Photo by Ari Moore
While on a recent overnight field trip with my son’s 3rd-grade class, I had a fascinating conversation with the school principal, who dropped by to observe. She discussed the dire need for me, as a parent, to let my children fail. “I give this advice to all parents,” she said, “because I’ve seen the direct results of the alternative.”
Not 10 minutes later, I was one of four parents supervising the “climbing tree”—a large, beautiful oak made for scaling. The teachers warned us ahead of time: let the kids test themselves—that it was okay if they climbed too high, or didn’t know how to get down. “If you can’t stop yourself from interfering, leave the tree,” they told us.
I started to get squeamish—not at the thought of the kids going too high, but that these warnings needed to be articulated. And maybe even that we were supervising tree climbing at all. I thought of childhood days spent in my backyard, climbing up to the perfect sitting branch, and then scraping the hell out of my arms on the way down. I’m sure my mom peeked out the window occasionally, but I was usually left to my own devices. That was half the fun. But that was a different time.
My son was one of the first to climb. He went way out on a limb, and I found myself stifling the urge to tell him the limb could snap, or that he wouldn’t be able to get back down. Just a few minutes ago, I had been nodding in agreement about parents not hovering, and here I was—a hovering parent. I suppressed my instinct to protect, and when my son asked how to get out of the tree, I told him to figure it out. Which he did. He had the scraped knees to prove it, and he displayed them like a badge of honor.
Right behind my son was a small girl. She went out on the same limb, but as she was trying to swing down, two well-meaning dads stood underneath, reaching their arms up to help. I broke out in a light sweat. This girl had just watched my son do this by himself. What message would that send if these men carried her down to safety?
“She can do it herself,” I told the fathers, envisioning myself as Miss Hannigan from Annie. But it was too late: I was out on my own limb. “You need to step away from the tree.” Both dads acquiesced, one walking away in a huff. And this tiny little slip of a girl sailed down from the tree, and landed on her own two feet. I remembered that feeling well—satisfaction from a tree conquered—and I knew it had been worth making a fuss over.
Isn’t that what we want for our kids? For them to face tough obstacles, find ways to cope, and land on their feet? If so, why do we rescue them so often, or worse yet, help them avoid difficulty to begin with? Much has been written about helicopter parents. Endless articles that outline the dangers of not letting our children fail—usually filled with criticism of parents who make their children the center of their lives, and horror stories about kids who can’t fill out financial aid forms or negotiate their own salaries. Like most issues discussed in the media, it’s a bit exaggerated. However, I’ve worked at two universities, so I know these stories aren’t apocryphal.
I also know that parenting is not just an intellectual exercise. It’s personal and emotional, and most people really are doing the best they know how. We all want to parent for the greater good, but when it’s your kid at risk, it’s a whole lot harder to take one for the team. And let’s be honest; if your child is the one that falls out of that tree, everyone is going to look straight at you, and wonder what kind of parent would let that happen.
Still, there’s too much at stake not to try. Common sense, and a lot of research, tells us that kids need to overcome challenges to build confidence and self-esteem. Stanford Professor of Psychology, Carol Dweck, says this might be especially true for girls, who tend to shy away from subjects in which they think they will fail.
“If you have little failures along the way and have them understand that’s part of learning, and that you can actually derive useful information about what to do next, that’s really useful,” Dweck said. “It’s really about praising the process they engage in, not how smart they are or how good they are at it, but taking on difficulty, trying many different strategies, sticking to it and achieving over time.”
So, I suppose parents need to remember a helping hand isn’t always helpful. That might motivate us to let our kids ride their bikes a little further, forget to turn in their own homework, and yes, even climb to the top of that tree. I’m confident they’ll figure out how to shimmy back down just fine without us.
Well said! I was recently at Great America and was stuck behind a group of “Tweens” in a food line. After at least five minutes in which no one moved, I finally realized not a single one of them (there were about 12 in the group total) knew what to do. They had been waiting for someone to hand them food, rather than taking it from the buffet style line. And there were signs directly in front of them prompting patrons to serve themselves. I was mortified to see this is what helicopter style parenting was doing. It’s not as if these kids needed to know how to feed themselves in the wild. They couldn’t even feed themselves in an amusement park with their parents’ money. I vowed to step up my efforts to let my children handle their own transactions in public. At the store, at a restaurant, at the library, everywhere. They may never survive on their own in the real wilderness, but they WILL know how to get what they need in their daily life without my input.
Thanks, Tina! I’m looking a lot harder at what I do for my kids, too! Lots of things I need to back off on.
While supervision and guidance seem like key parts of parenting, I agree that some independence is essential in building a kid’s confidence and helping them create their being. But beyond that I find it fascinating to see the effects of overprotection, because I suspect they are similar to children as they are to adults. When I became sick a few years ago, I was forced to become dependent on my mom. While it was annoying at first, after constantly being reminded of my limitations, I quickly lost my confidence in my ability to do anything, even something as simple as going to the store. So while failure is possible and kids can get hurt, I believe living in fear of the world is worse.