You are sitting at the kitchen table with your grandchild. They are working on homework, or trying to open something, or wrestling with a craft project. Suddenly the pencil goes down, the arms cross, and you hear it: “I can’t do it.”
Everything in you wants to lean over and fix it. That is love. That is instinct. But parenting experts Deena Margolin and Kristin Gallant say that jumping in, as good as it feels in the moment, can actually work against the child in the long run.
Why Letting Them Struggle Is the Kindest Thing
Margolin and Gallant are the founders of Big Little Feelings, an online parenting resource with 3.5 million Instagram followers. They describe themselves as toddler and big kid experts, and their focus is on helping kids thrive, not just behave.
Their advice on frustration might be hard to hear at first. But it makes a lot of sense.
“It is OK for your kid to struggle,” Margolin told Parade. “They can feel frustrated. Making mistakes is normal and it’s healthy. That’s how you end up learning and being able to handle frustration better eventually.”
When a child works through something difficult on their own, they build what the experts call frustration tolerance. That tolerance leads to resilience and confidence, the kind that sticks with them long after the homework is done.
Instead of stepping in, Margolin suggests saying something like: “I know this is hard for you. When you’re ready, see if you can try it a different way.” You are still right there. You are still supportive. You are just giving them the space to figure it out.
The Part That Is Hard for Grown-Ups Too
Here is where it gets personal and where Gallant says people are not going to want to hear it.
Children do not just listen to what we tell them. They watch everything we do. If a grandparent (or parent) gets rattled by small frustrations: spilled coffee, a traffic delay, a stubborn jar lid, the child takes note. And the next time they hit a wall, they are likely to react exactly the same way.
“They are sponges, they’re our mirrors,” Gallant says. “We can tell our kids to do things all day long. But if you yourself are not modeling frustration tolerance, it’s actually just going to go in one ear and out the other.”
None of this means you have to be endlessly cheerful or pretend hard things are easy. Quite the opposite, actually.
Show Them What Hard Looks Like
Margolin encourages adults to let grandchildren see them struggle with small everyday tasks. Narrate it out loud. Something like: “This jar is really hard to open. I’m going to have to try five times. There, I stuck with it.”
That kind of modeling does something words alone cannot. It shows a child that even grown-ups face frustration. And that sticking with something hard is exactly what you do.
There is also a gift waiting on the other side of all that effort. “There is no better feeling in the world than when you stick with something hard, and then you get it,” Margolin says. “We don’t want to rob our kids of that feeling.”
As grandparents, we have a unique role. We are not rushing to the next obligation. We have time to sit beside them, encourage them, and let them discover what they are truly capable of. That patience, more than any fix we could offer, is one of the best things we can give.
