What Trees Can Teach Us About Raising Resilient Adults

Walk through any forest after a windstorm and you’ll notice something curious. The trees that grew in sheltered valleys, protected from harsh weather, are often the ones toppled and broken. Meanwhile, the trees exposed to constant wind on mountain ridges stand firm, their roots driven deep into rock, their trunks dense and strong. These wind-battered trees didn’t just survive adversity—they were shaped by it into something more resilient than they could have become in easier conditions.

The same principle applies to raising humans, though it’s far more painful to watch.

I see this pattern regularly in my practice. Many patients come to me troubled not by their own struggles, but by their adult children’s inability to launch, to persist, to believe in themselves. And woven through these conversations is almost always the same thread: “They called again asking for money. I know I should say no, but…” The sentence trails off, heavy with guilt, love, and a quiet desperation to somehow fix what feels broken.

But here’s what I’ve come to understand both clinically and through watching the natural world: the purpose of parenting isn’t to prevent our children from ever feeling discomfort, failure, or struggle. The purpose is to raise adults who can face these inevitable experiences and discover their own capacity to overcome them.

Consider the butterfly emerging from its chrysalis. If you were to carefully cut open the cocoon to “help” the butterfly, sparing it the exhausting struggle of pushing through that tiny opening, you would doom it. The struggle itself is what forces fluid from the butterfly’s body into its wings, giving them the strength for flight. Without that adversity, the butterfly will never fly. Your kindness would cripple it.

This is a difficult truth for parents who love deeply: sometimes the most loving thing we can do is allow our children to struggle.

The Root System of True Confidence

Real self-esteem—the kind that sustains someone through life’s inevitable setbacks—doesn’t come from being told you’re capable. It comes from the lived experience of facing something difficult and discovering you can handle it. It’s built slowly, challenge by challenge, like a tree growing rings of strength with each passing season.

When we continually rescue our adult children from financial consequences, we’re not protecting them. We’re preventing them from developing their own root system. We’re keeping them as saplings in a greenhouse, never exposed to the conditions that would force them to grow stronger, to dig deeper, to figure out how to weather storms on their own.

I think of the emperor penguins in Antarctica. After hatching, the chicks huddle together in a crèche while their parents hunt for weeks at a time in brutal conditions. The parents don’t stay to shield their young from every cold wind. They know their job is to feed them and then step back, allowing the chicks to learn to regulate their own temperature, to navigate their harsh environment, to become penguins who can survive without constant intervention.

The parent penguin’s job is to prepare their young for the world as it is, not to pretend it’s something gentler.

Why We Keep Giving: The Hidden Motivations

So why do we do it? Why do so many loving, intelligent parents continue writing checks to adult children who never seem to figure it out?

The reasons are layered and often unconscious. Sometimes it’s guilt—maybe we divorced, maybe we worked too much, maybe we didn’t know then what we know now about parenting. The checkbook becomes a way to retroactively fix what we believe we got wrong the first time. But money can’t repair the past. It can only complicate the present.

Sometimes it’s fear. What if they really can’t make it? What if they end up homeless, hungry, desperate? This fear feels like love, but it’s actually a profound underestimation of our children’s capacity. It says: “I don’t believe you can survive without me.” That’s a terrible message to send someone you’re trying to help feel capable.

Sometimes—and this is the hardest one to admit—it’s about our own need to feel needed. When we’re no longer essential to our children’s daily survival, we can feel untethered, purposeless. Writing that check restores us to the center of their story. We become important again. But this kind of importance comes at the cost of their independence and our own freedom.

Think about how a mother bird teaches her fledglings to fly. There comes a moment when she stops bringing food to the nest. The hungry chicks venture to the edge, and then—she nudges them out. Some parents gasp at this scene, seeing cruelty. But the mother bird knows something essential: her babies will never discover they can fly while the nest remains comfortable. The discomfort isn’t punishment. It’s invitation.

The Difference Between Support and Enabling

I want to be clear: I’m not suggesting we abandon our adult children or refuse all help ever. There’s a crucial difference between temporary support during a genuine crisis and ongoing financial rescue that prevents natural consequences from teaching their lessons.

