Yes!! As a child clinical psychologist I could not agree more! (I have often referred to exposure therapy for children as feeling like torture for them!) but this makes so much sense— exercise those courage muscles in a sort of sneaky way!! (We have to do the same when we want children to learn better self regulation— sneak in the exercises without directly telling them why they are good for them). Ahhhh……. I am grateful this word is getting out there. There is so much a parent can do without resorting to coming to see someone like me!
Very informative, thank you. My childhood in rural Maine, 65 years ago, bears no resemblance to today’s hyper-limited experiences. [Shoot a couple wild rabbits for dinner with your own .22 rifle, at age 10? Just a normal after-school activity.]
I weep for the children who are missing so much real life experience.
Longtime reader of this blog and TAG book. I generally agree with all the prescriptions given here, but think we need to seriously grapple with three barriers to letting kids play and live more independently that are not just moral panic, they are genuinely real. These have different salience in different kinds of neighbourhoods but are all real to some extent for everybody.
The first is traffic. There are more people, driving vehicles with approximately double-triple the horsepower that vehicles had during the golden age of free play. I live in a dense classic streetcar suburb in Toronto (now considered part of downtown), and the thing I am overwhelmingly fearful of, more than everything else put together, when I let my nine-year-old out for free play, is the speed and size of the vehicles today.
The second is sexual abuse — NOT by strangers, but by the men among those networks of adults that we used to just trust to keep an eye on our kids. Comparative statistics are really hard to come by because this stuff wasn’t tracked or properly reported in the 1950s, but there’s enough anecdotal evidence and incidents that were bad enough to make the newspapers to convince me that way more rampant than it is today. Religious figures, sports coaches, even just storekeepers that the kids ran into frequently while roaming. I’m in a local history group that spends significant time combing through the digitized archives of our city newspapers for the period from 1890 to 1980 or so and you get a sense just from reading that of how much behaviour was basically assumed would happen, including really awful victim-blaming of, like 12-15 year old girls. Background checks and increased enforcement and just greater knowledge and willing to report things will help here I think, but it’s not a moral panic to be worried about this. Again, I’m not talking about strangers. It’s the networks of known adults.
The third one is maybe more of a factor in what in the US would be called “blue” cities. Here in Toronto it’s an issue too. There is now a significant population of truly dangerous people whose minds have been destroyed by opiates and fentanyl and who are in the midst of various schizophrenic breaks, who do things like attack strangers on public transit. This is not a made-up issue, it is really happening right now. I am not sure I trust strangers to protect my kids if something happens — I think strangers would have the right intentions, but several decades of prosecuting intervenors and those who counterattack criminals, at least here in Canada, has made people fearful to ever raise a hand. I don’t think you can restore the independence and play-based childhood in the liberal cities of North America without allowing for a baseline level of control in the streets again.
The fourth barrier of course is free-roam/Right-to-Play laws and giving people protection from child welfare agency calls for letting their kids play outside. But this group is already all over that stuff; it’s a well-known issue. It’s these other three that I’m not seeing this group totally willing to grapple with yet.
Some excellent researchers looked at this a few decades ago when we realized hyper-parenting based on fear was a growing problem. The incidence rates of sex abuse are no higher than they ever were among suburban and rural populations. Also, our awareness of perpetrator access abuse in youth development groups has helped us implement safeguards such as no child alone with adult rules etc. The enemy are media, healthcare providers, and government which function to instill fear to control the population and sell products to make parents adopt an illusion of safety. Teach your kids to take reasonable risks and to recognize (interpersonal) danger. Teach them the buddy system. Teach them how to ascend stairs and cross streets safely.
I unfortunately had a typo in my post that made it more confusing — I meant to say that sexual abuse used to be way worse in the 1950s. Just mostly unreported to police etc. so hard to get good statistics without really hard shoe-leather academic work. It’s better today. And the question is: is it better today because of no-child alone rules and police background checks for coaches, etc., or is it actually just better because kids don’t have any freedom today.
In other words — is it possible to give back kids freedom without going back to the bad days of 1950s sexual abuse? Or can we control it with modern policing etc. while fulfilling the goal of giving kids back their freedom?
