BGUTI [Better Get Used To It] proponents often give the impression that the sin being committed by overzealous adults is leaving kids unfamiliar with the tough challenges they’ll face later. This raises three questions. 

       1.  Are children, including those raised in very supportive families or taught in progressive schools, really unaware of the larger culture in which they live (in all its unloving particulars)? Without evidence of this ignorance, the whole argument falls apart. 

       2.  If the goal is familiarity, wouldn’t a single exposure to any given practice be sufficient to ensure it won’t catch them by surprise when they’re older? Why would we need to keep clobbering them with grades, contests, and the like day after day, year after year? 

       3.  What reason is there to believe that mere familiarity with something equips one to deal with it productively? “Our kids must experience disappointments to develop skills in handling failure and imperfection,” one writer asserts.26 But the fact of being disappointed neither imparts a skill nor promotes a constructive attitude. Of course one could argue that we need to teach such skills to, and promote resiliency among, children—or at least those children who seem to lack them. But that’s not what the BGUTI contingent is saying. They’re arguing for giving homework and tests to all young children, or separating them into winners and losers, because these tykes need to get used to such things—as if exposure itself will inoculate them against the negative effects they would otherwise experience later. If we were interested in helping children to anticipate and deal with unpleasant experiences, it might make sense to discuss the details with them and perhaps guide them through role-playing exercises. But why would we subject kids to those experiences? After all, to teach children how to handle a fire emergency, we talk to them about the dangers of smoke inhalation and advise them where to go when the alarm sounds. We don’t actually set them on fire.