A wolf pack cares for an injured member, bringing them food and protecting them while they heal. But once healed, that wolf is expected to hunt again, to contribute, to function as part of the pack. The support is temporary and purposeful, aimed at restoration of function, not permanent dependence.

True support might look like: helping with rent for three months while your daughter recovers from a serious illness, but with a clear timeline and plan for her to resume responsibility. Enabling looks like: paying her rent every time she overspends on luxuries, teaching her that poor decisions have no consequences because Mom and Dad will always fix it.

True support builds toward independence. Enabling builds toward permanent dependence.

The Gift of Natural Consequences

In nature, animals learn through experience. The young fox who attacks a porcupine learns a painful but memorable lesson about choosing targets wisely. No parent fox can explain this wisdom—it has to be learned through the consequence itself. That’s not cruel; that’s how competence develops.

When we prevent our adult children from experiencing the natural consequences of their choices, we steal from them the opportunity to learn. We communicate, however unintentionally, that we don’t trust them to learn, to adapt, to grow. We keep them in perpetual childhood.

The woman who bounces a rent check learns to manage her money better. The man who has to sell his luxury car to afford his bills learns to live within his means. The adult who has to say “I can’t afford to go out this weekend” learns to make trade-offs. These lessons feel harsh in the moment, but they build something essential: the bone-deep knowledge that “I can figure this out.”

That knowledge—that cellular certainty that you have what it takes to handle difficult things—is worth more than any amount of money we could give them.

Redefining Good Parenting in the Later Years

Perhaps the most important question isn’t “Am I being a good parent?” but rather “Am I parenting toward the right goal?”

If the goal is to keep our children comfortable, never struggling, always rescued from their mistakes, then continual financial support makes sense. But if the goal is to raise adults who can build their own meaningful lives, who believe in their own capability, who can face setbacks without crumbling—then our job is different.

Our job is to love them enough to let them struggle. To believe in them enough to step back. To trust the process even when it looks frightening.

Consider the salmon swimming upstream to spawn. The journey is brutal—swimming against powerful currents, leaping up waterfalls, pushing past exhaustion. Young salmon don’t make this journey; only adults do. And they can only make it because they’ve been strengthened by years of swimming in the ocean, developing the muscle and endurance needed for the challenge ahead.

If we could somehow transport the salmon upstream in a comfortable truck, sparing them the difficult journey, we’d think we were being kind. But we’d be robbing them of the experience that makes them who they are—creatures of remarkable strength and determination.

What to Do Instead

So what does good parenting of adult children actually look like?

It looks like love without rescue. It looks like believing in their capacity even when they don’t believe in it themselves. It looks like saying “I know this is hard, and I believe you can handle it” instead of “Let me fix it for you.”

It might look like: “I can’t give you money for your electric bill, but I’m happy to sit down with you and help you create a budget.” Or: “I won’t co-sign another lease, but I’ll help you research apartments in your actual price range.” Or simply: “I love you, and I know you’re capable of figuring this out.”

This is harder than writing a check. It requires us to tolerate our own discomfort at witnessing theirs. It asks us to trust a process we can’t control. It demands that we grieve the fantasy of being able to smooth every rough edge from their lives.

But it’s the difference between being a tree that keeps its saplings forever in its shade versus being a tree that allows new growth to find its own light.

The Long View

In my practice, I’ve noticed something interesting. The parents who are most at peace in their later years aren’t the ones whose adult children needed the least help. They’re the ones whose children learned to help themselves.

These are parents who set boundaries, who allowed natural consequences, who believed in their children’s resilience even when it was terrifying to do so. And now, decades later, they have adult children who are genuinely capable, who’ve developed their own resources, who have the confidence that comes only from having faced challenges and discovered they could overcome them.

These relationships are often closer, not more distant, because they’re built on mutual respect between adults, not on the awkward dynamic of perpetual parent-child dependence.

The wind-sculpted trees on the mountain ridge don’t resent the wind that shaped them. They simply stand, strong and resilient, exactly what they needed to become to thrive in the environment they were given.

Your adult children are more capable than you fear and more resilient than you imagine. The greatest gift you can give them isn’t money. It’s the opportunity to discover their own strength.

That discovery only happens in the struggle. And sometimes the most loving thing we can do is stop preventing it.