In recent years, more and more people have been speaking out about parents being too protective of their children. The term given to this habit is “helicopter parenting”.
Author Gever Tulley, who wrote 50 Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do), believes kids are more likely to come to harm as a result of too much sugar than they are from too much playing around with a hammer and nails.
In place of the helicopter mums, we now have “free-range kids”. The bible of the group is a book with the same title by Lenore Skenazy, who was labelled the worst mother in America when she let her nine-year-old take the New York subway home alone because he wanted to as an adventure.
Now, I’m all for making sure my children aren’t going to spend most of their early years in accident and emergency clinics, but at the same time, I think it’s probably just as important to make sure our kids learn how to take sensible risks, rather than avoid risks altogether.
“While there are aspects of danger in virtually everything we do, the trick is to learn how mastery actually minimises danger,” Gever writes in his book.
So if you think helicopter parents and the free-range kids movement are both too extreme, but you’d still like to encourage your kids to get out there and be more adventurous – and, most importantly, learn how to be self-reliant and show some initiative – what do you do?
Here are some tips for producing what I call “can-do kids” – children who are independent, self-reliant, adventurous… but still safe.
Right from the start, encourage your children to carry out whatever tasks they are capable of. It might be preparing snacks, for example, or collecting a newspaper from the letterbox.
Let your child take a bus to the movies with a friend. It’s an opportunity to learn how to handle money, how to use public transport and how to plan an outing. And as we tragically know, children are at much greater risk of harm from family members than from the stereotypical “stranger danger” of those outside the home.
Let your kids walk home from school – yes, alone. This is an opportunity to learn all sorts of things, including how to deal with strangers and how to find their way around. Best of all, it’ll teach your child that the world is not just a place full of bad things waiting to happen, but rather a place where they belong and can have some control.As I see lines of double-parked four-wheel drives outside inner city schools, I often think that children are at greater risk of being in a car accident than of having anything bad happen if they just walked home independently.
Let kids make mistakes – they’ll be much more motivated to improve their skills if you don’t take over and “fix it” whenever things go wrong.
Let kids help. Toddlers always want to be involved and although it’s a nuisance, it’s the start of them learning how to do things for themselves.
Don’t pick your toddler up to wash his or her hands. Get a stool that they can drag into place and climb up on.
Show your school-age child how to make their own lunch, and by their teens they’ll be cooking for the family.
Dig a hole. Kids love doing this, but at some point in years gone by we started discouraging strenuous activity. We also tend to avoid asking our kids do things that are physically demanding. However, left to their own devices, kids don’t even notice they’re working up a sweat.
Teach your child how to cross the road alone as soon as they can tell the difference between left and right. once they’ve got that skill, you can send them out to the shops on small errands, such as buying bread or milk.
Row a boat. Next time you’re at the beach and have access to a kayak or dinghy, let your youngster (with a lifejacket on, of course) row it along the shoreline without your help.
At the end of these activities and experiments, your child will be proud of their achievements, ready to step up to a new level of initiative and less dependent on you to do the sort of things for them that you probably did yourself without a second thought when you were their age.
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