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Well it's interesting because that connotation actually is a lot more recent than the word and came about alongside new discoveries in neuropsychology and the concept of "productive struggle" through the work of John Dewey and Lev Vygotsky (of "zone of proximal development" fame). The latter actually did inspire the use of that analogy in Bernstein's work on motor development.
To my mind, it's probably more of an artifact of the developing supremacy of Trancendentalism in American culture, and all its ideas of "self-reliance", but you can't quite say the analogy has no scientific backing since it sort of came out of scientific discoveries in the first place.
Crutches don't (that I know of) have anything special to them except that they're an easy to visualize example of the neuropsy phenomenon in question.
Of course, I'm not saying we ought to ban morphine on the sole grounds it is addictive. Simply that the tendency to medicate people for life is a danger and that one should want natural health to be the outcome, even if some of the steps on that path are sticky.
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