![\"Overprotective](\"https:\/\/content.artofmanliness.com\/uploads\/2017\/04\/Overprotective-General-Header-1.jpg\")
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In the last installment of this series<\/a> on the causes and effects of the modern trend towards overprotective parenting, we explored the evidence behind the biggest reason parents give for adopting this approach and abandoning the more \u201cfree range\u201d method they were reared with themselves: that the world today is more dangerous than it once was.<\/p>\n We showed that not only was the risk of a child becoming the victim of an accident or crime extremely low several decades ago, it\u2019s even lower now. We also discussed the fact that the tiny risk that still does exist seems impossible to completely counter, no matter how strenuously we try; the sheer randomness of the world ensures that some tragedies are simply beyond human control.<\/p>\n Nonetheless, as long as some risk, no matter how infinitesimally small or impossible to influence remains, many parents feel driven to do everything in their power to mitigate it, on the chance that their efforts can somehow tip the odds, or, more realistically, simply because it feels<\/em> better to know you\u2019ve done all you can to keep your kids safe.<\/p>\n That might be a reasonable approach to take to parenting, if<\/em> such hyper vigilance did not produce any downsides and risks of its own.<\/p>\n But it does.<\/p>\n What isn\u2019t typically appreciated concerning risk management, is that when you control for one kind of danger, sometimes another kind emerges in its place.<\/p>\n In trying to prevent some types of risks in our children\u2019s lives — not only concerning injury or death, but the failure to maximize their full potential and talent — we expose them to another.<\/p>\n These risks provoke a less visceral response, because their danger happens in slow motion, over a long period of time. Nonetheless, their physical, mental, and emotional effects can be just as real, and profoundly detrimental.<\/p>\n Children today have nine fewer hours of free time a week than kids thirty years ago did. The time at their disposal has been eaten up by extracurricular activities — sports, music classes, tutoring, etc. And when kids aren\u2019t participating in structured activities, they\u2019re typically hanging out with their parents, who don\u2019t want their children going off to play by themselves. The vast majority of their days and nights are thus spent under the supervision of adults — parents, teachers, coaches — who tell them what to do, and when and how to do it.<\/p>\n Without the experience of being engaged in unstructured play, away from the watchful gaze of grownups, kids fail to learn how to entertain themselves, how to be self-directed, how to figure out how to spend their time. Remember when you had the afternoon before you, and decided whether to ride your bike to a nearby school, or explore a construction site, or start a circus in your backyard? How many kids today are having that experience where they\u2019re the ones who initiate and carry out their own activities?<\/p>\n It\u2019s no wonder that one of the biggest things young adults struggle with today is being self-starters<\/a>. Once they\u2019re out of college, and the structures of their childhood and adolescence have been pulled out from beneath them, they feel adrift, waiting in vain for someone to direct their path and tell them which steps to take next.<\/p>\n If children aren\u2019t allowed to direct their youthful play time, how will they direct the course of their grownup relationships, hobbies, and careers?<\/p>\n I\u2019ve got some good kids. They\u2019re smart, pretty well-behaved, and fun. I wouldn\u2019t call them particularly imaginative, though. They don\u2019t much seem to engage in the kind of pretend play I remember absorbing myself in as a kid. In fact, they often seem weirdly literal for a 3-year-old and a 6-year-old.<\/p>\n Maybe it\u2019s a result of the \u201cscreen time\u201d they\u2019ve gotten (guilty), and the fact that as mentioned in a previous installment<\/a>, we\u2019ve been so hands-on and omnipresent in their lives; they haven\u2019t had as much of a chance to break off from the world of adults and enter in the fantastical world of children. Perhaps it\u2019s another unintended consequence of the lack of free time just mentioned — structured activities come with predetermined parts, guidelines, ends<\/em>; they require only a fraction of the creativity called upon by more open-ended play.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not just that the activities of modern children are more structured either, but that their toys are too. Left to their own devices, children must make use of \u201cloose parts\u201d in the environment, seeing in them numerous possibilities, and making up their own rules for how the world works — a stick becomes a sword; dirt clods become grenades; the driveway becomes lava.<\/p>\n In contrast, the toys given children these days have a preset and very explicit built-in function. It seems that for toymakers (and their parental customers) \u201cfun\u201d is not a sufficient purpose for a toy; instead they consistently tout their playthings\u2019 educational qualities. Yet by designing toys to be \u201cbrain boosters,\u201d their use becomes fixed — a wagon can be played with in an infinite number of ways; a gadget where you press a button to learn numbers can be \u201cplayed\u201d with by pressing buttons to learn numbers. Such structured toys may enhance one aspect of children\u2019s cognitive abilities, but it leaves fallow their capacity for imagination.