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September 27, 2021 - September 15, 2022
Even though my parents always conveyed the value of holding high expectations, they gave us so much time and space to experiment, play, and just be.
They believed in our potential to flourish. But they weren’t always trying to mold and change us.
Parents wondered why I was following my children around the playground, why I talked to them so much about their feelings, gave them so many choices, tolerated so much negotiation, and why I was opposed to sending them to sleepaway camp in preschool.
one of the main challenges facing American parents is their perception of how vulnerable their children are: a perception that makes today’s parents markedly more anxious than previous generations.
Children seemed to feel more belonging, happiness, and security from seeing themselves as part of a community of people, rather than as individuals with individual needs that urgently had to be met.
Protecting our kids from discomfort isn’t the same as doing what’s best for them.
In America, and in my own family, I realized, while we also care about these things, we too often encourage our children’s self-expression, uniqueness, and individual achievement to the detriment of the community and to the detriment of their happiness.
The most successful parenting practices are consistent, reinforced by others, and have conviction behind them. Parenting is so much easier if raising children is not up to an individual parent or family, but is considered a community mandate that everyone shares.
Research suggests that co-sleeping is more in sync with an infant’s primal attachment needs, and that separation of the newborn and his mother can lead to the very sleep problems American parents fear.
A consumer-oriented lifestyle10 is a significant cause of mental disorders such as depression, anxiety, or low self-esteem in children. Materialism has been associated with precocious sexuality, obesity, violence, eating disorders, and a propensity toward impulse buying.
Kids learn to get hooked on the novelty16 of acquiring things when this is what they’re used to. But they’re not born addicted to constant acquisition.
Being a good parent meant helping kids to understand that happiness can never be bought.
all our little boy really needed was our love, attention, and time, and that despite the relentless advertising, there was no material object that I could have bought for him that would be worth as much as that.
You give children freedom of choice, knowing that they are regulating themselves through their knowledge about what really are good choices, and through the feeling of autonomy that comes from knowing their choices have always been genuinely respected—not watched over or monitored. You can trust a child’s wisdom if you know he has internalized commonsense wisdom, such as what makes a healthy breakfast.
This all sounds very idealistic and impractical.
have we been confusing an overinflated sense of self with true self-esteem,
kids who are praised for being “smart” feel less intelligent when they make mistakes. When their self-worth and very identity depends on being smart, they are at risk of being less able to persevere through challenges,
Forget about self-esteem and concentrate more on self-control and self-discipline.
It takes commitment to achieve a level of mastery that is praiseworthy.
In Germany, by contrast, adults believe that children are strong enough to hear accurate feedback—the good and the bad. Constructive feedback won’t crush them. It will help them do better next time. Praise, when it does come, is well earned.
If, as a child, you become used to being the center of attention and believe you deserve to be special, you compromise your ability to engage in the healthy give-and-take that human relationships require.
Japan does a much better job of bringing most of its children up to a high level of achievement than our own country does.
Source?
“There is an idea now that a good parent is always telling their children how smart and talented and wonderful they are,” said Dweck. “Parents take too much responsibility and try to ensure their child never has a moment of a bad feeling, of inconvenience, of failure to get what they want.”
But it turns out there is a fine line between involvement and codependency, between reasonable, supportive guidance and hoverparenting, between protecting our kids and impeding their ability to learn essential life skills.
fact, the wrong kind of parental involvement can make our kids feel like they’re not in control of their own lives. If we take over tasks our children could be doing, even if they are kind of stressful or a challenge, when we are over-involved and do not allow a child his own autonomy, we can make a child anxious by giving him the message that he isn’t capable of doing things himself. We orient our children to ourselves, instead of to their own growth and accomplishments. Our over-involvement can also make it harder5 for our kids to cope with stress, or lead them to resist trying new things.
Pretend play, including play fighting, actually helps children be less aggressive in real life. (It turns out even gun play has a purpose21: researchers believe it helps children to read each other’s facial cues and body language, figure out their place in a group, and modulate themselves accordingly.) By allowing kids to practice22 being villains or superheroes, pretend play gives children a chance to try on different characters and experience the world from different points of view.
Trying to eliminate all possible risk isn’t just stifling; without the right sense of proportion and reasonableness, an environment filled with rules gives a false sense of control.
