Trying to smooth the way for your kids at every turn is preventing them from developing life skills and resiliency
As parents, we want to make things easier for our kids than we had it. We want to right the wrongs that we experienced growing up, including cruelty like being forced to walk to school if we missed the bus or working out disagreements with mean kids by ourselves. Preventing our children from dealing with these issues doesn't help them. It does more harm than good. That doesn't stop a lot of parents from creating a level of unhealthy dependence and transmitting anxiety to their kids. Many metaphors describe this type of parenting from bubblewrap, helicopter or drone parenting. A father in Tennessee took this idea to the next level and literally flew a drone to watch his daughter walk to school.
Now parents are rolling out the snowplow to clear the way for their offspring - texting them throughout the data to make sure is everything is ok before they attend the parent-teach conference with their child's college professor. They will stop at nothing to remove obstacles for their kids to make sure that they do not experience discomfort or pain. While this approach to parenting is often well-intentioned, it misses the point.
Julie Lythcott-Haims, author of "How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success,"has done extensive research on this topic. In her ten years as Stanford freshmen dean, she discovered that parents were unknowingly standing in the way of the development of their kids. They did not pass along the confidence needed to confront life's challenges. She discovered that they they never let their children grow up. Growing up means making decisions, and sometimes, bad decisions and mistakes.
Aim of Parenting
“The point is to prepare the kid for the road, instead of preparing the road for the kid,” Julie Lythcott-Haims .
Creating Mistake Space for Your Kids
While we certainly have been guilty of using the bubble wrap and lawnmower approach to parenting to protect our kids, one thing that we often think about is finding ways for our children to make decisions and experience age-appropriate consequences. One of the most important skills that adults must develop is the ability to make decisions. Just like developing any skill, practice is required to become a master. We have used this technique with our older daughter, watching her mature from an anxious high schooler to a confident college student. She was able to see the link between making the right decisions and seeing successful results. She has experienced difficulties and challenges that have caused her to become more resilient and persistent. This began because of the experiences that she had where she had to figure things out on her own without our intervention. My wife and I were always close by if she needed help and we did not to intervene (well, most of the time we didn't). Learning to put away the parenting power tools is hard. One thing that will help is to visualize your son or daughter calling you to ask you questions or living with you in their 30s and 40s. Break the dependence now. You will thank yourself later.
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