Maddie (left) and her sister, Lily (right), at the Kingston July 4 parade. You can see the independence and determination on their faces, right?

My wife and I bought our first house in Cleveland Heights in November 2000 when our daughter, Maddie, was 18 months old. Picture the tree-lined, sidewalked street of a Midwestern movie. The neighbors were friendly, the cookout invitations flowed freely, and the seasons transformed the street from snowscapes to spring blooms to summer heat.

It was a pretty sweet life, and it got even sweeter on the Fourth of July, when we discovered the annual community parade started right in front of our house. I remember standing on the porch watching it unfold: a makeshift band with a tuba and drum, a teenager on stilts, a woman carrying a preposterously oversized American flag, and every kid in the neighborhood on bikes, trikes, and scooters.

Maddie did her best to ride her tricycle with its glittering streamers and stubborn pedals. I walked alongside, nudging her to speed up because she was slow and it was hot, until she stopped mid-pedal, looked up at me with an irritated little face, and said words we’ve repeated in our family for more than twenty years: “Maddie herself.”

That moment—her insistence on doing it her way, even if it was slower, harder, messier—stays with me because she taught me the lesson I’ve had to learn and relearn a thousand times throughout her and her sister’s childhoods: we rob them of essential learning when we forget the value of friction.

The Great Smoothing

In June 2025, Forbes published an essay titled “Friction Is the Point: What AI Will Never Understand About Being Human.” In it, Jason Snyder warns that artificial intelligence and automation are erasing friction from nearly every corner of our lives. Questions can be answered in seconds. Content is pushed to us before we ask. Transactions happen with a single click.

“These aren’t just headlines,” he notes. “They’re coordinates on a map of erasure.”

Frictionless systems are efficient, but they also flatten meaning. As Snyder puts it, “Friction isn’t failure. It’s architecture. It gives shape to ideas. It makes meaning take root.”

That insight has profound implications for how we raise children. For many parents, the instinct to eliminate friction is not new. We clear obstacles, solve problems, and intervene before discomfort sets in.

Today, that impulse is amplified by an environment that is increasingly optimized for smoothness. Digital platforms cater to every need, AI solves irritants before they arise, and a culture of convenience convinces us that ease is simply better.

But here’s the paradox: in a friction-light world, the ability to navigate friction becomes the ultimate human differentiator. After all, friction, like gravity and grief and joy, persists in life regardless of how frictionless technology makes living.

Why Parents Reach for Ease

Parents today are living through an age of anxiety: climate instability, social division, a youth mental health crisis, and the relentless uncertainty of AI’s advance. It makes sense that we would want to soften the blows for our children. We want them safe. We want them protected. We want them shielded from the scarier edges of life. We want them to feel confident and smart.

“We all need affirmation,” Gary Bolles recently wrote, “but real human relationships thrive on friction, on the process of trying to understand and live with other humans. Imagine a generation raised from a young age on software that never creates friction and always tells us we’re right.”

For many kids, that future is here, and it profoundly interferes with the natural tools of growth:

  • Neuroplasticity. The brain literally rewires itself in response to challenge. Learning to ride a bike or working through a tough math problem encodes itself not through ease but through the falls, errors, and corrections along the way.
  • “Desirable difficulty.” Psychologist Robert Bjork showed that introducing obstacles to learning—like recalling before being shown an answer—improves retention and understanding. The struggle is not a detour; it’s the mechanism.
  • Antifragility. Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff argue that children, like immune systems, are “antifragile.” Shielding them from stressors makes them weaker; measured exposure makes them stronger.
  • Flow. Mihály Csíkszentmihályi found that the most rewarding states of focus and fulfillment come only after resistance. The challenge precedes the joy.

Remove the struggle, and you remove the growth. When parents or schools smooth obstacles away, we unintentionally create long-term deficits.

  • Resilience gap. Children don’t learn the lived truth: I can do hard things. Without friction, every future bump feels insurmountable.
  • Anxiety paradox. Protecting children from discomfort can heighten their anxiety. If they’ve never experienced manageable stress, even small challenges feel overwhelming.
  • Purpose gap. Struggle builds meaning. Overcoming a setback, whether in academics, friendships, or work, gives children the sense that their effort matters. Remove those opportunities, and they lose out on purpose.

