I’m in the US right now touring forUnder Pressure, which means a parade of interviews with radio stations around the country. I love the call-in shows especially because I get to hear from parents, teachers, social workers – all those people on the front-line of child-rearing. And it really seems that there is a growing consensus that we have collectively lost our bearings. Callers often share amusing and/or horrifying examples of hyper-parenting. A few minutes ago someone in Milwaukee said that a friend in New York has sent her infant to mastication classes because she’s worried he’s not chewing well enough. Another story: When a child in Chicago uttered his first word, his mother called in speech therapist to accelerate his language development. Or the parents who papered (literally) their hotel room with bubble-wrap to prevent their toddler from hurting herself. I could go on but I have to go give a talk now….
Tag: hyperparenting
More stranger danger
Yesterday I did a radio interview with a station in Newfoundland in Canada. Before my segment, I listened to a report of how local police had street-proofed a city there. You heard a voice repeatedly saying “Never do this” and “Don’t do that.”I felt afraid just listening on the phone from the other side of the ocean.Then you heard children talking about how they would run a mile from any strange adult. It was chilling, and depressing. Is that really the message we want to send to our kids? That every grown-up is a potential abuser? That you can’t trust anyone unless you know them personally and they have been formally approved by your parents? What kind of society does that create? And how will children ever learn how to distinguish the very tiny minority who are a threat from the rest of us? Anyway, it made me think again how timely is the Safer Stranger campaign just launched in Britain (see blog post May 7).
Giving children space
One of things I examine in Under Pressure is how we can become over-invested in our children, treating them as a mini-me. These days you often hear people talking about their kids with the collective pronoun: “We have lots of homework this weekend;” “we are signing up for football this year;” “we are applying to Harvard or Oxford.” This may start out from the noble instinct to do the best for our children and to be close to them, but it can go too far. Another problem is that in a culture in thrall to management science the temptation to approach child-rearing as a kind of product-development is strong. So we think: “If I add X to my child, I’ll get Y at the other end.” Unfortunately that is not how it works. Child-rearing is much more complex, blurry and confusing than that – and all the more thrilling and enriching as a result, I think. A child is not a product but a person born with his own character, aptitudes and flaws – his own soul. In that sense, parenting is more about discovering and celebrating who our children are rather than striving constantly to turn them into what we want them to be.
Since Under Pressure came out, several readers have sent me a poem by Kahlil Gibran that sums up these ideas with a gentle beauty. So I figured I’d share it here:
On Children
“Your children are not your children.?
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.?
They come through you but not from you,?
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
?For they have their own thoughts.?
You may house their bodies but not their souls,?
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, ?which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.?
You may strive to be like them, ?but seek not to make them like you.?
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children?as living arrows are sent forth.?
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, ?
and He bends you with His might ?that His arrows may go swift and far.
?Let our bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;?
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, ?
so He loves also the bow that is stable.”
And while we’re on the subject, here is something that Anne Frank wrote:
“Parents can only give good advice or put [children] on the right paths,
but the final forming of a person’s character lies in their own hands.”
Just like riding a bike
The tendency to over-protect children can backfire in lots of ways. Keeping kids cloistered indoors means they don’t learn how to navigate traffic, how to identify a well-meaning stranger or how to play with their peers without an adult taking control. The same may apply to learning to ride a bike. A landmark moment for any parent is buying that first bicycle and slapping on thestabilizers (training wheels)to support the child. But do children actually need that support? And do stabilizers really help them learn how to cycle? Maybe not. Recently, pre-school teachers in London noticed that even children under three were able to balance on two wheels if given half a chance and that they learned better as a result. They also developed more strength, stamina and balance. Said one teacher:”We might be wrong but at every stage we found that what holds them back was not them but us.”To prove the point, one London borough is now running an experiment where kids are given small wooden bikes with no pedals and their progress is monitored. We’ll have to wait for the results but I can already report that at least one two-year-old has almost mastered cycling without stabilizers. He’s the one that ran over my foot in the Battersea Park on the weekend.
The end of Stranger Danger?
Much of the panic and hysteria surrounding children today is focussed on their safety. Many kids are not allowed to venture outside alone. To modern parents, the world beyond the front door looks like a vast cesspool of drug dealers, bullies, paedophiles and rampaging traffic. As a father of two,I know that fear all too well. Sometimes I think it’ll be okay for my children to start walking to school alone when they’re 12. Or maybe 23. The instinct to protect our kids is a natural and noble one, but over the last generation it has tipped so far into paranoia. Even when statistics show that are streets are no more dangerous than before, they still feel more dangerous to us parents. The upshot is that many children are almost being raised in captivity. And they’re missing out on some valuable life lessons: how to handle risk, how to get along with their peers without adults hovering overhead, how to know when to trust a stranger. For years the rallying cry at schools has been “Stranger Danger” – the implication being that the outside world is a hellish, apocalyptic place where every unknown adult is a potential threat. Is that the right message to send to the next generation? Probably not. But thankfully the backlash has begun.This morning, at the House of Commons in London, I attended the launch of a campaign to help children navigate the streets alone by showing them that most adults can be trusted. It’s called Safer Strangers, Safer Buildings. A shortvideoteaches children that they can turn for help to people in uniform (police, doctors, check-out assistants, etc) and certain buildings (churches, shops, post offices, etc). It’s not rocket science, but it punctures the pernicious assumptionthat every stranger is a danger. And anything that makes parents feel less anxious and gets kids outdoors more has to be a good thing.