Researchers worry more about25 what they dub “surplus safety”—a situation in which we’re so concerned about protecting kids from perceived risks (such as minor injuries) that we actually put them at risk of other risks (for instance, the very real risk of obesity from sedentary indoor play). There is growing evidence26 that, far from protecting children from injuries, children are at increased risk of more broken limbs on our modern, safety-first playgrounds. When an environment is too sterile and safe, children may be driven to truly unsafe behavior. The greatest risk factor27 for playground
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dependency conflict is the simultaneous process of both “pushing a child to be autonomous or separate and do things on their own, while at the same time telling the child that the parent is judging, evaluating, or watching what the child does, which sends the opposite message. It ties the child to the parent. The parent is, in fact, the person who is controlling the child. A paradigmatic example is a five-year-old on a playground,” Weisner said. “The mother says go off and play, meet other children. When the child gets a few feet away, she calls out, ‘Hi, I’m right here! I’m watching you!
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we’re raising independent children, but we’re also raising dependent children. If we are constantly engaging with them, checking in with them, and eliciting reassurances that they are doing fine, we’re undercutting their autonomy because they have to pay attention to us. And they become dependent on their need to have us pay attention to them too.
We do not do our children any favors when we do their homework for them, mediate their friendships, and hover too close to them as they play. If we want them to be independent, we also have to trust them, let them make mistakes, and realize it’s okay for them to skin their knees.
Today, the average American child3 is spending only between four and seven minutes in unstructured outdoor play.
Make-believe play is, after all, rule-based play. Kids come up with the rules themselves and must remember to keep the play consistent and coherent. As children repeat scenarios14 based on their real-life experiences, they hone their internal ability to control themselves and behave in socially acceptable ways so they can keep the play going.
educators are seeing that too much time spent on early enrichment actually takes time away from the unstructured play children need in order to develop life skills and imagination critical for school readiness.
“artificial stimulation”—early learning that is developmentally inappropriate—can be counterproductive and even hinder children’s development.
“There’s been a measurable rise in childhood anxiety, depression, narcissism, and measurable declines in empathy as well over the last forty to fifty years—the years during which free outdoor play has declined dramatically,”
Recess is often taken away as punishment42 for misbehavior (“recess deprivation”), when it is exactly what would help let off some steam.
“There is no such thing as bad weather,” she added (a phrase I would hear many times from many Nordic parents), “only bad clothing.”
In a school like a forest kindergarten, the basic premise is that children, left to their own devices and only minimal adult guidance, will be able to create their own meaningful experiences for themselves.
play may be something children naturally do, but playing well is a skill that can be lost. If parents treat downtime and play with the same reverence our culture gives to more structured activities, kids won’t lose the skill of playing well.
“Letting their mothers choose the anagrams didn’t threaten their sense of control” in the same way that it did for the Anglo-American children. The Anglo-American children valued a different sort of autonomy, one that let them dictate their own preferences. They saw themselves as separate from their mothers9. For the Asian-American children, forming a healthy self-identity is not at odds with being accountable to their parents. If you believe that your mother’s goals are a logical extension of your own, you aren’t doing something “just to please your mother,” as Westerners might consider it.
While we hear about the need to increase school hours, the Finnish model focuses more on the quality of each hour a child is in school.
when we look at parenting practices and child behavior across a variety of cultures, we find that the pendulum in America has swung too far in the direction of devaluing social conventions.
When we treat our kids like friends, talk to them like peers, and allow their behavior toward others to slide beyond casually friendly into thoughtlessness—when we allow them to be consistently disrespectful to others (including ourselves), to take people for granted, and to treat people civilly only when they feel like it—we are not teaching them positive lessons about being authentic and true to themselves. We are teaching them to feel self-important and entitled instead of compassionate and kind, showing them that it’s totally okay to put their happiness and their needs above others’.
Children who have too few boundaries often flail around for a solid surface to ground them.
don’t reward your kids for sharing. Other research has shown that rewards10 undermine these generous tendencies in both toddlers and in older children.)
Parents who teach their children to speak with authenticity and honesty but do not simultaneously teach them the art of being considerate send their children the message that it is always better to be honest to your true self even if it means hurting someone.
daily greetings could almost become like a form of daily meditation to train each of us to be mindful and focus our attention outside ourselves, even if just for a moment.
But when we ignore our children’s eagerness to participate when they are younger, they internalize the idea that contributing is unimportant and that they are helpless. They also begin to expect that things will be done for them.
Parents in other cultures whose children are more helpful and willing are extremely consistent in their expectations and remain present to follow through until the task is done.
It wasn’t that the Japanese were naturally neater. It was that care and competence were values their parents had consistently prioritized. Teaching kids to take care of their belongings instead of being careless with them was a social dictum, expected by schools and the society at large.
