Jo Frost spent years telling parents hard truths on ABC’s SUPERNANNY, and apparently retirement hasn’t cured her of it.
“We are slowly disabling our children,” Frost said in a June 2026 video posted to her Instagram that has since pulled in more than 4 million views.
Frost, the British nanny and child care specialist who built her name observing families at their most frazzled, lays out exactly where she thinks things have gone wrong. Toddlers linger in strollers or hang onto pacifiers well past the age most kids give them up. Older kids fare no better, she says: 7-year-olds who need an electric toothbrush to get the job done, 8-year-olds who can’t manage a knife and fork at the table.
“Nine-year-olds who don’t basically understand bathroom hygiene,” Frost added.
Her diagnosis is straightforward. Parents have quietly stopped teaching life skills, and into that vacuum rushes the habit of doing things for kids instead of teaching kids to do things for themselves. Frost has a word for the result: infantile.
The comment section under her post reads like a staff meeting for elementary school teachers.
“Amen. I work with 3-5 year olds and I constantly see lack of life skills, independent skills and self-care skills,” one commenter wrote.
Related: Is Your Child Suffering from ‘Popcorn Brain’? Here’s What You Need to Know.
“As a teacher, this is debilitating in the classroom,” another added.
Research backs the instinct that stepping back helps kids more than stepping in does. But the reasons parents keep stepping in probably have less to do with laziness than with plain exhaustion. The Surgeon General’s 2024 advisory, “Parents Under Pressure,” found that 48% of parents say their stress is completely overwhelming most days, compared to 26% of other adults.
Money is a big piece of that load. Maryland-based nature-informed therapist Nathalie Savell told Parents that most families now need two incomes just to keep up. Pew Research Center data backs her up: 52% of households with kids under 18 now have both parents working full-time, up from 46% a decade ago and just 31% in 1975.
That math leaves less time and even less patience for teaching a kid to tie his own shoes, so a parent in a hurry just ties them instead. Screens eat up whatever time is left.
“Our mental load is much greater today because of screens and social media and life in general,” Savell said. “We’re all pretty much at capacity all the time.”
The cost isn’t only untied shoes. Ana Homayoun, an academic advisor and author of Getting In Is Not Enough: The New Blueprint for Success Beyond Grades, Test Scores, and College Admission, has watched executive functioning — planning, prioritizing, managing emotions — erode in students of every age.
“After 25 years in practice, I’m seeing students arrive at college unable to schedule their own appointments, manage a to-do list without a parent’s help, or recover from a setback without falling apart,” Homayoun told Parents. “These aren’t personality traits.”
A January 2026 EdWeek Research Center survey of more than 1,100 early educators found kids in pre-K through third grade struggling with basics — following instructions, tying shoes, using the bathroom — more than they were just two years earlier. Homayoun doesn’t pin the blame on parents so much as on a culture that has organized childhood “around performance and outcomes rather than process and independence.”
That’s a diagnosis Christian parents have heard before, just phrased differently. Proverbs 22:6 calls believers to train up a child in the way he should go, and training has always meant tolerating the fumbled shoelace and the crooked toothbrushing long enough for a skill to actually take root. Frost isn’t preaching, but her fix sounds a lot like discipleship anyway.
“We guide, we repeat, we expect. Not perfectly. Consistently,” Frost said, closing out her post. “Because independence isn’t something that just happens, it’s taught.”
Give a kid room to get it right, she said, and eventually, he will.
Read Next: New Research Gives Parents Another Reason to Rethink Screen Time
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