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The value of a few skinned knees
Posted By katie allison granju
I’ve written quite a bit about my belief that “over-parenting” is bad for children, and I couldn’t agree more with this guy (who happens to work from a Christian perspective) that this type of smother-parenting can do long-term damage to children’s emotional well-being.
Another pitfall of overprotection is a heartbreaking irony: Because over-parented children are taught to obsess over themselves, they don’t learn how to connect with others. Helicopter parents, who think they are drenching their children with love, are raising lonely sons and daughters. The kids’ constant self-focus, developed under the tonnage of unending parental intervention, handicaps them in every social setting.
Self-focused kids—whether they’re shy and withdrawn or brash and mouthy—do not reach out to other people. They’re not friendly, so they don’t make friends well. Their near total self-consciousness appears to others as self-absorption. What they need is wise guidance and encouraging nudges. Problem is, that’s exactly what many overprotective parents find distasteful and don’t want—nudging their kids outward, even little by little, would negate their constant presence and persistent meddling.
And when they do allow their children to enter “the realm of others,” by demanding special consideration, they expect others to coddle their child. They tend to unleash harsh words and passive-aggression on those who don’t, whether grown-ups or youngsters. Such parents, mostly mothers, stack the deck against their own best interests as they contaminate play and turn their children into the pariahs of the kid world.
I’ll offer my unsolicited view on this again: babies need babying; big kids and teenagers need to spread their wings and be allowed to take risks and grow. And our culture has it all backwards. We treat babies and very young children like little adults - expecting them to meet developmental milestones like weaning, solitary sleep, etc much earlier than biology intends - and then we overparent our big kids in ways that prevent them from learning to function independently.
May 2nd, 2008
Here is the link to Wendy Mogel’s “The Blessing of a Skinned Knee” at Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Blessing-Skinned-Knee-Teachings-Self-Reliant/dp/0142196002/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1209784349&sr=8-1
It’s good parenting advice.
How I ever made it through my childhood I’ll never know. I climbed trees and fell out of them, crashed my bike, got onto horses I could barely ride, swam in big waves, got bitten by the neighbor’s german shepard, rode in cars without seatbelts while my mother was SMOKING, took the subway alone to afterschool classes, and the list goes on. There was no over parenting in my home. How did I ever survive?
If you can’t accept the pain you will never learn.
If you never get the pain you will not learn how to accept it.
My watchwords raising three boys were
*Ya snooze, ya loose.”
“Don’t let the door hit ya in the ass.”
“You can do anything you want as long as you are willing to accept the concequences.”
They weren’t coddled and they turned out great.
Hello -
I could not agree more with the substance of your post. I was a premature baby, and small throughout childhood. Consequently, my parents sheltered me too much - at least at times. To their credit, they allowed me to play some rough sports even when I was the smallest guy out there. But just as often, they (especially my mom) intervened in difficulties I encountered with bullying, ridicule by schoolmates, etc. by saying in effect, ‘Those kids don’t matter. You are special.’ I never lacked for love, but perhaps my folks didn’t push me out into the world fast enough. There is simply no way around it; you have to go out and take your lumps in the school of hard knocks. That so many of our parents sent us to college only prolonged the process of growing up. My father, a vet of WW2, tallked me out of joining the military, because of my mom’s fears from the then-recent Vietnam war. It would have been the best thing for me, and would have forced me to grow up faster to join as I had wished. I was not mature enough to question my parent’s advice, and missed out on this important formative experience.
I ultimately did grow up, of course, and became a scientist and teacher. In my career, I saw so many parents hover over their kids - just as mine had, and it was always to no good end.
Another observation: Ever notice how kids from a tough, hard-scrabble background can be very well-equipped to meet life’s troubles, much better than their more affluent, sheltered counterparts? I have seen this time and again, and it occurs in history, too. The WW2 generation survived the Great Depression, and thus toughened, was able to prevail in the largest war in history. It is very much as Darwinian process, what does not kill you makes you stronger.
Helicopter parents are doing a terrible disservice to their children. Young people unchallenged by reality do not learn how to solve problems, or handle relations with people different than themselves. They are also prey to all sorts of nonsense in college, lacking the life experience to seprate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak.
The morale of the story, from my viewpoint, is that all of us must experience adversity to in order to mature. It is only through a tampering process that we can build a strong character, good values and a winning personality.
All the best - Pete
Unfortunately, ‘helicopter’ parenting frequently has an opposite effect on kids once they get out from under the eagle eyes of their parents. It’s the “preacher’s kids” paradox. Many times an upbringing with narrow boundaries results in wild behavior once the boundaries, or at least the one enforcing them, are sufficiently distant.
I’ve known young people that just went nuts as soon as they got out from under the control of their parents. Frequently with disastrous results.
Try to manage every aspect of your daughter’s life and she may end up on the “Girls Gone Wild” bus the first chance she gets.
Managing a Christian children’s camp, it has always struck me as ironic that urban and suburban parents are afraid to send their children into the woods for a few days fearing poison ivy, bug bites and the like, but they’ll park them in front of the TV, computer or video game console for years, apparently oblivious to the permanent rash that causes on the soul.
