Don’t handicap your children by making their lives easy.

Heinlein’s aphorism warns that well-meant parental “help” can become a form of harm when it removes challenge, responsibility, and the chance to develop competence. “Handicap” implies a lasting disadvantage: children who are insulated from difficulty may fail to build resilience, judgment, and self-reliance, and may come to expect the world to accommodate them. The line reflects a broader mid‑20th‑century emphasis—common in Heinlein’s fiction and public persona—on individual capability and earned maturity. It is not a call for neglect, but for calibrated difficulty: support that teaches skills and accountability rather than substituting for them.