revealed instead of absorbed. When the budget is genuinely tight, let the team plan inside it rather than topping it up. When two priorities compete and you can only fund one, let them make the case and feel the trade. When the easy expensive fix is available, sometimes sit on your hands and let them find the cheaper, smarter one.

The constraints you keep absorbing are the exact conditions that build a resourceful team. Take them away, and you get a team that only knows how to operate when everything is abundant. That team is fine while times are good. When the market tightens, and eventually it always does, they've never once had to do more with less, and they don't know how.

You can teach resourcefulness under real pressure now, in doses you control, while a wrong turn is recoverable. Or the market can teach it later, all at once, when it isn't.

You get to choose whether its a lesson or a crisis.

Here's a single test that exposes all three at once.

Take two weeks off. No calls, no check-ins, no monitoring from your phone at dinner.

Then watch what breaks. If you can’t bear to even think of trying it you already have your answer as to either how fragile your business really is or how much it is really a job.

If you try it, treat every break as a dependency map. It will show you exactly where the business depends on you, and dependency is the thing you're trying to remove.

The point of the test is doing it now, while the stakes are still small enough that what breaks is recoverable. A business that falls apart during a two-week absence today is showing you, cheaply, what would have fallen apart during a real crisis tomorrow.

That's the whole idea, start to finish.

The struggle you keep absorbing doesn't disappear. It waits. And it compounds while it waits, until the day the stakes are too high to practice and the lesson arrives as a catastrophe instead of a dose.

You don't protect a business by carrying it. You protect it by letting it learn to carry itself, in doses small enough to survive, while you're still there to catch what falls.

Start today before the stakes get any higher.

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