The Forbes essay warns of a similar danger in creative work: when the act of creation is too smooth, it ceases to stick. The same holds for human development. When life is too easy, it slides right off.

The Role of School: Safe Friction

This is why schools matter so deeply. A good school functions as a second home, not only a place of safety but also a place of purposeful struggle. The aim isn’t to expose children to overwhelming difficulty but to give them calibrated doses of friction in a supportive environment.

At Marin Montessori, this looks like:

  • In Primary, a young child spills water while pouring. Instead of being rushed away, they fetch a cloth and clean it. That small friction teaches responsibility and capability.
  • In Lower Elementary, students run class meetings to address conflicts. They must listen, debate, and negotiate solutions. The friction of disagreement becomes practice in empathy and civic life.
  • In Upper Elementary, long-term projects require planning, revision, and presentation. When ideas don’t work out, students must regroup and try again. Friction teaches perseverance.
  • In Junior High, adolescents tend animals, manage micro-businesses, and plan extended trips. Crops fail. Products don’t sell. Group plans unravel. These frictions teach the lessons most crucial for adulthood: resilience, adaptation, collaboration, and renewed effort.

Each example reflects the same design: children encounter real obstacles in a safe space where adults guide, but don’t rescue.

Safe and Strong

Parents often feel torn between two goals: keeping children safe and making them strong. In an anxious world, it feels like we must choose. But purposeful friction shows that we can do both. Children can be held within a caring, secure community and given the freedom to wrestle with difficulty. That balance builds competence and confidence.

The Forbes piece concludes with a striking point: in a world where AI smooths away every edge, friction is the last honest metric. It’s what makes something matter.

The same holds for raising children. In an AI-powered culture that will make life ever smoother, the ability to embrace and navigate struggle will be the defining skill. The future will belong not to those who have avoided friction but to those who have practiced it, learned from it, and built strength through it.

That is the paradoxical gift of childhood: struggle today equips children to thrive tomorrow. My daughter, Maddie, taught me that before she was two. As an independent, off-the-spreadsheet 25-year-old in Chicago, she teaches me the same lesson still. In the end, it’s a lesson worth relearning because, in a world that promises smoothness, the bumps are what make us human.

Works Cited

Bjork, Elizabeth L., and Robert A. Bjork. Making Things Hard on Yourself, but in a Good Way: Creating Desirable Difficulties to Enhance Learning. Psychology and the Real World: Essays Illustrating Fundamental Contributions to Society, Worth Publishers, 2011.

Bolles, Gary. “False Friend: ‘AI Will Help Our Work, but It’s Not a Colleague.’” The Observer, 18 Aug. 2025, www.observer.co.uk/contributor/gary-bolles?type=read

ChatGPT. “Grounded and Soaring Content Planning and Blog Drafting.” OpenAI, 29 Aug. 2025.

Gray, Peter. Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life. Basic Books, 2013.

Haidt, Jonathan, and Greg Lukianoff. The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. Penguin Press, 2018.

Harvard University Center on the Developing Child. “Toxic Stress.” Center on the Developing Child, developingchild.harvard.edu/key-concept/toxic-stress/.

Masten, Ann S. “Resilience Theory and Research on Children and Families: Past, Present, and Promise.” Journal of Family Theory & Review, vol. 10, no. 1, 2018, pp. 12–31. doi:10.1111/jftr.12255.

Mesman, Jude. “Resilience in Children and Adolescents: An Overview of Research.” Frontiers in Psychiatry, vol. 12, 2021, pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8500371/.

Snyder, Jason Alan. “Friction Is the Point: What AI Will Never Understand About Being Human.” Forbes, 16 June 2025, www.forbes.com/sites/jasonalansnyder/2025/06/16/friction-is-the-point-what-ai-will-never-understand-about-being-human/.

Yale University. “Some Childhood Adversity Can Promote Resilience to Anxiety Disorders.” Yale News, 5 Mar. 2025, news.yale.edu/2025/03/05/some-childhood-adversity-can-promote-resilience-anxiety-disorders.