Bubble-Wrapped Kids

6/26/2015

K-8 Director Heather Mock

How do we engender self-reliance in our children?

Hello Everyone,

I hope you are having a restful summer and are getting the chance to spend some quality time with your families. I can’t believe we are almost into July!

At the end of the week, we’ll be sending our older child to camp for three weeks in Michigan. He attended the camp last year, and his experience was fantastic. In the short time he was there, his confidence and sense of self grew tremendously. But the value didn’t stop there – I think the experience was just as valuable for me. To realize that my son can survive just fine without me (and, in fact, actually benefited from some time away from me) was heartening and enlightening. As Michael Thompson mentions in his book Homesick and Happy, “Wonderful things can happen for children when they are away from their parents.”

How do we engender self-reliance in our children?

Hello Everyone,

I hope you are having a restful summer and are getting the chance to spend some quality time with your families. I can’t believe we are almost into July!

This is a lesson we all too quickly forget in our day-to-day lives with our kids. Especially in the connected world in which we live, we feel the need to check in on our kids constantly. Despite the fact that our students aren’t supposed to have phones out during the day, we parents forget this and text our children during the school day, so used to the need to transfer information immediately. And when our children are uncomfortable, many of them go right away to texting their parents to come to their aid.

I remember when I went to hear esteemed psychologist Madeline Levine speak a few years ago, she told the story of a student on her first day of classes in college, unsure of where her first class was being held. Instead of simply looking at a campus map or maybe asking someone on campus to point her in the right direction, she called her mother, who happened to live not only in a different town but in a different country!

I came across an article written by a former Dean of Students at Stanford addressing this same issue – it was concerning enough to her that she wrote an entire book on the subject. I haven’t had a chance to read the book, but the article is a great reminder of our job as parents. We are not here to clear the way for our kids or to wrap them in bubble wrap to prevent them from getting damaged. Instead, we are here to foster independence and autonomy by listening to them, providing support when they do fall, and reminding them constantly how much we love them.

To read the article, go to: http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2015/06/09/what-overparenting-looks-like-from-a-stanford-deans-perspective/

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