“small school coddling”
This is a negative term, but MIL and I were talking about colleges, and she said that her middle son (I am married to her oldest son) couldn’t find his math class in a large urban campus, and just ended up never going to that class the entire semester.
He’s an astonishingly bright guy (passed the bar in two difficult states on the first try), but she said looking back he really needed an undergraduate experience that had a lot more hand-holding because that’s his temperament.
So yeah, being aware of what your kid needs to be succesful regardless of their IQ is probably a good thing that should not be looked at disparagingly with words like “coddling”.