What it does to them

I've been careful in this book not to say that the takeover damages children, because the research doesn't say it, and because most children of parents who do everything turn out to be adults who can do things, having learned them later and elsewhere. So I want to be exact about what I think it does.

Bandura, whose work on self-efficacy underlies a lot of what I've cited, used that term for a person's belief that they can do a thing, and argued that the strongest source of it is having done the thing. Not being told you can. Not watching someone else do it. Doing it, badly, and then less badly. If that's right, and it's held up for fifty years, then a child who's never done the zip has no belief about the zip, and a child who's done nothing has a general absence where a sense of being able to do things would be. That absence doesn't show up at four. It shows up at fourteen, when the jobs get bigger and the child meets one without a parent's hand and has no record to draw on.

The research on parents and adolescents gives a supporting picture. Marie Yap and colleagues reviewed a hundred and eighty-one studies of what parents do and whether their twelve-to-eighteen-year-olds had depression or anxiety, and found that over-involvement, and giving the young person less room to run their own life, were among the factors with the soundest evidence of a link, alongside less warmth and more conflict. In early childhood, the picture is weaker. Eline Möller and colleagues pooled studies of children under five and found the links between over-controlling or over-protective parenting and early anxiety were small. I'd read those two together as saying that the cost isn't at four and it grows, which is what you'd expect if what's being lost is practice.

There's also what the hand says. Every takeover carries a message, whether or not you mean it, and the message is "you can't". A child who receives it twenty times a morning, kindly, for years, will believe it, because it's the most consistent thing anyone tells them. It's a bit like a spectator who runs onto the pitch every time a player looks like fumbling the ball. The player is never allowed to find out what they'd have done.

What it does to them, then, isn't a wound. It's a gap in the record, and the record is what they'll consult at eighteen when they're wondering whether they can. You can't fill it retrospectively. You can stop widening it on Tuesday.