Having a real bad day from Stock Exchange
But only on the inside.
At Halloween, as the King of Everything climbed dark staircases covered with wet leaves, in the drizzle, wearing his Harry Potter cape, I screamed inside: “Don’t slip! Don’t walk so fast! Hold onto the railing! Those stairs are steep/slippery/too dark!” and by the end of the night I had bitten my tongue bloody. Only 25% of my thoughts slipped from behind my clenched teeth, but I hated myself for it.
It’s an epidemic that threatens to crush the life out of our kids…
We worry too much. Our reptile brains need a good dose of happy feel good, or they are going to kill us with worry.
Case in point: remember the mother who, last year, let her kid take the subway home? In New York? OHMYGODNO!!!! If you Google ‘America’s Worst Mom” you will find Lenore Skenazy at the top of the list. And all because she trusted her kid to be a capable tween. And I was over here at Solomother, cheering her on.
Time.com has a long article on the subject of overbearing, overprotective parents — and the real life fear statistics alone are enough to make me want to scream, LIGHTEN UP ALREADY! to parents everywhere. Including myself. (Read “The Growing Backlash Against Overparenting” by Nancy Gibbs)
Consider that crime is down, the chances of your child being abducted is 1 in 1.5 million, and a dozen other numbers that the article — and Skenazy — insist we’ve got all wrong.
I know what I want for Christmas: A copy of Skenazy’s book, Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry. Drop by her blog, Free Range Kids. Tell her Solomother sent you there for some sanity.
Oh… and meditation and yoga classes. My ADHD coach, when I told her that I worry about my kid like I do, told me flat out: “You need to learn how to meditate.”
Tell that to the hamster in my brain. It needs to stop running on the wheel so damned fast.
It’s so hard to strike the right balance. Sometimes when I don’t helicopter, accidents happen. For instance when my son was 5, we showed up early to his soccer game, set up our chairs by the field, and told him to go ahead and play on the playground with his teammates (some 500 feet away.) Ten minutes later, an agitated woman came running over to us “Is there a Tina? A Tina here? A little boy has a broken arm and says his mom is Tina.”
Do I think I could have prevented the fall and the broken arm if I had been standing by the jungle gym watching him? Maybe. Probably not. But I can’t even tell you how I felt, sitting there sipping my coffee, while my son was crouched on the ground holding his broken arm, crying out for me…and I wasn’t even in earshot.
I absolutely object to the idea of parents picking their kids’ college courses for them, or writing letters to the principal when their kid fails a spelling test, or any other of the million ways we don’t let our kids choose their own paths or feel the natural consequences of their actions.
But as much as I try to step back and let my kid have some freedom (Sure Doob, you can go across the street and see if Noah can play) I still have the FEAR all over me. I can behave as though I’m not helicoptering, but I’m like you…my hamster is driving that wheel in my head fast enough to power a small town. I try not to pay attention to stories about strollers rolling onto train tracks or eleven-year old girls abducted on their way to school, but you can’t escape the news stories and it just drives the fear. I don’t know how to balance my concern for safety and the need to teach my kids about stranger danger (and the danger of family members as well) with the importance of letting them have a childhood filled with free-play and careless optimism.
Anna, isn’t that sad? The first time I let my son play — in a playground not 100 feet from the house I was in, with my friend’s older and responsible kids — it was all I could do to stop looking out the window every 30 seconds. PITIFUL!
You are sooo right. As I was driving down our street today, I saw a little one (probably 3 or 4) playing outside and running down the sidewalk without an adult in sight. I said out loud, “Where is the parent?!” all the while thinking, “I used to be that kid”…
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I am so not a helicopter parent that sometimes my mother thinks I am too casual. Which probably means I’m doing it right!