My car was the 11th of 12 to pile up on the West Side Highway last week.

A car must have stopped short, and one after another, like dominos, each car crashed into the next. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” my baby sitter said as we smashed into the car in front of us. The car behind us then crashed into us, forcing our car to hit the car in front of us one more time.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” my baby sitter and I said together this time — to each other and to the three children sitting in the back.

My gang was all strapped in, no one was hurt, and in a few hours, everything — except the front end of my car — was back to normal.

I have reviewed this minor accident in my head countless times now, and I have come to view it as a gift. An accident where no one is hurt is the most instructive kind of lesson. I was reminded of the fragility of life, of the importance of seatbelts, and of the reality that I have no control over anyone else’s driving around me. It was a reminder that nothing — not even the melted ice cream cake that I had ordered for my son’s birthday party and lovingly packed in ice packs for the car ride —matters as much as your children’s health.

Now that I’ve come to see the accident in a positive light, I’m beginning to wonder if I’m preventing too many “accidents” from happening in my children’s lives. Am I preventing them from understanding the pointed lessons that sometimes can only be learned through minor mishaps and mistakes? In my effort to pave their path, am I inadvertently doing them a disservice by not preparing them for the inevitably bumpy road that life will present them?

I fear the answer for me, and many other well-intended parents, is yes.

“My daughter just got her first C,” a mother of two teenagers told me. “It was actually a C-plus in biology. I knew she needed a tutor but just didn’t get it together.”

It’s easy to catalog the upside of micromanaging our children’s lives. With a certain amount of effort we can help our children avoid obvious pitfalls and achieve better grades, gain entry into prestigious colleges, and develop close relationships with teachers. But there is a growing amount of anecdotal evidence to suggest that paving their paths too smoothly has a hidden dark side.

“I keep hearing about more and more affluent kids dropping out of college,” a mother of three teenagers told me recently. “These kids have spent the past five years being molded and coddled by their parents. And then they get to college and not only are they let down by the end result, but they are also unprepared for any little glitch. A miserable roommate, a bad schedule, a tough professor: They simply can’t cope.”

The boom in college dropouts is well documented: According to the U. S. Census Bureau, nearly a third of Americans in their mid-20s are college dropouts, up from a fifth when the statistic began to be tracked in the 1960s. Many of these dropouts come from poor and working-class families who often cannot afford to pay tuition. The U.S. Department of Education found that 41% of low-income students enrolled in a four-year institution managed to graduate within five years, compared to 66% of these students from high-income families.

But psychiatrists and private school educators this week told me that there seems to be a fast-growing number of upper-class college dropouts. “I’ve seen more and more teenagers this past year who are taking time off from school,” an uptown psychiatrist told me. “And so many depressed kids in their 20s I’ve stopped counting. These aren’t kids from families that can’t afford college. To the contrary, these are kids who’ve been given every opportunity, who’ve had their hands held for so long that they don’t know how to work on their own, fight their own battles, struggle and survive. [They] have also worked so hard to get into college, that it’s actually a let-down.”

A college counselor in Greenwich, Conn., worries more and more about the children she is placing. “There’s no way to get through to a teenager and tell her to enjoy this period in her life and lighten up a bit when her parents are busy micromanaging every single second of her life,” she said.”I know parents think they are really making their children’s lives easier, but what would really make their children’s lives easier was if they just backed off and focused more on their own lives. Children need space.”

So this Thanksgiving, don’t forget to celebrate the small accidents and minor mistakes. The car hood that needs repair, the C-plus in biology, the broken heart, the missed goal, the SAT scores that need improvement. Our children need to know that even when — especially when — they screw up, we still value them, and that, believe it or not, as much as we love them, we have other problems — and passions — as well.

sarasberman@aol.com