Q: It seems to me that parents are more over-protective today than they once were. Why is that?
A: Let me tell you about my own childhood experiences. Walking home from school my first day in Grade 1 (we did not have kindergarten in those days), Wayne Ford and I got into a fight. I ran home in tears to my mom, who wiped my eyes dry and then went about her chores except to remind me that supper would be at six and life would not be worth living if I was late.
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My mom did not phone Wayne Ford’s mom. She did not complain to the school. And she did not SOS my dad to come home this instant to interlude the family crisis.
Funny thing was that the same thing was going on in Wayne Ford’s house. Neither of our parents were all that worried about our little fisticuffs.
The next day en route home from school, Wayne Ford and I became best of friends and it stayed that way for the next eight and a half years, when both of us moved to different communities.
What seems to be happening these days is that parents are overly involved in their kids’ activities. For example, when parents drive their children to school, from their perspective they are protecting them from childhood abduction, from the martyrdom of early childhood death or from strange people hanging around schoolyards.
The statistics are not necessarily supporting their concerns. Despite those many schoolyard shootings in the United States, life is safer now for kids than it has ever been. Fewer of them are being abducted and the traumatic death of children is statistically for the better. But statistics be damned. If I was as parent in the lineup after school, I would be as protective as those parents are. No one is being critical of the parents.
The problem is that this drive to over-protection for our children is depriving them of innumerable learning experiences. When Wayne Ford and I had our run in with each other, we opened the door to a life of social development. We figured out how to resolve our little interpersonal problems, how to be creative and how to fix the trust that each of us had broken. Those were important lessons. Neither Wayne Ford nor I would have learned them if our parents had been in the motorcade ending the school day and taking us from the school ground to where ever it was we needed to go. And what a loss that would have been.
We as adults need to figure out how we are going to give our kids some of those experiences from which our over-protections are depriving them. They are not learning how to get along with each other when they are into organized sports or warmed-up cars at the end of their school days.
So what can we do to encourage those mounds of creativity that are buried in the psyches of all children and give each of them the opportunities to learn about those social relationships that Wayne Ford and I had with each other while at the same time protecting our kids from unnecessary hardship?
I don’t have an easy answer to that one. But I would encourage you and the parents of your grandchildren to think about it.
Jacklin Andrews is a family counsellor from Saskatchewan. Contact: jandrews@producer.com.
