“Life Isn’t Fair” Wasn’t Cruel. It Was the Lesson.
- carlarioalves
- Dec 31, 2025
- 2 min read
When my children said, “That’s not fair,” my response was often direct:
“Life is unfair. Learn to deal with it.”
They didn’t always appreciate it.
Sometimes they pushed back with, “You’re making it unfair.”
And I told them the truth:
“Well, it’s my job to teach you how the world works.”
That statement makes people uncomfortable.
But discomfort does not make it wrong.
Fairness is not how life operates
Life does not run on fairness.
It runs on rules, power, timing, systems, luck, and other people’s decisions.
Shielding children from this reality doesn’t prepare them — it misleads them.
One of the biggest parenting mistakes is confusing emotional support with emotional insulation. They are not the same.
Support says: “You can handle this.”
Insulation says: “You shouldn’t have to.”
Only one of those builds competence.
Frustration is not harm — it’s training
Decades of developmental psychology are clear on this point:
Children who are allowed to experience manageable frustration develop:
better emotional regulation
stronger self-control
higher resilience in adulthood
The long-running Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study showed that childhood self-control strongly predicts adult outcomes including health, wealth, and criminal behaviour (Moffitt et al., 2011).
In other words: learning to deal with it early matters.
Hearing “no”, encountering unfairness, and sitting with disappointment are not parenting failures.
They are practice.
Authority exists — whether we like it or not
Schools are unfair.
Workplaces are unfair.
Illness is unfair.
Loss is unfair.
No one pauses real life to negotiate feelings first.
Children eventually meet teachers, managers, institutions, and laws that do not explain themselves gently. Pretending otherwise does not protect them — it delays their adjustment.
This is why research consistently shows that authoritative parenting — clear limits combined with consistency — produces better long-term outcomes than permissive approaches that remove frustration altogether (Baumrind; Steinberg).
High expectations are not cruelty.
They are preparation.
“Life is hard” is not the same as “I don’t care”
Telling a child that life is hard does not mean abandoning them emotionally.
It means refusing to lie.
It means saying:
I won’t remove every obstacle — but I believe you are capable of climbing.
That belief matters.
Psychologist Adele Diamond’s work on executive function shows that children develop coping skills by using them, not by being spared from difficulty (Diamond, 2013).
Resilience is built through exposure, repetition, and responsibility — not comfort alone.
The real job of a parent
The job of a parent is not to create a perfectly fair world.
It is to prepare children for an imperfect one.
Sometimes that preparation sounds like reassurance.
Sometimes it sounds like silence.
And sometimes it sounds like this:
“Life is unfair.
And you are strong enough to handle it.”
That lesson isn’t harsh.
It’s honest.
See, the point is…
life isn’t fair, and pretending otherwise doesn’t prepare anyone.
What prepares people is honesty, limits, and the expectation that they can cope — even when things don’t go their way.
fairness is not guaranteed.
Resilience is learned.
And learning it early is an advantage, not a cruelty.
I wasn’t trying to make life feel fair.
I was trying to make my children capable.
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