I think you are absolutely right. Traffic is more dangerous, but the most dangerous are the streets full of the mentally ill and drug addicted. Another is the lack of moms home during the day, especially after-school hours. Moms have always been the safe-stranger option for kids, and as one of the only moms home on my street in the 80's and 90's, I had several opportunities to step in and help kids in dangerous situations. My children's up bringing was so different from mine, and not necessarily by choice.
I don’t know how to resolve this. I have no illusions about the risks that lurk in trusting men with children — of course it’s a tiny minority but still orders of magnitude more than among women — but we can’t really turn back the clock on having women out of the workforce. Nor would we want to, I think? We have to find a way for kids to have independence that works with 21st century gender roles and working norms.
Neither do I know how to turn this back. I do think having an economy that allows a family to survive on one income again would allow more parents to stay home with kids, but that's probably dreaming. Getting to know our neighbors instead of hiding inside is a good place to start. And teaching kids how to speak to strangers instead of fearing everyone would be the second place. They need to recognize dangerous behavior, rather than labeling everyone they don't know a threat. That's on parents.
"I do think having an economy that allows a family to survive on one income again would allow more parents to stay home with kids" The second part of your sentence seems better than the first. The post-war economic miracle is perhaps underestimated by those who didn't live through it. I wonder how many Americans today would be willing to go back to the level of technology and convenience and communication and freedom we didn't enjoy in 1975.
I struggle a lot with your third issue as well. I live in a relatively safe neighborhood in the Bay Area of CA, but about once a week will bump into someone on our street whose mind is not all there, and was once chased to my car by a man cursing at me. I worry about what a child would do in a similar circumstance…
As a child, I grew up in apartments, but eventually relatively dense housing. And because people had more children, I could tell my parents that I was just going downstairs or across the street to my friend's. Indeed, up to Grade 6, I could fall out our front door and there'd be someone within a month of my age to goof around with. Bit by bit the "leash" was extended to visit friends a few blocks away. But what is critical is that my parents had that *opportunity* to loosen the leash because of the social circumstances that exist. Fast forward 40 years and our own children had to be driven everywhere to see any friend, because there was no one else the same age near us, and we lived in the suburbs, where everyone had a separate dwelling and no one lived on top of or attached to anyone else.
My point is that the demographic change of smaller families, and the virtual elimination of multi-family housing (and many apartments are predicated on only one or two occupants, and certainly not families with children), have eroded parents' opportunities to have TRUST in child independence. By not according them that independence, children don't learn to have trust in themselves, and self-esteem is fundamentally self-trust, acquired VIA successful (or at least penalty-free) independent action.
Two words: Hallelujah! (for Camilo’s innovation) and Almost! (for missing the real cause of anxiety in kids).
Yes, yes, kids need more independence, but independence alone is not the answer. Not. You want proof? Endless studies demonstrate that neighborhoods with lower income and higher rates of single-parent households experience higher rates of crime and imprisonment. These children tend to be less supervised—more independent—and the result is more anger and crime, not the greater happiness we seek for them. For 30 years I have taught children AND visited them as adults in prison, so I can state with authority that independence alone is not enough.
So what is missing? What children need more than anything else is to feel loved unconditionally, the kind of love we don’t have to earn, the kind without disappointment and anger. But parents don’t know how to give this love that confers upon their children the joy and confidence that eliminate the need for children to seek pain relief in devices, social media, isolation, and addictions. Until we learn how to love without conditions, our children will be anxious—period!—whether they have independence or not. The prisoners I referenced have directly told me that love was what they were missing.
Without love, independence just turns into a lack of direction.
Without love, children won’t give up their phones, nor will their parents have the courage to require that move.
Without love, our kids are lost.
We as parents can learn to find and give unconditional love at the free and agenda-free website RealLove.com, which is the culmination of thirty years of research on this subject.
Great piece not just for therapists treating anxiety, but for parents who want to raise relsilient kids.
Our family just returned from visiting relatives in Switzerland where we came across a daycare class that was gamboling freely on a steep and rocky hill. The youngest kids were just over two and navigated the descent independently. The teachers kept an eye from a distance; no “careful” or “watch out” could be head, just laughter. Kids also learn to make fires to fry sausages and boil tea.
One of the stated curriculum goals of many kindergartens in the country is to walk to school independently. Kids wear bright orange pinnies and are trained in traffic safety after which they can commonly be seen walking the streets alone or in small gaggles.
