I’ve recently come to a conclusion about my parenting abilities that is at once tremendously deflating and very encouraging: our kids learn more, have more fun and build better skills – cognitive, emotional, social and physical -- when we stay out of their way. We don’t have to micro-manage our children like new hires ready to climb the corporate ladder. Turns out that’s a good thing. In fact, it’s amazing what can happen when we manage to let our kids be kids.
I don’t know when the term “helicopter parents” was coined to describe the moms and dads who hover over their kids and transport (hover, transport = helicopters, get it?) them from event to event and activity to activity in a what’s-best -for-our-kids mentality that
has led to 6 year-olds needing day planners and 7 Habits training. Worse still, I don’t know when I became one.My wife and I have an inside-joke-funny-only-to-us refrain we often use to describe the “inappropriate” behavior of our kids. “He/She is acting like a 6/5/3 year-old again!” Our children are, respectively, six, five and three years old.
The irony of the statement serves as an important reminder that our kids are in fact, still kids. What’s non-obvious to those who aren’t parents of young children (and more troubling to too many of those who are) is how often we forget that.
Fortunately, reminders come daily, if children are allowed to give them. Don’t believe it? Try this: send your kid out to the backyard or to the local park to play on their own, with their siblings and/or with other kids who happen by. That’s what we did, while watching surreptitiously through the window, um, I mean “cooking dinner.” The results are fascinating to me. At our house, the odds of choosing dirt and a stick-shovel over a soccer ball must be 10 to 1.
What’s so interesting is that it has everything to do with interest rather than athleticism. In fact, our oldest did play soccer last fall. And while “we don’t keep score” at this age, every parent knows our team was undefeated. And most likely, they would correctly guess that our son was the team’s leading scorer, netting more balls than the rest of the team combined. He’s really, really good. (And he has really, really good genes, with a mom and uncle who both starred at the Division I college level.)
That’s what makes it all the more remarkable that he’s more interested in starting a grub worm farm with discarded garden pests than he is with challenging his mom to a shootout. Why? And why is that a good thing?
Truthfully, I don’t know why it’s the case that kids like digging in the dirt so much. But my belief is that it has something to do with this fact: humans are of nature and from nature, and it is natural to investigate those relationships to our environment. I am certain, though, that such an environmental investigation is a very good thing. For starters, such an investigation results in a deeper understanding of ecological and biological systems (you have to actually feed those grubs, you know!). And as with so many things, deeper understanding results in deeper appreciation and deeper affinity for those systems and builds an increased sense of responsibility for their health.
Speaking of health, the American Academy of Pediatrics last year published a report suggesting that free play is “essential for helping children reach important social, emotional, and cognitive developmental milestones as well as helping them manage stress and become resilient.”
Similarly, Dr. Stephen Kellert of Yale University argues that “play in nature, particularly during the critical period of middle childhood, appears to be an especially important time for developing the capacities for creativity, problem-solving, and emotional and intellectual development.”
And if that isn’t enough, recent studies affirm previous research that suggests that digging in the dirt is good for your allergies, too. Multiple studies suggest that exposure to germs actually helps to strengthen and build a child’s immune system.
All of these studies are so important to understand because so many parents are scheduling the child out of their children in an attempt to make them healthier, safer, smarter and more successful. They are most definitely making these choices for all the right reasons. Unfortunately, they are too often making bad choices and adding tension to already stressed families when it isn’t warranted.
But alas, there is hope! There is an antidote to Helicopter Parent Disorder and a path out of Over-Scheduled Kid Syndrome and (yes, I just made up both HPD and OSKS). And that path leads right out your backdoor. Get out of her way, and let your 5 year-old be 5 (she’ll be really good at it!). Let her get her dress dirty. Don’t be offended if she prefers mulch, dandelions and a grasshopper over piano lessons, T-ball, and her brand new doll house. Show excitement over the grime under her nails (even if you have to fake it the first time or two). And let yourself be amazed by the creativity she’ll show out there. She’ll be happier and healthier for it. My bet is you (and the rest of your family) will be happier, too.
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1http://www/aap.org/pressroom/play-public.ht
2Kellert, Stephen R. “Nature and Childhood Development.” In Building For Life: Designing and Understanding the Human-Nature Connection. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2005.
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