Why Your Kids Don't Know How to Do Anything (It's Not Their Fault)
Your kid can’t cook. Can’t do laundry. Can’t make a phone call. Can’t manage their own schedule. Can’t handle conflict without you refereeing.
And you’re looking at them thinking: how did we get here?
Here’s the uncomfortable answer: you did everything for them.
Not maliciously. Not even consciously. It just happened. One rescued morning at a time.
The accumulation
When they were 3 and couldn’t zip their coat, you zipped it. Faster. Less crying. Made sense.
When they were 6 and made a mess making a sandwich, you made the sandwich. Cleaner. Quicker. Less waste.
When they were 9 and loaded the dishwasher wrong, you reloaded it. It just bugged you.
When they were 12 and needed to call the orthodontist, you made the call. It was easier.
Each moment was rational. Each moment taught the same lesson: “You can’t do this. I’ll handle it.”
Multiply that by thousands of moments across years and you get a teenager who believes — deep down, in their bones — that they are not capable.
It’s not laziness
When people see a teenager who can’t do basic things, they think lazy. But that’s not what’s happening.
Your kid didn’t refuse to learn. They were never asked to. The opportunity was taken from them before they knew it existed.
A kid who’s never been allowed to struggle with the zipper never learns what struggling-and-succeeding feels like. They skip straight to “someone else will do it.” Not because they’re entitled. Because that’s the only world they know.
The real damage
Missing skills are fixable. A motivated teenager can learn to cook in a few weeks. Money management can be taught in a month. Laundry takes about 20 minutes to explain.
The real damage is the missing belief.
A kid who’s never handled things on their own doesn’t believe they can. And that belief — “I can’t handle this” — shows up everywhere:
- They avoid hard things
- They freeze when facing the unfamiliar
- They need constant reassurance
- They wait to be told what to do
- They crumble at the first sign of failure
This follows them to college. To their first job. To their first relationship. The skills can be learned at any age. The belief is harder to rebuild the longer you wait.
Why good parents do this
It’s not that you didn’t care. It’s that you cared too much to let them struggle.
Plus the math never felt right in the moment. Teach your 7-year-old to make eggs = 20 minutes of supervision, a mess to clean, and eggs that are barely edible. Make eggs yourself = 3 minutes, clean kitchen, everyone’s fed.
You chose efficiency. Every parent does. But efficiency in the moment creates dependency over time.
There’s also this: watching your kid struggle is genuinely painful. Every parenting instinct says “help them.” Stepping back feels like neglect. It’s not. It’s the opposite. But it doesn’t feel that way.
The fix
Stop doing things for them that they could learn to do themselves.
Not all at once. Pick one thing.
If they’re young (5-8): Start with getting dressed, making their bed, putting away their dishes, helping with simple food prep. Here’s a fuller list for 5-year-olds.
If they’re pre-teen (9-12): Laundry, simple meals, their own schedule, packing their own bag. They should know what every 10-year-old should know.
If they’re a teenager (13+): Everything in the 50 things list is fair game. Start with whatever you’ve been doing for them most recently. Hand it over completely.
Then: step back. For real. Not “step back but hover.” Not “step back but redo it after.” Actually step back.
They’ll do it wrong. They’ll forget. They’ll complain. That’s the process. The discomfort is the learning.
The hardest part
The hardest part isn’t teaching the skills. It’s tolerating the gap between what they produce and what you would have produced.
The wrinkled laundry. The overcooked pasta. The messy bed. The forgotten appointment.
You have to let those stand. Because the alternative — fixing it for them — teaches them they were right to think they couldn’t do it.
Every time they struggle and survive, the belief shifts: from “I can’t” to “I can, actually.”
That shift is worth more than any skill on any list.
Start today
Don’t make a plan. Don’t buy a book about it. Don’t wait for the right moment.
Pick one thing you do for your kid that they could learn to do themselves. Tell them it’s theirs now. Show them once. Then step back.
It’ll be messy. It’ll be slow. It’ll be uncomfortable.
That’s what building capability looks like.
Want a system for tracking what your kids can do — and what’s next? That’s what we built.