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The author’s 5-year-old son, Gideon, playing at the Land playground in North Wales. (Hanna Rosin)
In her Atlantic Monthly article, The Overprotected Kid, Hanna Rosin writes:
It’s hard to absorb how much childhood norms have shifted in just one generation. Actions that would have been considered paranoid in the ’70s—walking third-graders to school, forbidding your kid to play ball in the street, going down the slide with your child in your lap—are now routine. In fact, they are the markers of good, responsible parenting. One very thorough study of “children’s independent mobility,” conducted in urban, suburban, and rural neighborhoods in the U.K., shows that in 1971, 80 percent of third-graders walked to school alone. By 1990, that measure had dropped to 9 percent, and now it’s even lower. When you ask parents why they are more protective than their parents were, they might answer that the world is more dangerous than it was when they were growing up. But this isn’t true, or at least not in the way that we think. For example, parents now routinely tell their children never to talk to strangers, even though all available evidence suggests that children have about the same (very slim) chance of being abducted by a stranger as they did a generation ago. Maybe the real question is, how did these fears come to have such a hold over us? And what have our children lost—and gained—as we’ve succumbed to them?…
Ask any of my parenting peers to chronicle a typical week in their child’s life and they will likely mention school, homework, after-school classes, organized playdates, sports teams coached by a fellow parent, and very little free, unsupervised time. Failure to supervise has become, in fact, synonymous with failure to parent. The result is a “continuous and ultimately dramatic decline in children’s opportunities to play and explore in their own chosen ways,” writes Peter Gray, a psychologist at Boston College and the author of Free to Learn. No more pickup games, idle walks home from school, or cops and robbers in the garage all afternoon. The child culture from my Queens days, with its own traditions and codas, its particular pleasures and distresses, is virtually extinct. …
But the real cultural shift has to come from parents. There is a big difference between avoiding major hazards and making every decision with the primary goal of optimizing child safety (or enrichment, or happiness). We can no more create the perfect environment for our children than we can create perfect children. To believe otherwise is a delusion, and a harmful one; remind yourself of that every time the panic rises.
Rather than reprimanding parents for being over protective Rosin encourages us all to think a little about exactly what we are doing. It’s difficult to deal with most parent’s preoccupation with “making every decision with the primary goal of optimizing child safety (or enrichment, or happiness)”.
A growing number of voices confirm that the value of unscheduled, unsupervised, open-ended activities has been exchanged for a level of control and supervision that is actually harmful to the healthy development of children. I’ve seen this in Scouting, especially over the past decade or so. What used to be accepted as an appropriate risk is now eliminated outright and, as Rosin notes, actions that would have been considered paranoid a few years ago are now the norm. It takes more effort to maintain Scouting as a journey of discovery and exploration Scouts undertake on their own initiative rather than a tour of highly scheduled, supervised, zero-risk activities created by adults.
Rosin’s isn’t the first (but it is one of the better) articles or books written on the subject (see Free Range Kids). Perhaps we’ll begin to see the pendulum of over-protective, over-involved parenting swing back to a more moderate approach.
When I read the article which is both enlightening and frightening, I finally understood the attraction of video games and why they hold no attraction for me. The video game allows each player to enter a “safe” area to explore and play out his/her adventures without anyone supervising their efforts. They can explore new territories, solve puzzles, make things, defeat powerful opponents on their own; very much like the play spaces in the article but without having to go out in the world. For me, I like to go out in the world and hike, camp, fish, drive, canoe, explore; and I often do it solo. The world doesn’t terrify me. But, now for the first time, I do finally understand the lure of video games. Unfortunately, I haven’t worked out how to help others wean themselves from virtual to real adventures and THAT should be what Scouting is all about.
I have no problem with virtual and real adventures coexisting peacefully, there’s no need to wean anybody away from anything, just give them the opportunity for real adventure.
Children can get obsessed with things like video games just as past generations did with baseball cards, comic books, radio, novels, dungeons and dragons, magic the card game, television – the list is endless. None of these things are problems to solve or scourges to eliminate. A young person of character will balance these sort of things in their lives, so we build character.
I am reminded of the song “Trouble” in “The Music Man”:
“Mothers of River City! Heed that warning before it’s too late! Watch for the tell-tale sign of corruption! The minute your son leaves the house,
Does he rebuckle his knickerbockers below the knee? Is he starting to memorize jokes from Capt. Billy’s Whiz Bang?”
When we cast real adventure and fun in the out-of-doors in a positive light we don’t have to bother casting video games in a negative light.
I didn’t attempt to make a value judgement or to denigrate virtual adventures. Yes, I agree that trying to put down virtual adventures is not a direction to take. What I wanted and did say is Scouting is a series of real adventures and I am working to find ways to promote those adventures. I hope they can be made so compelling that they will become a Scout’s first choice.
Clarke,
I suddenly realized I didn’t make my point clearly at all. The main point I was making was the epiphany I had about the lure of video games. I never understood the lure; I do now. I was not saying that video games are good or bad, just outside my frame of reference.
I agree with the article, but a key to make “It takes more effort to maintain Scouting as a journey of discovery and exploration Scouts undertake on their own initiative rather than a tour of highly scheduled, supervised, zero-risk activities created by adults.” come true the legal system we currently have in place must change from a the ‘sue for every trivial accident process’ and society with it’s similar approach.
I don’t worry about being sued. Without arguing over chickens and eggs I don’t think the legal system is the problem, just a symptom. I think we’ve become far too restrictive of the risks we accept for children and ordered their lives based on some faulty logic of what risk is.
In addition to this article and Free Range Kids (enjoyed your interview with Lenore Skenazy on the blog, Clarke), I also recommend Gever Tulley’s Beware Dangerism (available for Kindle as a Kindle Single for a couple of bucks). He compares the top 10 actual dangers to children to the top 10 “dangers” that parents actually worry about. It’s eye-opening.
There is a lot of truth in this article. It only tells part of the story. Unfortunately, there have been some recent high profile abuse cases (in scouting, education and religious institutions) that show that parents need to be ever cautious with every interaction. Youth, just like everyone else, need to learn by doing, sometimes by making poor choices and not repeating the same mistake. But one abuse case damages a child FOREVER. As a parent, I will always error on the side of caution, no gray area for me. I just had an interesting exchange with our Scout Master this week at scout camp. My son literally had a blistered sun burn after being in the sun all day. The leaders gave our son their cellphone to call home, which he did. My wife (30 years experience as an ER nurse) decided to go see how he was doing. It was a 2 1/2 hour drive one way. My son had heat stroke and blisters. The Scout Master only had a couple of things to say to us when he saw us. First that we were hovering parents, and weren’t helping our son grow up. Second, he want to know if we trusted him. Oops, poor choice. Not a hello, or what brings you guys up to camp. Well, the answer is, my son needed medical treatment, which the leaders failed to give. After checking on our son and experiencing the fine greeting from the leader, NO we don’t trust the Scout Master. Parents should be allowed to check on their children when and where they feel it important, without being identified as poor parents. That goes for school, church or scouts.