What Bear Grylls’ Parenting Post Taught Me About Letting My Kids Struggle
The playground was busier than usual for a Tuesday afternoon. I was standing under the big oak tree, trying to keep one eye on my six-year-old son, Leo, and the other on my phone, where my friend Rachel had sent me a screenshot of a Bear Grylls Instagram post about parenting. I read it twice, then a third time, while Leo scrambled up the climbing frame that makes my stomach drop every single time.
The post wasn’t what I expected. It wasn’t about survival skills or building fires or foraging for wild berries in the back garden. It was about how Grylls lets his sons climb trees and jump off rocks, and how he tries not to hover or rush in when they fall. The line that stuck with me was something about how a child needs to know what it feels like to slip before they can learn to hold on properly. I read it again as Leo disappeared behind the red slide, and I felt that familiar twitch in my legs—the urge to walk over and make sure he hadn’t wedged himself in somewhere.
When I looked up again, Leo was on the highest platform. He’d never gone that high before. He was standing perfectly still, his small hands gripping the rail, staring down at the wood chips below. Another parent walked past and gave him an encouraging smile. My instinct was to call out “Hold on, I’m coming” and climb up with him, the way I’d done a hundred times before. But the Bear Grylls post was still warm in my memory, and Rachel had written underneath the screenshot: We need to try this.
So instead, I walked closer. Not all the way, just close enough that I could hear him. And I stood there with my hands in my pockets and my mouth shut.
The hardest part wasn’t the fear that he’d fall. It was the silence between us. In that silence, I had to actually decide what I believed about parenting, and that’s an uncomfortable thing to do on a random Tuesday in front of other parents.
What I realized in those two minutes is that everything about the way we parent is calibrated by time and convenience. When I rush over to help Leo climb down, it’s not just because I’m worried—it’s because I need to get home and start dinner, because the queue for the swings is building up, because I feel like everyone is watching and expecting me to be the kind of parent who swoops in. Helping him is faster. It’s less awkward. It gets the job done.
But the Bear Grylls post was asking me to think about what the job actually is. It’s not getting him down from the climbing frame safely. It’s teaching him how to get down when I’m not there.
Leo was still frozen on the platform. His lip was starting to wobble. A younger child behind him was waiting to climb up, and I could feel the pressure mounting. I finally said the only thing I could think of that was honest and specific. I said, “Leo, you look stuck. Is that right?”
He nodded, biting his lip.
“Okay,” I said. “What part feels scary?”
He thought about it. “Getting down,” he said. “My feet don’t know where to go.”
That was new information. I’d assumed he was just scared of the height or scared of getting hurt. But actually, he was scared of the transition—the part where you have to twist your body around and feel for the first rung with your toes while your hands are still gripping the platform rail. That’s a genuinely tricky motor skill, and it’s easy to forget how complicated it is when your body is still growing and your spatial awareness is still developing.
Instead of reaching for him, I moved around to the side of the climbing frame where he could see me. “Okay,” I said. “Turn your body around first. Just like we do when we get out of the car. Can you feel the bar with your foot?”
He shook his head. It was too wide. So we tried something else. I told him, “Sit down on the platform first. Just lie on your belly and slide.” I didn’t offer to catch him. I said, “I’m going to stay right here. You’ll be able to find it.”
He moved slowly. He lay down on his stomach, his shoes dangling off the edge, and he looked terrified for a full minute. Then he wiggled backwards, found the bar, and landed in the wood chips with a soft thump. He turned around, grinning, and immediately ran off to the slide.
The whole thing took less than three minutes, but I learned more about Leo in that time than I had in weeks of hovering at his elbow. He needed a verbal prompt, not a rescue. He needed me to break the problem down into a physical action he already knew—like getting out of a car—rather than an abstract instruction like “be careful” or “you can do it.” And he needed me to stand still.
The Bear Grylls post, as I’ve read it back several times since, isn’t really about extreme adventure parenting at all. It’s about recalibrating what “help” means. Help doesn’t always mean doing the thing for your child. Sometimes help means standing somewhere visible, offering information, and letting them do the thing for themselves. That’s a much harder skill to learn than any practical childcare task, because it requires you to suppress the part of your brain that screams “just pick him up.”
It also revealed how often I use vague reassurance as a substitute for real guidance. “You’re fine,” I usually say, or “You’ve got this.” But kids don’t process reassurance the way adults do. They hear the tone, but without concrete direction, they don’t know what to do with the feeling. In that moment on the platform, the most useful thing I said was not “you’re fine”—because he wasn’t fine. It was a question: “What part feels scary?” That gave him a way to articulate the problem, and it gave me the information I needed to help without fixing.
There are limits, of course. I’m not going to let Leo run across a busy road to prove a point about resilience. Risk assessment is still my job. But what the post did for me was make me more deliberate about distinguishing between dangerous situations and uncomfortable ones. If Leo is about to touch a hot stove, I’ll grab him. If Leo is stuck on a climbing frame and the only thing at stake is a bit of frustration and a scraped knee, I can wait. I can offer suggestions. I can let him feel the wobble.
I thought about this again a few days later when we were cooking dinner. Leo wanted to pour boiling water into the pasta pot. My immediate reaction was “no, I’ll do it.” But the Bear Grylls post was rattling around in my head, so I looked at the situation again. The pot was heavy. The water was genuinely dangerous. He needed help. So I helped him hold the handle, both his hands over mine, while he did the actual pouring. He got the experience of doing something slightly risky. I got the control of making sure it was safe enough. It felt like a decent middle ground.
I still don’t think I’m a Bear Grylls parent. I don’t have much interest in sleeping in a shelter made from leaves, and my idea of a family adventure is a walk that ends at a café. But his post made me wonder what other things I’m doing for my children that they could be doing themselves. I’ve started noticing the small moments where I step in just because stepping in is faster. Carrying Leo’s raincoat when he could carry it himself. Tying his shoelaces because he takes too long. Running interference with the other kids at the park when a minor conflict could be resolved on its own.
The other day, Leo climbed the same high platform again. This time, he didn’t freeze. He found the bar himself, swung his body around, and climbed down without even looking for me. I stood under the oak tree, hands in my pockets, and I can’t say I felt a huge wave of pride. It felt more ordinary than that. He just did it, and then he went to find a friend. The moment passed without any fanfare.
But that ordinary moment is the point, I think. The goal isn’t to raise kids who give you a bedtime speech about their own resilience. It’s to raise kids who don’t need to make a big deal out of managing their own bodies and their own problems. And the goal for me, as a parent, is to get comfortable with the uncomfortable pause before I rush in. I haven’t mastered it. There are still plenty of moments where I jump in too soon or stand back too long. But I’m getting more used to asking one simple question before I act: who needs the practice here—him or me?
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