I’ve said jokingly for years that as painful as it was, the best thing my parents did was have another child and start ignoring me - and it seems I was right. My mother “made up for” my father’s emotional absence from the family by aggressively helicoptering my baby brother, inventing all sorts of vague “disabilities” for him - including declaring at one point that her son was “asexual”. He’s 42 now; lives at home, never had a date, never been away from home overnight except with Mom. He’s an intelligent guy but utterly inaccessible. I don’t think we’ve had a total of half an hour’s conversation in his whole life. Sad.
My wife and I raised six sons and a daughter, now aged between 24 to 34. Our daughter is now a marvelous wife and mother, ensuring her own daughters receive their fair share of skinned knees. And the thing I like best about my boys? They’re all men.
The three best things I told them all during their childhood:
1) I’m not the entertainment committee.
2) Figure it out.
3) Is it bleeding? Is it oozing or spurting? Can you see bone? OK, it’s an emergency.
TO: katie allison granju, et al.
RE: Indeed
There are so many indicators in folk sayings that point to the theory that one has to fall down in order to learn the pain and learn how to get back up.
These over-protective, molly-coddling types are destroying their own grand-children, by destroying their childrens’ ability to cope with a world that is not, repeat NOT, safe.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[Look upon it as evolution in action.]
P.S. olivia’s comment about her brother seems to bear me out on this.
The comments of the summer camp director are very true. Our kids go to camp each summer and return filthy dirty, with bug bites, sunburns, scrapes, bruises, and once a broken finger. But for a month, there is no electronic entertainment, nobody is babying them, and they have the freedom and authority to plan their days with much less structure than in school. There is much more tolerance for rough-housing than in the feminized Ritalin dispensaries our schools have become. They return happy, enthusiastic, and with visibly increased maturity and self-confidence.
A month? I’ve always wondered about that. The summer camps on the West Coast all seem to be a week to ten days. (I was a summer camp counselor, and we had a strict “no electronics” rule for the scouts. If they complained that the staff got electronics— when somebody was foolish enough to play their stereo loud— we’d reply that we were there for the summer, working, and they were there for a week.)
I like my mom’s take on the subject: “If they’re not dirty, they didn’t have fun.” My parents are going to be very involved with my kids while I watch them (parents) carefully, looking for techniques I missed while I was growing up.
Oh, and just because…
“How much longer?” “Fifteen minutes.”
“How much further?” “Four more miles.”
“Are we there yet?” “No.”
Never vary from these answers, and your child will either stop asking or learn to read highway signs.
It would be great if we parents could be assured that we wouldn’t bring down the wrath of CPS upon our @$$es if we let our kids skin their knees. Somebody called the cops on me because my 6 year old and 2 year old snuck out to the end of the street to watch the train go by, then snuck back in. And you wouldn’t believe the dirty looks I got from other parents when I made my son walk less than a mile and a half to school in winter because he was being unruly in the car. They couldn’t believe I would make a poor child walk so far in the snow, even though I pointed out that he had a very warm jacket and snow boots and was perfectly well equipped to be outside in the snow for longer than the walk would take. I did it anyway despite their disapprobation, because I felt it was important for my son to learn that unbuckling and standing up in the car while driving was unacceptable behavior. But I can see where a weaker parent might have just given in.
I wasn’t a helicopter child, but I can say that my total self-consciousness at every moment - I was always convinced that everyone thought I was a freak and hated me - stunted me horribly. I suffered from anxiety - which everyone in the family could tell - and clinical depression - which no one realized —well into my twenties. I still have trouble with socializing.
If society is starting to condone a parenting style that leads to more kids being like I was, I have no words.
Over a period of 15 yeras, my sister told me many times that I was the ‘world’s worst mother’ because I allowed my son to do ‘dangerous’ things. The dangerous things included camping across Canada with a competant friend at age 10 and at age 21, riding his motorcycle from New York to Austin, TX. I was supposed to forbid my son to do this…right…at age 21, forbid him to what?
My son is now a successful business man, husband and father, age 48. Her son, age 33, still lives at home with Mommy and Daddy, has no friends…certainly no girl friends…and is supported by his parents as his career brings in about $6000 a year, in a good year.
Smother-mothering takes its toll.
Being a bad mother because I encouraged my son to take risks is, in the long run, better for the kid.
The comments of the summer camp director are very true. Our kids go to camp each summer and return filthy dirty, with bug bites, sunburns, scrapes, bruises, and once a broken finger. But for a month, there is no electronic entertainment, nobody is babying them, and they have the freedom and authority to plan their days with much less structure than in school. There is much more tolerance for rough-housing than in the feminized Ritalin dispensaries our schools have become. They return happy, enthusiastic, and with visibly increased maturity and self-confidence.
very good
I wasn’t a helicopter child, but I can say that my total self-consciousness at every moment - I was always convinced that everyone thought I was a freak and hated me - stunted me horribly. I suffered from anxiety - which everyone in the family could tell - and clinical depression - which no one realized —well into my twenties. I still have trouble with socializing.
If society is starting to condone a parenting style that leads to more kids being like I was, I have no words.
thank you very much
tahk you very much
thank you very much
very thanks
thank you