Thus, for Swiss kids independence starts early and is simply part of daily life.
Just today, my 11 year old boys told me (and I swear I’m not making it up): “I wish our neighborhood was doing that ‘80s childhood’ summer our hair stylist told us about. No one is outside to play with!” I told them to knock on some doors and ask if so-and-so could come out to play. But, sadly, all of the neighborhood kids are probably in day camps while their parents work.
I find it so ironic and telling that what was so normal that it must have been barely worth mentioning to our forbears is now a “therapy.” This is not a criticism but rather a recognition and an expression of gratitude that maybe this burst of insanity could finally be letting up.
YES and freedom needs to be grounded in secure attachment to primary caregivers and a healthy, safe environment : ie quality family time . Absolute freedom without love is a dangerous thing.
The inherent problem with encouraging independence in our children is that some kids make horrible mistakes in judgment which can lead to death or crippling injuries. This didn't used to be such a big deal when half of children died in childhood so the average woman was expected to push out six or more of the little darlings to achieve some population growth. Nowadays, each child is more special, so the loss of a single child becomes a much bigger deal. Maybe it's parents that need help for their anxieties, not the kids? Or maybe our recent changes in social structure are not so adaptive for the species? Or maybe our planet would be better off with several billion fewer people?
Excellent and inspiring to read about Independent Activities as a method to therapy with kids struggling with anxiety. As a psychotherapist and observer myself, I see the avoidance people are experiencing as an absolute epidemic based on anxiety overruling everywhere. I've talked with so many parents and have recommended the successful enveloping of independent activities, especially for teens and young adults, to strengthen their feelings of fortitude, joy and independence as the antidote to anxiety. It's so great to hear that research and data are backing up this idea.
This is a nice thought in general but not terribly actionable for parents without age indicators. My daughter is eleven months old. She gets anxious if I leave the room. Is it appropriate to put her in the back yard for two hours to get over it? Obviously not. My son is five. Should I let him bike to the park without me across busy streets? Applaud him for being brave enough to run through parking lots unsupervised to climb into truckbeds? Feels like maybe I should wait for his good judgment to develop more before ratcheting up his independence. But how to tell?
YES. I came here to say this. As encouraging and necessary as this growing discourse has been, it consistently rhetorically treats all of childhood as a bloc. 0-10 is fine for segregating out social media users on average, but very little advice for a 9yo applies to a 4yo, etc. And while this piece is great, I do think preventative strategies would be even more helpful. Health workers and researchers are rightly addressing a crisis by offering novel effective treatments. But my kids are not anxious now. They very well could be soon! I would love to see age-appropriate recommendations for parents looking to mitigate the social forces that lead to increased anxiety, rather than merely treating that anxiety once it arises.
Childhood stages of development are well understood. If you google “at what age can a child” you’ll get charts with wonderful ideas for milestones to aim for.
Try letting him make his own lunch all by himself. That’s one independent thing I started my kids on. You can only hurt yourself so much with a butter knife and PBJ. It’s building up the attitude of, “I can figure it out.”
I completely agree on all fronts, and fondly recall my childhood of running around in my neighborhood freely then coming home for dinner...no parental involvement. I live in Paris, France and it's encouraging to see how many young adolescents ride the city busy by themselves or walk themselves home from school. My oldest is only 3 years old, but I'm trying to encourage independence at this stage (age-appropriate of course). It would be helpful to maybe think about offering ways to encourage independence from the start (1 - 2 yrs) and offer examples of what this would look appropriately for the different ages throughout childhood and adolescents.
This is fabulous!! I grew up in CA living across the street from what was referred to as the "vacant lot," a very large piece of land that stretched out behind the other row of houses across our street, ours a steep street, as were/are most streets at the foothills of the Angeles Crest mountains.
I was the youngest girl and my brother the youngest boy in the motley group of the 9 boys and 3 girls neighborhood.
Stink Bugs, Horny Toads and an occasional snake were resident in the vacant lot, living upon this dry land filled with small hills and valleys, for king of the hill challenges/play.
Our steep street itself was daily challenges, playing baseball or kickball, steeping aside for cars to pass, and later riding the first skate boards: a metal skate, front and back, nailed to a 2 by 4, mine painted red by my dad, these road down the bumping asphalt 12 house length street, and then again, and again.
