As a clinical psychologist, I spend a lot of time sitting with people who are struggling because of something a well-meaning person did for them. Not to them. For them. There's a term in the literature for this. It's called idiot compassion; it comes from Buddhist psychology and means compassion that prioritises someone's immediate comfort over their long-term wellbeing. It feels like kindness. It looks like kindness. And it is almost always motivated by kindness. But it's also motivated by a human need to not feel helpless. As parents of teenagers, we are particularly vulnerable to this. Our teenager comes home and something has gone wrong. Maybe something has happened in their friend group, or they couldn't answer the maths question, and something in us shifts into problem-solving. We reassure, we rationalise, we problem solve. They seem okay and we feel better. This is the short-term gain. The cost of idiot compassion is the subtle message it sends our teenage...