MOV Parent: Do you want your children to be safe or strong?
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Do you want your children to be safe, or do you want them to be strong? This is an impossible question, because parents want their children to be safe AND strong.
But in reality, parents do have to choose. The only way for living organisms to develop strength is to face adversity. The trees that have the strongest roots are the ones that grow on the windy ridges, not the calm valleys.
You've probably heard of "helicopter parenting," which is parents that hover and manage their child's every minute. Recently, researchers have coined a new phrase, "snowplow parenting," in which parents actively remove all barriers or possible obstacles to their child's success in life. The opposite of this parental approach is "free range parenting," in which parents purposefully don't manage their child's life and instead stand back and see if their child can figure things out on their own first.
Contrary to many parents' assumptions, the kids that seem to do the best in life are the ones who have the chance to struggle and meet challenges on their own. Children with helicopter and snowplow parents are more likely to have low self-confidence and higher levels of anxiety.
The problem of childhood anxiety is sourced not only in over-parenting, but from too much screen time and not enough "real" time. The American Psychiatric Association ran a poll in 2017 and discovered that millennials are the most anxious population in the U.S. Social media is the natural environment of today's adolescent and young adult. They are "internet natives" and operate quite well in this virtual world.
But in real social interactions, they often feel like fish out of water. The only way they cope in real-life social settings is by holding their lifeline in front of their face -- their phone.
This avoidance of the awkwardness of real social interactions results in less opportunity to practice managing real emotions in real time with real people. Anxiety increases, and real emotional work is avoided, creating fragility instead of resilience.
Most parents love and cherish their children, yet their best efforts to give love and security can be misguided and result in unintended harm. We parents work hard to create the best learning environments, provide tutoring and music lessons and encourage athletic pursuits to the point that we are traveling hundreds of miles a month to support their endeavors. There are benefits to these things. However, the danger in making a child's schedule all about them is that they will grow up assuming it's all about them! Other dangers are that they will believe they have to be perfect and that things should come easy. Kids with every minute structured by their parents panic in the face of unstructured time.
What can we do to strike a balance between "safe" and "strong" for our kids? If you don't completely eliminate social media, at least put some strong limits on it until your kids are socially strong and emotionally resilient. Resist the urge to fix your child's boredom or other distressing problems. See if they can figure it out.
Another strategy is to get your kids out of their own bubbles. Get them involved in service. Give your children a sense of purpose beyond themselves. Teach them to be good citizens -- to look out for the interests of others as well as themselves.
Instead of giving your kids screens to occupy them at the dinner table, purposefully engage them in conversation. Ask what their high and low of the day is, or what interesting or funny thing happened. And then, make sure you are listening. Don't allow a screen to get between your kids and awesome, meaningful experiences.
Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.