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Sometime in the recent past, parents developed a lack of confidence in their children's ability to negotiate life. This has resulted in the bubble-wrapping, or micro-managing, parenting style of today.

Sarah Chana Radcliffe, author and parent educator, said while there can be many reasons for this change in parenting style, one is that it may be a reaction to the harsher parenting style today's parents experienced as children.

"They come from a parenting style that was insensitive to their feelings so they have become over-sensitive to their child's feelings to the point to where they can only tolerate one emotion in their child, which is happy," she said. "(Children are) not allowed to have a full range of human emotions like disappointed, frustrated or frightened."

The problem in being overly sensitive is that parents run the risk of creating kids who expect everything and have an unrealistic sense of entitlement or a needy child who has low self-esteem.

Radcliffe suggested parents go for a happy medium, giving children the skills that will allow them to protect themselves and not just rely on their parents. Radcliffe said parents need to make kids more trauma-proof so when bad things happen, they learn to be resilient.

"Trauma-proofing is a better idea than thinking you can prevent them from experiencing trauma or bad things," she said. "You can't reorganize the world but you can build up your children and make them stronger."

For example, if a child was called a name at school and the parent goes to the school to talk to the teacher the child becomes a victim twice - from the name caller and the parent who took care of it.

"It teaches children that 'I'm not expected to handle this and bad things will happen to me. I'm a helpless victim of bad things and somebody has to save me'," she said.

Instead, teach your child to speak up for themselves. Keep in mind, parents must teach their children to distinguish between being called a name and being physically threatened.

Bubble wrapping can not only have detrimental effects for your child but it can have adverse effects on the parents, who have a lot of fear, anxiety and neurosis.

"If we come to a middle point then what's going to happen is we're going to have more confidence in our child's ability to experience the full range of human experiences and emotions and to cope and not crumble at the first hurt feeling," she said.

Radcliffe said it's a balancing act between trauma-proofing and protection because your child can't have high self-esteem if they're afraid all the time. They have to learn from their experiences.

"If you can sell parents on having a child who takes the traumas of life and transforms them into important learning lessons, it can help shape a person's adult outcome because of what they've had to go through in childhood," she said. "What they've learned, they can contribute to society and become stronger and wiser because of their hardships."

Visit www.parenting-advice.net to read more of Radcliffe's insights on parenting.