Are You Raising an Overprotected Wimp?
There it was among the bibs and BPA free dishes, hanging in the isle innocently among the various products for our young children – the product that I knew meant we have gone overboard as parents and are dooming our families to raising wimps. An insulated “koozie” to protect kids’ delicate hands from the cold of an ice pop treat. Seriously? Are our children so overprotected that they have to have a protective wrap on their frozen treats so that their fingers don’t get too cold? What are the costs of insulating our children from every discomfort of the world that we possibly can?
I revisited the work of Hara Estroff Marano who wrote the book A Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting, and is the former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today. She describes the modern trend of parents who are increasingly becoming helicopter parents, consistently and constantly regulating and trying to control every possible uncomfortable issue their kids might face. Some parents feel that wrapping our children in every measure of protection is the equivalent to wrapping them in our love. The more we protect, the more we must love our children. Marano would disagree, saying that these efforts actually make our children more fragile and less likely to develop into successful, independent adults.
The Dangers of Helicopter Parenting
Children need room to discover on their own how their environments truly work. If every time they are presented with new challenges we jump in and intervene and make a safe choice for them, or try to buffer them from every pain, they lose the opportunities to weigh the risks and benefits. This approach removes the ability of kids to think for themselves, taking away their opportunities to assess situations and determine for themselves how to approach the problems or issues.
This is not to say that we should just let our children figure everything out on their own, remove safety measures from the lives, and forget the potential true consequences. Car seats, electrical outlet covers, and other safe options for our children’s environments offer families needed and valuable precautionary measures. Somehow koozies for ice pops just don’t seem to fit this description.
There is a difference between providing a safe, loving, and secure environment for our children and having them live fully padded lives of overprotection. In the simplified example of the ice pop protector, the child who uses it is set up for unrealistic expectations. There are many uncomfortable issues that people face and it is not possible, and not valuable, to take away every level of discomfort. Discomfort helps our children to learn right from wrong, safe from unsafe. It also makes them use their own intuition and forces them to form their own ideas for solutions. If we take away all of their discomforts, we take away their motivations and opportunities to come up with possibilities for change.
Maybe in this case it would simply be that a child would decide to grab a washcloth if the freeze pop was too cold, but it would still be up to the child to choose if the treat was worth the pain of the ice between their fingers or not. Sometimes the best ways to love our kids are when we support their own, independent thinking and let them struggle with the little things. Nations are not developed and frontiers crossed by the easy, paved road, but by forging over rough terrain and facing challenges head on. Who knew a freeze pop koozie could take away so much?
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