Parenting & Family Quote by Fred G. Gosman

Gosman is taking aim at a very modern impulse: treating childhood like a risk-management problem. The line works because it flips a comforting premise on its head. What sounds like care and protection becomes, in his framing, a slow-motion setup for catastrophe. “Shelter” is the loaded verb here. It doesn’t mean ordinary support; it suggests over-insulation, a curated world where frustration is edited out like an offensive scene in a movie. The payoff is the almost brutal symmetry of “more... more... more”: each attempt to eliminate pain now compounds pain later.

The subtext is less about kids being “soft” and more about adults being anxious. Sheltering is often a parent’s self-soothing behavior, a way to keep uncertainty at bay and to perform good guardianship in a culture that scrutinizes every decision. Gosman’s warning lands because it implicates the caregiver: you’re not preventing loss; you’re postponing it and inflating its impact. The “future disappointments” aren’t hypothetical tragedies, either. They’re the everyday collisions with reality - rejection, boredom, criticism, failure - the stuff that builds emotional calluses.

Contextually, the quote sits neatly inside debates about “snowplow parenting,” resilience discourse, and institutions that increasingly promise comfort as a right rather than a temporary condition. Gosman isn’t romanticizing hardship; he’s arguing for calibrated exposure. Disappointment, in this view, isn’t a glitch in childhood. It’s a training ground for adulthood.