Not sure of the writing limit...going on some. The age differences in the group, yes, added to those challenges and opportunities, adding some scuffed emotional experiences to the scuffed knees, and toes.
A retired teacher, I'm trying to change education in public schools, they also needing to honor the childhood "play and learn" years, up to age 7, of which Piaget and Montessori wrote, which once naturally guided even public education, and while we were still free to play outdoors. Many of these "independent" experiences were right brain, hands on, discovery and intuitive abilities, which children are meant to develop before left brain thinking, also important, moves us all, first into experienced-based thinking, but then also abstract thinking, abstract not possible till age 11.
So very unfortunately, in our modern era of phones and accelerated tech, now left brain thinking is paramount, even starting at the preschool level, and for sure kindergarten levels, with letters and numbers taught as precursors; thinking, fact and figures increasingly taught and memorized to be regurgitated on tests. This leaves behind the essential, and needed, also to still be used, right brain skills of connection, discovery, desiring and learning to help others, among many other things, which are a natural part of community living, this truncated and nearly eliminated in our modern left brain world. Finland, starting public education at age 7, and doing other things right, tests highest in the world.
I love this. We were coached on exposure therapy to keep kid going to school which basically involved forcing her to go or if she really refused hard, making home time boring and school like. It eventually worked (missing 1-2 days per week to 1 every 8 weeks and those were close calls, e.g kind of sick, borderline stay home anyways) but felt punitive at times, even as we did our best to frame it lovingly. I would still recommend some of that kind of thing for something as vital as school attendance, but I love the idea of having unrelated independent challenges the kid chooses.
One small bit of feedback on the article: cut to the chase with the practical advice and then provide more background - I worry too many readers didn’t get far enough through the background research and trends to get to the concrete advice.
What if this risk-averse, coddling nanny attitude is applied to all of society? What happens when certain social and political factions push an agenda of non just supervised play but supervised life? Are there expected--and unexpected--consequences when harm prevention (especially for feelings) and fairness (the redistribution kind) dominate public policy?
Yes!! As a child clinical psychologist I could not agree more! (I have often referred to exposure therapy for children as feeling like torture for them!) but this makes so much sense— exercise those courage muscles in a sort of sneaky way!! (We have to do the same when we want children to learn better self regulation— sneak in the exercises without directly telling them why they are good for them). Ahhhh……. I am grateful this word is getting out there. There is so much a parent can do without resorting to coming to see someone like me!
Very informative, thank you. My childhood in rural Maine, 65 years ago, bears no resemblance to today’s hyper-limited experiences. [Shoot a couple wild rabbits for dinner with your own .22 rifle, at age 10? Just a normal after-school activity.]
I weep for the children who are missing so much real life experience.
Longtime reader of this blog and TAG book. I generally agree with all the prescriptions given here, but think we need to seriously grapple with three barriers to letting kids play and live more independently that are not just moral panic, they are genuinely real. These have different salience in different kinds of neighbourhoods but are all real to some extent for everybody.
The first is traffic. There are more people, driving vehicles with approximately double-triple the horsepower that vehicles had during the golden age of free play. I live in a dense classic streetcar suburb in Toronto (now considered part of downtown), and the thing I am overwhelmingly fearful of, more than everything else put together, when I let my nine-year-old out for free play, is the speed and size of the vehicles today.
The second is sexual abuse — NOT by strangers, but by the men among those networks of adults that we used to just trust to keep an eye on our kids. Comparative statistics are really hard to come by because this stuff wasn’t tracked or properly reported in the 1950s, but there’s enough anecdotal evidence and incidents that were bad enough to make the newspapers to convince me that way more rampant than it is today. Religious figures, sports coaches, even just storekeepers that the kids ran into frequently while roaming. I’m in a local history group that spends significant time combing through the digitized archives of our city newspapers for the period from 1890 to 1980 or so and you get a sense just from reading that of how much behaviour was basically assumed would happen, including really awful victim-blaming of, like 12-15 year old girls. Background checks and increased enforcement and just greater knowledge and willing to report things will help here I think, but it’s not a moral panic to be worried about this. Again, I’m not talking about strangers. It’s the networks of known adults.
