"Suffer the little children to come unto me" means let them suffer, or endure hardship

The KJV's full line reads: "Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not" (Mark 10:14). In modern English, "suffer" almost always means to experience pain, so the verse can land, to a contemporary ear, as if Jesus is instructing that children should endure hardship. The actual sense, current in 1611 and preserved today mainly in the fossilized phrase "suffer no fools," is simply "allow" or "permit."

This exact word is one of the examples Mark Ward's Authorized: The Use and Misuse of the King James Bible (2018) uses to define what he calls "false friends": words still in everyday use, so a reader has no signal to look them up, but whose meaning has quietly drifted since 1611 in ways a modern reader is unlikely to catch. Every modern translation renders this verse with some form of "let" or "allow" specifically to avoid the confusion "suffer" now creates.