EDUCATION // ENGENDERING RESILIENCE IN OUR CHILDREN
Let Them Fail
Our kids are anxious and depressed — and it’s our fault
by B. Scanlon
EXCERPT //
Our children are safer now than at any point in history. We took the lead out of paint and gasoline and stopped smoking near them. Government regulations demand kids wear seatbelts, and most of them wear helmets when on anything else with wheels. The crime wave experienced by the Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers ended in the 1990s—though, we know that for Philadelphians the threat of gun violence is very real. (In June, we surpassed the grim milestone of 300 homicides by gun.) Our kids live with this threat—along with the pressures of social media, the breakdown of community, civil unrest, and a global pandemic—and are still, in the larger context, mostly safe. Despite this, fear and the imagined risk of danger have persisted. Parents, and by extension, their kids, still feel unsafe.
What I’m seeing in the classroom is the result of these feelings. It’s a generation of increasingly over-parented, overscheduled, coddled children. The average age of kids who play unsupervised outside today is 11, compared to their parents who did it at age 9. Moms today spend an average of 100 minutes per day on childcare activities compared to 54 minutes in 1965 when many of them were staying at home.2 As a result, many children have very little unstructured, self-directed free play. Free play isn’t just fun; it helps children learn problem- solving skills and fosters creativity. Overparenting—often referred to as “helicopter parenting”—has serious repercussions.
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