The third one is maybe more of a factor in what in the US would be called “blue” cities. Here in Toronto it’s an issue too. There is now a significant population of truly dangerous people whose minds have been destroyed by opiates and fentanyl and who are in the midst of various schizophrenic breaks, who do things like attack strangers on public transit. This is not a made-up issue, it is really happening right now. I am not sure I trust strangers to protect my kids if something happens — I think strangers would have the right intentions, but several decades of prosecuting intervenors and those who counterattack criminals, at least here in Canada, has made people fearful to ever raise a hand. I don’t think you can restore the independence and play-based childhood in the liberal cities of North America without allowing for a baseline level of control in the streets again.
The fourth barrier of course is free-roam/Right-to-Play laws and giving people protection from child welfare agency calls for letting their kids play outside. But this group is already all over that stuff; it’s a well-known issue. It’s these other three that I’m not seeing this group totally willing to grapple with yet.
Some excellent researchers looked at this a few decades ago when we realized hyper-parenting based on fear was a growing problem. The incidence rates of sex abuse are no higher than they ever were among suburban and rural populations. Also, our awareness of perpetrator access abuse in youth development groups has helped us implement safeguards such as no child alone with adult rules etc. The enemy are media, healthcare providers, and government which function to instill fear to control the population and sell products to make parents adopt an illusion of safety. Teach your kids to take reasonable risks and to recognize (interpersonal) danger. Teach them the buddy system. Teach them how to ascend stairs and cross streets safely.
I unfortunately had a typo in my post that made it more confusing — I meant to say that sexual abuse used to be way worse in the 1950s. Just mostly unreported to police etc. so hard to get good statistics without really hard shoe-leather academic work. It’s better today. And the question is: is it better today because of no-child alone rules and police background checks for coaches, etc., or is it actually just better because kids don’t have any freedom today.
In other words — is it possible to give back kids freedom without going back to the bad days of 1950s sexual abuse? Or can we control it with modern policing etc. while fulfilling the goal of giving kids back their freedom?
I think you are absolutely right. Traffic is more dangerous, but the most dangerous are the streets full of the mentally ill and drug addicted. Another is the lack of moms home during the day, especially after-school hours. Moms have always been the safe-stranger option for kids, and as one of the only moms home on my street in the 80's and 90's, I had several opportunities to step in and help kids in dangerous situations. My children's up bringing was so different from mine, and not necessarily by choice.
I don’t know how to resolve this. I have no illusions about the risks that lurk in trusting men with children — of course it’s a tiny minority but still orders of magnitude more than among women — but we can’t really turn back the clock on having women out of the workforce. Nor would we want to, I think? We have to find a way for kids to have independence that works with 21st century gender roles and working norms.
Neither do I know how to turn this back. I do think having an economy that allows a family to survive on one income again would allow more parents to stay home with kids, but that's probably dreaming. Getting to know our neighbors instead of hiding inside is a good place to start. And teaching kids how to speak to strangers instead of fearing everyone would be the second place. They need to recognize dangerous behavior, rather than labeling everyone they don't know a threat. That's on parents.
"I do think having an economy that allows a family to survive on one income again would allow more parents to stay home with kids" The second part of your sentence seems better than the first. The post-war economic miracle is perhaps underestimated by those who didn't live through it. I wonder how many Americans today would be willing to go back to the level of technology and convenience and communication and freedom we didn't enjoy in 1975.
I struggle a lot with your third issue as well. I live in a relatively safe neighborhood in the Bay Area of CA, but about once a week will bump into someone on our street whose mind is not all there, and was once chased to my car by a man cursing at me. I worry about what a child would do in a similar circumstance…
As a child, I grew up in apartments, but eventually relatively dense housing. And because people had more children, I could tell my parents that I was just going downstairs or across the street to my friend's. Indeed, up to Grade 6, I could fall out our front door and there'd be someone within a month of my age to goof around with. Bit by bit the "leash" was extended to visit friends a few blocks away. But what is critical is that my parents had that *opportunity* to loosen the leash because of the social circumstances that exist. Fast forward 40 years and our own children had to be driven everywhere to see any friend, because there was no one else the same age near us, and we lived in the suburbs, where everyone had a separate dwelling and no one lived on top of or attached to anyone else.