<\/p>\n The result of this emphasis on structured, educationally-focused play is a generation of young people who are like my kids: capable of smart thinking, but only along narrow lines. In a study titled \u201cThe Creativity Crisis<\/a>\u201d Kyung Hee Kim notes that while intelligence and SAT scores have been rising in the last couple decades, scores on tests of creativity have declined, so that:<\/p>\n \u201cover the last 20 years, children have become less emotionally expressive, less energetic, less talkative and verbally expressive, less humorous, less imaginative, less unconventional, less lively and passionate, less perceptive, less apt to connect seemingly irrelevant things, less synthesizing, and less likely to see things from a different angle.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The most significant decline has been seen in \u201cElaboration\u201d scores, which test people\u2019s ability to take existing ideas, reflect on them, and then build on them in new ways.<\/p>\n It\u2019s the kind of ability that grows not from looking at a screen where X=X, but navigating an open environment where X might equal Y or Z or D. Where a pinecone becomes a telephone; a rock, a fossil; a hollow tree, a hideout.<\/p>\n Jane Clark, a professor of kinesiology, calls today\u2019s crop of children \u201ccontainerized kids.\u201d<\/p>\n Babies and little children start life not only strapped into car seats, but fastened into high chairs for feeding, wedged into infant armchairs for watching TV, and buckled into strollers for walks and jogs around the neighborhood.<\/p>\n Some of this \u201ccontainerizing\u201d is necessary for safety, but it\u2019s also making children much more sedentary. According to one study<\/a> which tracked the movement of toddlers, the average 3-year-old is active for a minuscule 20 minutes a day!<\/p>\n As children get older, their container gets larger, but not by much; parents, who prefer the safety of the great indoors to the risk outside, functionally keep their kids under \u201chouse arrest.\u201d Some research<\/a> has shown that less than a third of American children play outside on a daily basis, while another survey<\/a> found that 1 in 2 kids worldwide play outside for less than an hour a day — less time, it might be pointed out, than inmates spend outside at maximum security prisons.<\/p>\n While both the domestic wards and their wardens are happy — kids like staying curled up with their screens, and parents like knowing exactly where there are at all times — the more time children spend within four walls, the less time they spend moving their bodies.<\/p>\n Anecdotally, I can tell you that when my kids are inside, they\u2019re much more sedentary, draping themselves over furniture and whimpering with boredom. Put outside however, it\u2019s like the sun immediately charges up their solar-powered batteries, and they come alive with activity.<\/p>\n The rise in containerizing children, whether in buckled seats or relatively spacious homes, has thus unsurprisingly paralleled a rise in childhood obesity, which has more than tripled since the 1970s.<\/p>\n Parents often think they can counter this trend, and get the best of both physical activity and<\/em> close supervision by placing their children in organized sports. Yet, ironically enough, the popularity of organized sports has expanded at the same time<\/em> as children\u2019s waistlines. Enrollment in peewee soccer does not seem to be a cure-all for keeping childhood obesity at bay.<\/p>\n This may be because organized sports, at least for young kids, can often be surprisingly sedentary affairs. There\u2019s a lot of standing around being confused, punctuated with a little activity, followed with snacks and unearned Gatorade. In contrast, when kids play by themselves, in unstructured ways, in games of their own design, they actually seem to move more. I know my son Gus is a lot more active even when he\u2019s simply shooting hoops by himself than when he\u2019s at tee-ball practice.<\/p>\n While parents often think children are so full of energy their activity level will take care of itself, this is only true when artificial and unnecessary barriers to this activity are removed, and children are left to their own devices and allowed to roam and range. Stored away, all batteries corrode.<\/p>\n In keeping kids from the imaginary boogeymen outside, parents are blind to the silent \u201ckiller\u201d within, which packs on pounds that children may carry with them into adulthood, and which may even eventually cut short the very life mom and dad worked so hard to preserve.<\/p>\n Lower levels of movement and activity not only run the risk of making children obese, but also stymy the development of their physical abilities.<\/p>\n Though we rarely think of them as such, all movements — whether running, jumping, crawling, throwing, balancing, etc. — are skills. And as skills, they require embodied practice to really master.<\/p>\n Research shows that the more active a child is, the more their motor skills improve, and that the environment plays an important role in enhancing this process. For example, studies done in Norway and Sweden found that children who played daily in more natural areas — landscapes of uneven ground, rocks, and trees — developed greater balance, agility, and all-around mobility than those who played on a safer, flatter, more structured playground. The more challenging and unpredictable the context of play, the more it strengthens physical competence; greater risks bring greater rewards.