I'm assuming there's a little bit of a vernacular mismatch here. People hear that you're "picking on" the kids or stressing them intentionally and conflate it w

I'm assuming there's a little bit of a vernacular mismatch here. People hear that you're "picking on" the kids or stressing them intentionally and conflate it with actual pettiness or degradation, instead of training the children to process and understand criticism without getting defensive, which is probably more along the lines of what you mean. I'd suggest you use words that are less likely to cause false associations on this topic, as it is highly sensitive. That said, I think that the child's tolerance usually develops organically via interaction with other children, and the biggest way to help with this is to give the child a lot of siblings. We should be careful not to "overengineer" our children's childhood, especially not in ways that are ripe for misinterpretation in hindsight.