But falling on your face is good for you
A few weeks ago, I was talking with an old friend who lives far away. My friend is the devoted dad of a lovely toddler (whom I'm ashamed to say I haven't met yet), and he and his wife are the proudest parents in the whole wide world. The most recent saga about the little lady was that she had spent a couple of weeks using a very common word incessantly, without any apparent effort to link it to anything she was feeling, wanting, or looking at. The parents puzzled over this for some time until it dawned on them that the word she was saying over and over was apparently a dogged effort to say her own name.
So what did these wonderful, attentive, and by no means rich parents do?
They enrolled their daughter in enunciation classes.
The kid is TWO. I don't know much about kids, but I'm pretty sure that any conversation I've ever had with a two-year-old is pretty much a guessing game all around.
After hearing about this, I was very interested to read this article about the backlash against overparenting. Apparently since the onset of the recent (or current, depending on your outlook) recession, a third of parents have cut back their kids' activities out of necessity and then discovered that it worked for parents and children alike.
According to the article, we got to the wonderful world of overparenting largely because of fear. Fear is hard-wired into the human condition because knowing when to be afraid kept our ancestors alive. In prosperous times when we don't have to worry about starvation or a war spanning the globe, we find other things to worry about, and not all of those things are necessarily things that should consume us with worry. Many of us (most of us?) worry anyway, though, because that's what's in our genes.
And thus, the helicopter parent was born.
In all fairness, I really don't know squat about raising kids, and I would never argue with certain things that take little effort and reap big benefits, like making kids wear helmets when they ride their bikes. Based on what I've seen and read, however, I've come to the conclusion that constantly hovering over kids is counterproductive for a vast array of reasons. From a practical perspective, it's expensive and it's not always easy to discern the relationship between the spend and the result. I mean, enunciation classes for two-year-olds can't be cheap, right? Vying to give kids the latest and greatest toys and gizmos to stimulate imaginative play also costs big bucks, especially when kids of a certain age will generally prefer the box.
From a child development perspective (and you know I'm really going off into the weeds here, since I have NO personal experience or expertise), I think overparenting makes kids less adventurous and more fearful. I also think that shielding kids from unpleasant consequences makes it more difficult for them to develop good judgment. I see a connection between hypervigilant parenting and both a sense of entitlement and a sense of powerlessness, since it's hard to be self-reliant with mom and dad swooping in every time something goes awry. In short, I've come to believe that overparenting robs kids of survival skills.
There's a simple remedy to the problems overparenting is creating for this generation of kids:
Just back off and let them learn about the world in their own way.
It's easy, it's cheap, and according to a growing number of advocates, it's just about the best thing you can do.
There haven't been too many silver linings in the recession cloud that I've seen so far, but I do think that having to slow down and back off of heavy kids' activity schedules and just letting them be kids is a positive outcome. I'm hoping it's one that outlasts the collective economic woe.
What do you think?
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