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, the landscapes of play and exercise for children have been both literally and metaphorically flattened, if they exist at all. As many as 40% of schools have either eliminated one or all of their recess periods, not simply to gain more classroom and testing time, but also because of liability concerns. For the same reason, climbing ropes and dodge ball games have been removed from gym class. The risk of someone getting hurt is too high; the risk of physical ineptitude doesn\u2019t rate, even though it\u2019s correlated with the risk of obesity.<\/p>\n Studies<\/a> show that the relationship between motor skill development and obesity can form either a positive or negative feedback loop. Children with higher motor skills tend to be more active, and the more active the child is, the greater their motor skills become, which further encourages their activity. On the other hand, children with lower motor skills are less likely to be active, which further atrophies their motor skills, making them even less inclined towards physical activity, and more likely to become obese.<\/p>\n This point is simply an extension of the above, but it\u2019s important enough to warrant its own entry.<\/p>\n Along with more full-body physical skills, kids also need to learn how to skillfully do things with their hands<\/em>. And just like broader physical competence, manual<\/em> competence is earned through direct experience — by actually manipulating tools and objects.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a lot that can be accomplished by swiping things with one\u2019s fingertips these days, but a child should still learn hands-on skills that require the palms and wrists as well — even \u201cdangerous\u201d ones. Every kid should arrive at adulthood knowing how to safely wield a kitchen and pocket knife, use matches, swing a hammer, tend a fire, and so on.<\/p>\n In learning these things, there\u2019s risk in their burning themselves or bludgeoning their thumb, sure. But in failing to, there\u2019s risk in their growing up without the belief that they can perceptively shape the world, manipulate its raw materials, fix its broken things, and gain mastery over its basic elements — that they can be effective in the world in a tangible way.<\/p>\n Because modern children are under near constant adult supervision, when they have a problem, there is always a grownup there to ask for advice on what to do. Even on those rare occasions where a kid finds himself alone, both he and his parents remain connected via their respective cell phones; this dynamic continues, Lenore Skenazy relates in Free-Range Kids<\/em><\/a>, even as children get older, which keeps “the parent-child relationship back where it was when the kids were very young and needed constant supervision”:<\/p>\n “I still remember the time my older son, Morry, who was maybe ten at the time, called me just after I\u2019d left for work to ask if he could have banana bread for breakfast. \u2018Sure!\u2019 I said. But what I should have said was, \u2018Heck yes! Have whatever you want! I\u2019m not there<\/em>. If I get home and find the dregs of a vodka smoothie in the blender, I\u2019ll know you need more supervision. Otherwise, you know how to make breakfast, and you\u2019re old enough to decide what to eat.'”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Modern childhood is like playing Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?<\/em> with an unlimited number of lifelines. That\u2019d be a boon if one were racking up cash on a game show, but it\u2019s a bust for fostering children\u2019s self-reliance.<\/p>\n If kids outsource all of their decision-making to parents and other authority figures, they\u2019ll have difficulty learning to think for themselves; when they do make their own choices, they\u2019ll be prone to second-guessing and self-doubt — even to a kind of \u201clearned helplessness<\/a>\u201d where they don\u2019t feel in control of their lives.<\/p>\n Children need limits and guidance, of course, but they also need to be able to form their own hypothesis, experiment with this or that decision, and assess the consequences of their behavior. Afterwards they\u2019ll tweak their initial hypothesis, maybe fail again, and form yet another one. Some lessons can and should be learned by counsel and example, but others have to be grasped through trial and error. As James Russell Lowell put it, “One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning.”<\/p>\n A little prick of the thorn now and again is a healthy thing; from the tiny bit of blood it draws springs an enduring sense of self-trust.<\/p>\nThe Risks of NOT Letting Your Kids Do Risky Things<\/span><\/h3>\n
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<\/a><\/p>\nThe risk of children failing to develop the ability to take initiative or be a self-starter.<\/h3>\n
The risk of an impoverished imagination.<\/h3>\n
The risk of childhood (and adulthood) obesity.<\/h3>\n
The risk of children failing to achieve full physical competence.<\/h3>\n
The risk of children failing to achieve full manual competence.<\/h3>\n
The risk of failing to develop problem-solving skills and a sense of self-reliance.<\/h3>\n
Listen to my podcast with Lenore Skenazy about “free range” parenting:<\/i><\/h3>\n