Dear Friends,
In today’s middle-class family culture, parents are anxious. And children are anxious, too.
Parents want nothing more than to keep their children both safe and growing, but often these two things seem impossible to balance. A safe child is one who is under a caregiver’s careful supervision, most people seem to believe; and yet growth requires some amount of independence. How can we balance our responsibility to keep our children safe with that nagging, deep-down knowledge that children who are under constant supervision cannot learn resilience, resourcefulness, and self-direction?
Perhaps the answer comes from taking a different perspective. Instead of seeing an attached child and an independent child as based on two different, opposed models of childhood and parenting, let’s consider how secure attachment can provide the compass to make independence both fruitful and safe — if we can get our fear out of the way first.
Read more here: “Free-Range Kids and the Parental Compass”
Books mentioned in this essay: The Anxious Generation — Hold On to Your Kids — Free-Range Kids — Family Unfriendly1
So, what do you think?
- Did you experience some form of “free ranging” as a child? What was your experience?
- Have you been able to give your children the amount of independence that you would like to? If not, what would help you and your kids access more of this?
- How do you distinguish between fear/anxiety and prudence when it comes to parenting?
Have a great day!
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How do you do it Dixie? I have not even had time to get to your last piece yet...Just about to publish a post we've been working on, after which I can breathe again and take time to catch up on my reading. Will share my thoughts then :)
Lot of wisdom here, Dixie! I appreciate the nuance and examples you gave. Sometimes it feels like the parenting advice we're given doesn't encourage graduated stages very well. Everything is all or nothing. I like the idea of "first (or multiple) exposure" where kids learn things alongside of parents and then try it on their own--like the example you gave of the girl using hand tools after first being guided by her parents. When my daughter was 7, after walking her through the library book return a couple of times, I asked her to try it on her own. It somehow resulted in a book getting lost (between the van where I sat and the book return outside the library, just out of my line of sight), but she was so proud of herself afterwards. Now, she regularly takes her books back inside and gives the librarian her card to check the books and they chat a little.
We've also expanded her bike riding range. It's still in our broader neighborhood, but out of sight of our house and earshot. Most of the streets do not have sidewalks. I didn't grow up with any boundaries on where I could bike--my parents never said and I never asked. It meant I ranged a bit farther than what was wise (looking back) and ended up in some very sketch situations that could have very easily gone sideways quickly. While I know we can learn from those situations, I'm trying to strike a balance now. We're learning. I have found out she's a lot more capable than I often allow her to be. :)
(Also, complete rabbit trail: my brain keeps wanting to call you D.D. and I finally figured out why. In high school, I had a friend named DeeDee who looks so much like you, only her curls were blond, not auburn.)