Children Are Not China Dolls, Part Eleventy-Billion

It's always gratifying when a young person notices the same trends I've noticed:

In my sophomore year, my community college hired me to help underclassmen with subjects for which I’d earned credit. Jack (everyone in this essay has a pseudonym) was evidently stressed even as I entered a private cubicle to greet him. When I asked him to show me what he was working on, he presented a stack of papers about adding and subtracting fractions.

My job included helping kids develop college-survival skills, as many didn’t know how to take notes or manage their time. Listening to complaints from students in a general chemistry class about how even a community college was so much more difficult than high school made it apparent they lacked such skills because those skills had not been previously necessary. I learned they were accustomed to regular reminders for homework, weekly fill-in-the-blank PowerPoint notes, and all-multiple-choice tests. (Emphasis mine.)

Gosh, that sounds familiar! But in all seriousness, if you're wondering how students can pass through high school learning absolutely nothing, you might want to consider this coddling as a major culprit. "Zombies" don't come from traditional, teacher-led curricula; they come from pandering and an absence of discipline.

If I were a teacher in a public high school, I would spend the first day of school reviewing optimum study habits -- and then, from that point on, I'd cut the apron strings. "I've given you some hints, guys, but now it's all up to you. Oh, and by the way, I don't believe in study guides. If you ask me what's going to be on a particular test, my answer will always be the same: 'If we've gone over it, it will be in there -- even if we went over it in September.'"

I suspect that wouldn't go over well -- at least, not at first. I do think, however, that if I were permitted to continue in that vein, I would better serve my students in the long run.

In related news, I've found yet another voice speaking up in favor of leaving even younger folks to their own devices:

Why Adults Have to Stop Trying So Darn Hard to Control How Children Play
Angela Hanscom

You can’t role-play empathy! Or lecture children to death on how important it is to include other children. Children need to learn these things through practice. LOTS of it! This is best done through daily play experiences with other children – especially outdoors, where children can roam, explore, and play away from the adult world.

...

Children are told what they can and can’t play, with many of the traditional games like tag and kickball becoming something of the past. Play dates are organized by adults to keep children entertained, safe, and happy. And what was once a tradition for the kids in the neighborhood to independently walk down to the local water source to play a game of pond hockey, has become an all-consuming hockey travel team where children are ranked and judged based on skill.

In the meantime, teachers are reporting that more and more children are having trouble regulating their emotions in school, struggling with a sense of entitlement, and constantly seeking out adult reassurance with just about any difficulty they encounter.

This links up pretty well with the aforementioned article from The Federalist. The common theme, of course, is adult micromanagement and the refusal to give school-aged children any credit. I don't want to sound like a stereotypical old biddy, but when Matt and I were kids, we somehow managed to survive many hours of basically unsupervised play without lingering psychological or physical injuries. Are today's children made of fundamentally different stuff? I think not.

Why Are We Treating Kids Like They're Made of Porcelain (and Idiots to Boot)?

When I was in elementary school, my parents routinely kicked my brother and me outside with a command to "go play" -- and then left us to our own devices. Matt and I consequently spent entire days climbing all over the giant rocks in our neighbor's front yard (no doubt an old glacier deposit), inventing new games, and telling elaborate stories to ourselves about "Sister Sun," "Sister Moon," and, of course, the Zinkley family, who lived in a dome in Antarctica. We were always within earshot of at least one adult, but generally speaking, that adult never felt compelled to supervise directly unless something was clearly going wrong.

As soon as I turned ten, my parents also routinely left my brother and me home alone -- not overnight, obviously, but for a couple of hours at a time while they enjoyed a quick date night. And when he was around the same age, my brother had to make his own breakfast on many school days because Dad was at work, Mom was at art school, and I had to catch the bus to my junior high. One morning, Matt broke a syrup bottle, called a neighbor to help with the clean-up, and ended up leaving a thin layer of tacky goo all over the kitchen floor. Other than that, nothing untoward ever happened.

Clearly, if my parents were trying to raise us today, they'd get arrested, and we'd end up in foster care. Not only were they "criminally negligent" in letting us play by ourselves or stay home alone, but they also let us run ahead in the mall when we were toddlers and even - gasp! - occasionally left us behind in the car while they ran inside for a second to run a quick errand. Monsters!

Thanks to the twenty-four hour news cycle, our society is now convinced that the world is crawling with predators and that children can't possibly be trusted to look after themselves -- and the hysteria is rising to truly ridiculous levels. What possible rational reason can there be to bring charges on a mother who left her eleven-year-old - her ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD - alone in the car at her daughter's request while she went to the store? I can see being concerned about a child who's strapped in a car seat and therefore can't escape, but a middle schooler is not a helpless moron. So why are we behaving as if she is?

