For the next several midweek posts I am going to look at issues that arise in children because of the helicoptering style of parenting. I could also have called this the effects of helicopter regulations because both cause the same effects. This week we will look at the problem of these children having no real sense of danger.
Danger: A Part of Childhood
Up until the recent past, instilling a good healthy sense of danger in children was one of the only ways to help those children see adulthood. When I was a child, my parents understood that childhood was a dangerous time, and I had to get with the program as young as possible. I raised my own children in this way. However, now the name of the game is to shield children from every possible scenario where they might get the least bit hurt because childhood should be all rainbows and unicorns.
Now do not get me wrong, some of the play equipment I played on as a child was probably unsafe. The slides were metal and tall. We did not have fall zones with pea gravel or wood chips, etc. We had grass and sometimes concrete under our play equipment. However, we had a healthy sense of danger whereas children today do not really. I knew that if I fell off that slide it would hurt and probably break something. If we took risks, we understood they were risks. Yes, we were daring, but we had a better understanding of our limits because we had been allowed to experience hurts. Therein is the problem with today's children. They have no concept of their own limits.
Learning Limits
When we shield children from experiencing the bumps and bruises of childhood, we deprive them of a very big part of their development - learning limits. When a child falls off the chair, that child learns about gravity and that climbing on a chair can be risky. The scenarios for this are endless. Whether we like to admit or not, a child learns more from a negative consequence than they will ever learn from a positive experience. I read an article recently that dealt with this very concept. Did you know that our brains are hardwired to experience negative situations differently than positive situations. The negative situations register in a different part of the brain and go straight to long-term memory. That is called the negativity bias and most of the time it is painted as a bad thing. However, in this article it showed how in times past this negativity bias ensured survival. We had to remember the negative experiences in order to avoid doing it again. Guess what? We still need that.
We cannot shield children from negative experiences and have those children grow up to be functioning adults. Children do not learn limits from positive experiences - ever. It just does not work that way. Children learn limits by pushing those limits until they find the point of hurt. Then they back off. They have to be free to explore this on their own. Parents, I am afraid you cannot just tell them where those points occur. It will have no relevance to them unless they have had experience with it themselves. They must experience negative consequences. It has actually been documented that children today are experiencing more injuries per capita than they did even 10 to 20 years ago. Most of the studies I have seen on this subject agree that children today have developed a false sense of security due to not having enough exposure to natural consequences.
Natural Consequences
How do we rectify this? Back off parents. Back off regulations. We cannot plan for every contingency to make sure that children experience a pain-free childhood nor should we. We have to let them take their lumps just like we had to take our lumps. It is called natural consequences, and we should never shield children from them. Otherwise, they will not learn about gravity. They will also not have a working knowledge of their own limitations. We can plan for worst-case scenario, but these days parents freak out when their child gets a bruise or a skinned knee. Good grief, people. It will be okay.
We have actually made childhood more dangerous by trying to usher in the utopia of childhood. Remember it is documented that our children are experiencing more injuries than previous generations and believe me, these children are not more daring than those previous generations. We have taken something out of the equation we never should have touched. Actually, we have believed a lie that has been pushed by every single movement for a utopic experience. We never learn from history. Every time we try to bring utopia on Earth, we end up with a dystopic situation. It is always because we go too far and remove core pieces of our existence in order to bring it to fruition. We need to learn to accept the "good enough." In childhood, that means we need to let the bumps and bruises be. They serve a very important purpose. To remove them as we have tried to do, has brought about bad results.
I hope you have enjoyed this post. Goodbye and God bless!!
Check out Natalie's children's books at: https://www.amazon.com/author/nataliewade7457
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