I may be the first parent in history to say such a thing, but I miss the days when parents were under-protective. I don't mean looking the other way when your 13-year old daughter hitchhikes home from the beach (ahem), or your six year old microwaves an egg still in the shell. I mean everyday stuff. I'm talking about letting kids climb the monkey bars at the playground or take a bike ride around the neighbourhood. Being a kid back then was more dangerous, perhaps, but was it also more fun? More instructive? Did it teach us to make better decisions and accept responsibility? I still cannot believe my parents let my 7-year old sister walk me to kindergarten everyday. Or how many summers we swam unsupervised in some murky old pond on my grandparents' farm. To say nothing of driving a tractor at age eight. No harm came to us. Nothing "bad" ever happened. Does that make it OK? As a parent, and a borderline over-protective one, I'm conflicted.
There was a terrific article in Maclean's a few weeks ago. In it the author comments on how he rarely sees kids out exploring the neighbourhood, unless they're right in front of their house. Aside from missing the opportunity to develop common sense, learn to cross the street and navigate around the neighbourhood, I just found it terribly sad. I have such fond memories of growing up a street urchin. In the 70s, Saturday mornings meant my mother played her Barbra Streisand LPs and Pine Sol'd the house. She shooed us out and, seriously, locked the screen door. We were not welcome back until the floor was dry and she'd belted out "The Way We Were" twice, at least. So we hung out. On the street. Rode our bikes. Built a fort. Bugged someone else's mom for freezies.
Tomorrow I'm accompanying Stella's class on an outing to the local library. It's exactly one bus stop from her nursery school. But we're not walking. We're taking the bus because parents have voted against teachers taking the children for walks off school property. I'm not judging individual parenting decisions. I just think we've got to find a way to say yes more often.
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2 comments:
The Unger book has some pretty interesting things to say, actually. And I have to agree - all the protective walls we build around our kids can harm them much more than we think. And I am guilty myself of keeping too tight a rein on my 4 year old.
It's definitely food for thought. I've more aware of just automatically saying no or how much I do for my daughter that she should learn to do for herself. We've started with small things, like letting her pull up a chair to the fridge and pour herself a glass of milk, and, not coincidentally, where the mop lives and how to use it!
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