My point is that the demographic change of smaller families, and the virtual elimination of multi-family housing (and many apartments are predicated on only one or two occupants, and certainly not families with children), have eroded parents' opportunities to have TRUST in child independence. By not according them that independence, children don't learn to have trust in themselves, and self-esteem is fundamentally self-trust, acquired VIA successful (or at least penalty-free) independent action.
Two words: Hallelujah! (for Camilo’s innovation) and Almost! (for missing the real cause of anxiety in kids).
Yes, yes, kids need more independence, but independence alone is not the answer. Not. You want proof? Endless studies demonstrate that neighborhoods with lower income and higher rates of single-parent households experience higher rates of crime and imprisonment. These children tend to be less supervised—more independent—and the result is more anger and crime, not the greater happiness we seek for them. For 30 years I have taught children AND visited them as adults in prison, so I can state with authority that independence alone is not enough.
So what is missing? What children need more than anything else is to feel loved unconditionally, the kind of love we don’t have to earn, the kind without disappointment and anger. But parents don’t know how to give this love that confers upon their children the joy and confidence that eliminate the need for children to seek pain relief in devices, social media, isolation, and addictions. Until we learn how to love without conditions, our children will be anxious—period!—whether they have independence or not. The prisoners I referenced have directly told me that love was what they were missing.
Without love, independence just turns into a lack of direction.
Without love, children won’t give up their phones, nor will their parents have the courage to require that move.
Without love, our kids are lost.
We as parents can learn to find and give unconditional love at the free and agenda-free website RealLove.com, which is the culmination of thirty years of research on this subject.
Great piece not just for therapists treating anxiety, but for parents who want to raise relsilient kids.
Our family just returned from visiting relatives in Switzerland where we came across a daycare class that was gamboling freely on a steep and rocky hill. The youngest kids were just over two and navigated the descent independently. The teachers kept an eye from a distance; no “careful” or “watch out” could be head, just laughter. Kids also learn to make fires to fry sausages and boil tea.
One of the stated curriculum goals of many kindergartens in the country is to walk to school independently. Kids wear bright orange pinnies and are trained in traffic safety after which they can commonly be seen walking the streets alone or in small gaggles.
Thus, for Swiss kids independence starts early and is simply part of daily life.
Just today, my 11 year old boys told me (and I swear I’m not making it up): “I wish our neighborhood was doing that ‘80s childhood’ summer our hair stylist told us about. No one is outside to play with!” I told them to knock on some doors and ask if so-and-so could come out to play. But, sadly, all of the neighborhood kids are probably in day camps while their parents work.
I find it so ironic and telling that what was so normal that it must have been barely worth mentioning to our forbears is now a “therapy.” This is not a criticism but rather a recognition and an expression of gratitude that maybe this burst of insanity could finally be letting up.
YES and freedom needs to be grounded in secure attachment to primary caregivers and a healthy, safe environment : ie quality family time . Absolute freedom without love is a dangerous thing.
The inherent problem with encouraging independence in our children is that some kids make horrible mistakes in judgment which can lead to death or crippling injuries. This didn't used to be such a big deal when half of children died in childhood so the average woman was expected to push out six or more of the little darlings to achieve some population growth. Nowadays, each child is more special, so the loss of a single child becomes a much bigger deal. Maybe it's parents that need help for their anxieties, not the kids? Or maybe our recent changes in social structure are not so adaptive for the species? Or maybe our planet would be better off with several billion fewer people?
Excellent and inspiring to read about Independent Activities as a method to therapy with kids struggling with anxiety. As a psychotherapist and observer myself, I see the avoidance people are experiencing as an absolute epidemic based on anxiety overruling everywhere. I've talked with so many parents and have recommended the successful enveloping of independent activities, especially for teens and young adults, to strengthen their feelings of fortitude, joy and independence as the antidote to anxiety. It's so great to hear that research and data are backing up this idea.
This is a nice thought in general but not terribly actionable for parents without age indicators. My daughter is eleven months old. She gets anxious if I leave the room. Is it appropriate to put her in the back yard for two hours to get over it? Obviously not. My son is five. Should I let him bike to the park without me across busy streets? Applaud him for being brave enough to run through parking lots unsupervised to climb into truckbeds? Feels like maybe I should wait for his good judgment to develop more before ratcheting up his independence. But how to tell?