I think this nonsense is a reflection of just how privileged we modern Americans really are. Allow me to explain: Relatively speaking, our disaster response infrastructure is amazing -- so while we still have to contend with nature's wrath (especially given the unique geography of the North American continent), impacts are minimized. We have cold storage and state-of-the-art stove tops, so food poisoning is merely an occasional inconvenience and not a daily concern. We have cheap and readily available vaccines for diseases that, for my parents, were unavoidable facts of life. And since the 1990's, the crime rate has fallen across the board. But this astounding accomplishment - creating one of the safest societies in world history - has made us prideful. Because we have removed or reduced many dangers that were once commonplace, we think we can remove all danger -- and that, readers, is delusion that is costing us our children's sanity.

A strong and growing body of research suggests that kids need risk -- and that if we don't let them climb trees, start fires, and use power tools, we actually make them less resilient and more prone to anxiety and depression. Now obviously, we have to keep age appropriateness in mind; I wouldn't, for instance, give a two-year-old Daddy's electric drill. But the logic here makes profound sense in light of what has been found to be effective for the treatment of phobias and obsessive-compulsive disorders. Adults who are suffering from pathological anxiety are given medications, true, but they are also encouraged to sit and talk through their fear until it goes away on its own. Why wouldn't children also benefit from this "exposure therapy"?

So please, parents: Don't be like those fun-killing playgrounds and preschools out there that post a million rules for their play spaces and never, ever let children climb to the top of the monkey bars. Be a little more like parents in Japan, who let even tiny children go a few doors down to buy a block of tofu. Kids are more capable than you think!

The Dr. Russell Approach to Parenting (Cross-Post)

As of yet, I don't have children, but one of my major life goals is to become a mother -- and if I ever find a husband with whom I can share this enormous responsibility, I intend to parent like Dr. Russell.

For those of you who aren't well-versed in the works of Robert A. Heinlein, Dr. Russell is the father of the protagonist in Have Space Suit, Will Travel, a juvenile science fiction novel that begins with the following exchange:

"Dad," I said, "I want to go to the Moon."

"Certainly," he answered and looked back at his book. It was Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat, which he must know by heart.

I said, "Dad, please! I'm serious."

This time he closed the book on a finger and said gently, "I said it was all right. Go ahead."

"Yes... but how?"

"Eh?" He looked mildly surprised. "Why, that's your problem, Clifford."

The students at my day job are good kids, by and large; I run into genuine attitude problems very rarely.  Still, many collapse when faced with even a mild challenge. If it takes more than an instant to figure out how to solve, say, a geometry problem, they give up and ask for help. They don't look back through their notes. They don't start writing information down. They just -- stop. Indeed, grappling with a difficult problem on their own will bring some of my students to tears.

What these kids are manifesting here, I feel, is the impact of helicopter parenting. When we wrap our children in cotton wool and shield them from adversity, we don't get young adults who are happy and self-sufficient. On the contrary, we get young adults who are perpetually anxious and afraid of failure -- hardly a recipe for success in either college or the working world, where self-motivated risk-takers are more likely to be rewarded.

So if and when I have kids, I'm going to adopt "Why, that's your problem, Clifford" as my own personal motto. Once I teach my kids the critical basics - i.e., the three R's and some basic research and self-help skills - any and all questions and requests will be handled the Dr. Russell way: 

• "Mom, what does [insert word] mean?" "How can we find out?"
• "Mom, I don't understand this math problem." "Did you try looking at your notes in your math notebook?"
• "Mom, I'm hungry." "Hmm. What can you do about that?"
• "Mom, I don't have any clothes to wear!" "Well, you have this big pile of dirty laundry you can do something about..."
• "Mom, can we get the new [insert cool YA series] book for my Kindle?" "Sure. Do you have the money to pay for it?" [beat] "Hmm. Guess you have to go out and do a little yard work for the neighbors."

Mind you, this doesn't mean I will be completely hands-off. As G.K. Chesterton observed, we need boundaries to feel secure -- especially when we're young. I will be establishing rules and expectations that carry consequences if they're not met. I will also be setting a baseline homeschooling curriculum because there are certain things I feel every child should learn. But beyond that? As soon as possible, I'm going to get out of the way.   

Admittedly, part of the reason this approach appeals to me is that, given my rheumatoid arthritis, I just don't have the spoons for over-protective modern parenting. But more importantly, I think pulling back and allowing my kids to figure things out on their own sends the implicit message that I trust them and believe them to be fully capable -- which, I hope, will encourage them to stretch themselves intellectually and become the personally responsible, enterprising citizens America desperately needs.