The Child Who Never Learned to Lose: What Serning and Lyon's 'Apprentices' Essay Gets Right — and Stops Short Of

The Boy in the Car

Niklas Serning and Nina Lyon open their essay with a sentence that should stop any parent cold: Lisa's son would panic at the school gate, crying and shouting, sometimes lashing out — and every accommodation the family tried worked, until it didn't. That phrase is the essay's beating heart. Worked, until it didn't. Each small rescue purchased a little peace at the cost of a little capacity. The debt compounded invisibly, as the authors put it, like an ignored loan.

Serning and Lyon are clinical psychologists writing from inside the therapeutic world, and they are honest enough to indict their own guild. The language of mental health, they argue, has become the default grammar for every conversation about children. Things keep getting worse. More therapy, more diagnoses, more accommodation — and still the school-avoidance numbers climb, developmental markers slip, young adults drift out of work and into disability claims. They propose a new category, overprotective childhood experiences, or OCEs, to name what ACEs (adverse childhood experiences) cannot: the harm done by the assiduous removal of every hardship, however small.

This is a serious essay making a serious argument. It deserves a serious reply. Not a refutation — a deepening.

What the Therapeutic Frame Cannot See

The authors are right that overprotection harms children. They are right that emotion regulation is a trained skill, not a given trait. They are right that parents who read The Whole-Brain Child and plan playdates where no one can lose are not bad parents — they are good parents who followed expert advice straight into a trap.

But the essay treats the problem as primarily a calibration error. We over-corrected. We need to recalibrate: introduce appropriate stress, let children lose at board games, hold the line on bedtimes. The framework stays therapeutic throughout. The goal is a well-regulated child who can function in modern society. What's missing is any account of why discomfort is formative, or what the child is being formed toward.

The Catholic tradition has long held that the answer is virtue — and that virtue is not a psychological outcome but a moral achievement with a telos beyond adjustment. Drawing on Aquinas, virtue is a stable disposition of the will, shaped by repeated action in the face of resistance.[^1] The sock-refusal scene that Serning and Lyon narrate so precisely is not just a missed opportunity for self-regulation practice. It is a missed opportunity for the child to discover that his preferences are not the center of the universe — and that this discovery, made gently and firmly by a loving parent, is itself an act of love.

Tom Lickona, in his lectures on character education, makes the connection explicit: parental rational anger — not rage, but the firm emotional signal that a transgression matters — is essential for conscience formation. Children who never see their parents respond with appropriate gravity to moral failures develop a flattened capacity for compassion. The parent who never says no with conviction is not protecting the child's emotional world. They are depriving it of moral weather.

The Crisis the Essay Won't Quite Name

Here is the hardest version of Serning and Lyon's case, the one they gesture toward but do not fully press: perhaps the therapeutic mindset is not merely a tool that has been over-applied. Perhaps it carries within it a vision of the human person that is at odds with flourishing.

The therapeutic model, at its least examined, treats the self as a system to be optimized. Dysregulation is the problem; regulation is the goal. But a child is not a system. A child is a person with a destiny, and the Catholic tradition insists that destiny involves suffering that cannot be optimized away. Balthasar's account of love-as-gift is relevant here: genuine love always involves a gift of self that costs something, and the capacity for that gift must be practiced — first in the small surrenders of childhood, the shared toy, the lost game, the socks that scratch.

This is not sentimentality about suffering. Gabor Maté's work on trauma and the body, which the Catholic psychology tradition engages carefully, confirms that unprocessed suffering does real neurological damage. The goal is not to flood children with adversity. The goal is what Serning and Lyon call, borrowing from developmental research, the zone of proximal development — the narrow band where challenge exceeds current capacity just enough to require growth. The Catholic tradition recognizes this band not as a therapeutic technique but as the structure of all genuine formation: spiritual, moral, emotional.

Paul Vitz's work on narcissism and original sin is illuminating here.[^2] Vitz argues that primary narcissism — the infant's intense drive toward omnipotence — is not merely a developmental phase to be outgrown but the psychological expression of what the tradition calls concupiscence. Every child arrives wanting to be the center. The parent's loving, patient, firm resistance to that demand is not cruelty. It is the first catechesis. The parent who rigs the board game so the youngest always wins is not protecting the child's self-esteem; they are, without knowing it, confirming the child's deepest disordered instinct: that the world will arrange itself around their comfort.

What Formation Actually Requires

Middle childhood, as DMU faculty explain in their developmental lectures, is the period when the self-concept solidifies and peer influence becomes decisive.[^3] Children in these years are learning not just to regulate emotion but to hide it strategically, to present different faces in different contexts. That capacity has a mixed reputation. It is also essential for social life. The child who has never practiced tolerating discomfort in the safety of the family arrives at school without the emotional vocabulary for this negotiation — unable to read the room, because they have only ever been in one room.

Groeschel, in his account of spiritual development, identifies the same dynamic at the religious level: the soul that has never learned to endure minor deprivations cannot persist through the dark nights that genuine faith requires. He is not speaking metaphorically. The habits formed in childhood — including the habit of tolerating frustration without catastrophizing — are the substrate on which character, and eventually virtue, are built.

Viktor Frankl's contribution matters here too. Meaning, he insisted, is found not by the removal of suffering but by orienting it toward something worth suffering for. The child who puts on the scratchy socks because the family is going somewhere together is learning, in miniature, that love sometimes means doing hard things for others. That is not a therapeutic lesson. It is a moral one.

The Question Lisa's Story Leaves Open

Serning and Lyon end with clinical recommendations — graduated exposure, parental confidence training, schools that hold the line. These are good recommendations. They will help some children.

But they leave untouched the deeper question their essay raises without quite hearing: what is childhood for? The essay treats developmental markers — dressing oneself, sitting still, tolerating separation — as skills whose absence predicts poor outcomes. They do predict poor outcomes. They are also, in the older tradition, something more: early expressions of the person's capacity to love beyond themselves, to endure discomfort for the sake of others, to discover that the world is real and demanding and, precisely because of that, worth engaging.

Lisa's son is not suffering from a calibration error. He is suffering from a loss of formation. Formation, the tradition insists, is always in the direction of something. The question for any parent reading this essay is not only how much stress is appropriate, but what am I forming my child toward? That question does not have a therapeutic answer. It has a human one.

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