As a non-native resident of Orange County, California I’ve enjoyed many a laugh at how a good percentage of the locals respond to any weather that isn’t 75 degrees and sunny. Yesterday drought stricken California finally got some rain, the second rainfall in a week. As what typically happens, the rain brought out the North Face jackets, stocking caps, mittens and umbrellas.

Yesterday, as I was waiting in the longer than usual school drop-off line it struck me that nearly every single elementary school child immediately got out of the car and opened up an umbrella. In some cases mom actually got out of the car (holding up the line) and walked around the car with an open umbrella, seemingly in fear of a single rain drop falling on their child. And this wasn’t a downpour, more of a moderate drizzle.

It’s not a long walk to the classrooms either. My two girls probably had to walk less than thirty-yards to their classrooms.

I realize this probably sounds like the classic “back in my day” statement, but it’s true. When I was in elementary school in rural Wisconsin my brother and I used to walk a half-a-mile to school year-round, no matter what the weather conditions were. There were days when the windchill was several degrees below zero.

What did we do? We bundled up like the kids in A Christmas Story and shuffled off to school.

Of course my parents weren’t trying to teach us a “lesson” by making us walk to school. It was small-town Wisconsin in the early 1980’s and that’s how it was, and it’s what my parents did when they were kids. My parents grew up in an even harsher climate, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. When my parents talk about trudging through three-feet of snow they aren’t exaggerating.

The average Southern California kid lives in perfect weather all year long. When they aren’t outside in perfect weather they are inside in an optimal temperature controlled environment. Many of these kids will go through their entire childhood and not deal with any harsh weather conditions at all.

According to Aubrey Marcus in Own The Day, Own Your Life we’ve “built an entire culture on the elimination of the difficult and the pursuit of the comfortable. Everything panders to it and we buy into it because we have all these old scripts running through our heads from our mothers and doctors and crazy old neighbors: If you go out in this cold without a jacket, you might catch your death. Put some shoes on, you’ll catch a cold.”

There’s a bigger lesson here, something effectively captured by Nassim Taleb in his seminal work Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder. Taleb used the analogy of the zoo animal versus the jungle animal. The zoo animal lives in a controlled environment with all means, water and shelter provided for them. Meanwhile the jungle animal doesn’t have the same luxury. The jungle animal has to deal with unpredictability and randomness. Each day brings different challenges. Antifragile is a term Taleb created to represent the opposite of fragile, i.e. as stress is applied the wild animals actually get stronger as a result. We want our kids to deal with unpredictability and randomness— we want them to gain from it and become stronger. By eliminating any discomfort in their lives (even a little rain) we are essentially raising a generation of zoo animals. The need for our children to feel comfortable at all times is actually having the opposite affect on their ability to handle stress. It’s making them more fragile.

So stop fulfilling your child’s every need. They may complain about getting a bit wet but don’t give in to it. Make them deal with it. If you’re the mom who runs around the car to open the door with an umbrella in hand, stop it. Your kids need to occasionally deal with uncomfortable situations, even minor ones. Hustling around the car also sends the message that they are the center of the universe and that you’re willing to drop everything for even a minor discomfort. This sets a terrible precedent.

Make your kids embrace discomfort.

According to Joe De Sena, creator of the popular Spartan Race, “Life in the First World has become too easy. It’s hard to be happy when you have ‘easy’ in abundance. You appreciate nothing.”

Doing things that are even slightly difficult now, and allowing those things to compound, will make things easier later in life. I’m in my mid-forties, a fully grown adult, and I still practice this every single day, starting with turning my morning hot shower to an ice cold shower for the last couple of minutes. Yes, science has shown that cold exposure showers actually have real benefits, but it’s more than that. It’s important to feel discomfort in your life. It’s good for you.

It’s no secret that Americans are getting sicker every year and the American Psychological Association has found a strong correlation between high levels of stress and poor health scores (Marcus book, Chapter 2). The cause of this is the bad stress, chronic stress, which causes inflammation and suppresses the immune system. Chronic stress is psychosocial threats— that test we have coming up, our social status, anxiety around a big presentation later that day, whether or not we’ll have to look for a job come January. This is the constant and perpetual mental stress that we all deal with, no matter how old we are.

There is a good kind of stress though, acute stress. Researchers at Cal-Berkeley have demonstrated how acute stress— short-lived, not chronic—primes the brain for improved performance. In lab studies they found that intermittent stressful events are probably what keeps the brain more alert, leading to improved performance.

So a little bit of rain, plus the accompanied cold that comes with it, is actually good for your kids. So let them get wet— it’s just one minor event that stacked on top of other events in their childhood will create a stronger and more resilient child.

Plus, who doesn’t love playing in the rain?

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