YES. I came here to say this. As encouraging and necessary as this growing discourse has been, it consistently rhetorically treats all of childhood as a bloc. 0-10 is fine for segregating out social media users on average, but very little advice for a 9yo applies to a 4yo, etc. And while this piece is great, I do think preventative strategies would be even more helpful. Health workers and researchers are rightly addressing a crisis by offering novel effective treatments. But my kids are not anxious now. They very well could be soon! I would love to see age-appropriate recommendations for parents looking to mitigate the social forces that lead to increased anxiety, rather than merely treating that anxiety once it arises.
Childhood stages of development are well understood. If you google “at what age can a child” you’ll get charts with wonderful ideas for milestones to aim for.
Try letting him make his own lunch all by himself. That’s one independent thing I started my kids on. You can only hurt yourself so much with a butter knife and PBJ. It’s building up the attitude of, “I can figure it out.”
I completely agree on all fronts, and fondly recall my childhood of running around in my neighborhood freely then coming home for dinner...no parental involvement. I live in Paris, France and it's encouraging to see how many young adolescents ride the city busy by themselves or walk themselves home from school. My oldest is only 3 years old, but I'm trying to encourage independence at this stage (age-appropriate of course). It would be helpful to maybe think about offering ways to encourage independence from the start (1 - 2 yrs) and offer examples of what this would look appropriately for the different ages throughout childhood and adolescents.
This is fabulous!! I grew up in CA living across the street from what was referred to as the "vacant lot," a very large piece of land that stretched out behind the other row of houses across our street, ours a steep street, as were/are most streets at the foothills of the Angeles Crest mountains.
I was the youngest girl and my brother the youngest boy in the motley group of the 9 boys and 3 girls neighborhood.
Stink Bugs, Horny Toads and an occasional snake were resident in the vacant lot, living upon this dry land filled with small hills and valleys, for king of the hill challenges/play.
Our steep street itself was daily challenges, playing baseball or kickball, steeping aside for cars to pass, and later riding the first skate boards: a metal skate, front and back, nailed to a 2 by 4, mine painted red by my dad, these road down the bumping asphalt 12 house length street, and then again, and again.
Not sure of the writing limit...going on some. The age differences in the group, yes, added to those challenges and opportunities, adding some scuffed emotional experiences to the scuffed knees, and toes.
A retired teacher, I'm trying to change education in public schools, they also needing to honor the childhood "play and learn" years, up to age 7, of which Piaget and Montessori wrote, which once naturally guided even public education, and while we were still free to play outdoors. Many of these "independent" experiences were right brain, hands on, discovery and intuitive abilities, which children are meant to develop before left brain thinking, also important, moves us all, first into experienced-based thinking, but then also abstract thinking, abstract not possible till age 11.
So very unfortunately, in our modern era of phones and accelerated tech, now left brain thinking is paramount, even starting at the preschool level, and for sure kindergarten levels, with letters and numbers taught as precursors; thinking, fact and figures increasingly taught and memorized to be regurgitated on tests. This leaves behind the essential, and needed, also to still be used, right brain skills of connection, discovery, desiring and learning to help others, among many other things, which are a natural part of community living, this truncated and nearly eliminated in our modern left brain world. Finland, starting public education at age 7, and doing other things right, tests highest in the world.
Absolutely right.
Thank you; pass this knowing on to others, as you probably are. ❤️
I love this. We were coached on exposure therapy to keep kid going to school which basically involved forcing her to go or if she really refused hard, making home time boring and school like. It eventually worked (missing 1-2 days per week to 1 every 8 weeks and those were close calls, e.g kind of sick, borderline stay home anyways) but felt punitive at times, even as we did our best to frame it lovingly. I would still recommend some of that kind of thing for something as vital as school attendance, but I love the idea of having unrelated independent challenges the kid chooses.
One small bit of feedback on the article: cut to the chase with the practical advice and then provide more background - I worry too many readers didn’t get far enough through the background research and trends to get to the concrete advice.
What if this risk-averse, coddling nanny attitude is applied to all of society? What happens when certain social and political factions push an agenda of non just supervised play but supervised life? Are there expected--and unexpected--consequences when harm prevention (especially for feelings) and fairness (the redistribution kind) dominate public policy?