Input Junkie

In the main, I agree with you, but I do have one side thought. It's not "toughen up," but it's more, "relax; laugh; shrug shoulders." I think my husband and the Japanese daycare my kids were in got me to see the benefits of this--and I do think this is distinct from "toughen up." "Toughen up" implies callousness, being inured to injury, but what my husband and the daycare were promoting was a giving up of a degree of amour propre, maybe? Along with a general relaxedness that doesn't jump to the assumption that small incursions or unfortunate happenings are deliberate assaults. Say Child One knocks down Child Two's tower of blocks--suppose even intentionally, but (this is important) not with apparent malice. One route you could go would be to talk about hurt feelings and not destroying things other people make. Those are important lessons, but when you're very young and not with the most motor control, and at an age when many of your number (maybe you, yourself, too, under certain circumstances) love seeing things come crashing down, then to put all the emphasis on sadness and the wrongness of breaking things and being careful can have some dire unintended consequences--and may just not be understood very well. Whereas, if you laugh, and say "Wow! The tower went bang! Let's all build it back up again!" then the child who broke it isn't stigmatized, the child who had it broken has a means of reinterpreting the negative event less negatively, and everyone gets to work at building a new tower. Towers come down, but then we rebuild them--it's natural and positive.

... It's not to say that all the time this is the approach to take. At some point, the other lesson is valuable too. It's just that if there's a way to UNproblematize a situation, to lessen the number of things that are cause for upset, that can be a benefit all around, I think.