Don’t clip their wings

A playground, and a bunch of kids happily running about, busily being children.

One of them, decides to try his hand at climbing on the outer side of the play structure, something the designer clearly never intended. A concerned mommy takes a stab at keeping the little adventurer on the beaten path — “Look what your son is doing!” she complains to me, “He may fall” she adds just in case I missed the implication of imminent danger.

“Well”, says I somewhat nonchalantly “I figure if he does, he’ll probably learn something”.

Growing up is a challenging, complex business. It is not like raising cattle, where the point of the exercise is simply to maximize physical growth and health. When raising children, one would do well to remember that, you must also allow them the opportunity to grow as people.

Children need to evolve their competence, their self control, their confidence, their ability to correctly perceive and estimate danger, and most importantly their socialization.

All too often, it is all too tempting, to go ahead and do something for children, even when it’s something they are fully able to do themselves. It is all too tempting to remove obstacles from their path, to do their work for them, to blindly give them more than they need, to shield them from failure, to protect them from hurt.

And yet, doing all of that is not in the best interest of your child. When you do all of that, you are depriving your child of effort, you are stealing your child’s opportunity to grow.

Usually when we pursue a goal in life, the biggest prize that we take away is not the one we set out to achieve, but rather, how we grow — who we become on the path towards that prize. When striving to achieve a thing; a grade, a championship, the top of the jungle gym, we strain ourselves, we stretch out our abilities, we push beyond our comfort zone.

And we grow as humans, we become more than we were.

One cannot grow without effort, a child whose guardians do everything for him will remain dependent, will lack confidence, judgment, competence.

Failure teaches us, strengthens us, makes us more resilient and tenacious. Like muscles, which only grow through micro tearing achieved by pushing them beyond their comfort zone, humans grow through micro failures, and sometimes bigger ones.

When you steal a child’s efforts, preventing him from failing, when you remove all obstacles, he will atrophy, and will grow up weak, unsure of himself, or alternatively with an unfounded unrealistic brittle and entitled self-image, which will shatter at the first failure.

Pain teaches as well, it teaches us our limits, it teaches us to be careful, that our actions have consequence, and it teaches us compassion. One cannot understand or empathize with the pain of others, without having experienced it ourselves. Bruises fade. Scuffed knees heal. Chipped milk teeth get replaced with new ones. But a child who grows up overly protected will forever remain weak, haunted by doubt and deeply afraid. Always he will look expectantly over his shoulder, for someone else to overcome his own challenges for him.

In a fundamental, essential way, he never had the opportunity to grow — his guardians stole it from him.

You do of course need to keep a watchful eye on young children. They are more than capable of maiming, drowning, and hurting themselves in a myriad of creative fashions, or for that matter their siblings and other contemporaries. As their guardian it behooves you to safeguard from a child paying a price too high in their process of exploration and growth. But such protection is best done surreptitiously, unnoticed by your child lest he learn to rely on you to save him when he gets into trouble. And you must be willing and able to let him fail, and let him pick himself up when it is clear that he is not in danger.

Ultimately you must remember that the best way to protect one from the dangers in the world is by cultivating resilience, strength, judgment, competence. Sooner or later a child grows up and goes forth into the world beyond your ability to hover over him, and if upon reaching that that point your child is still dependent on your care, he will suffer, and he will get hurt, by dangers well in excess of the ones you’ve prevented him from overcoming in childhood, and if he is unready it might well be too late for him to grow.

Undoubtedly an independent child will go ahead and make mistakes as he grows, when he’s grown. He will make choices that you as a parent, might not be happy with, and that’s ok. Once he’s grown, you must be able to let your child live his own life, in the way he sees fit. He is not us, and we are not him. The best we can do is give him a strong foundation from which to grow from, and the opportunity to experiment, to overcome challenges and to grow, which hopefully he will continue to do, throughout a long and meaningful life.

I believe that the best way to frame my role as a parent is as a Shepard. I am obliged to bring my child to the pasture of life, and let him roam free to grow, to explore, to discover, under my watchful eye, while I make sure to keep the wolves at bay. Making sure he has good resources and good example to learn from and to use.

You cannot hold your child’s hand forever, you must let him sweat and toil, and fail, and even, within reason, to get hurt, so that he might grow, so that when the time is ripe, and he is ready, he might spread his strong, practiced wings wide and fly out of your nest and into the world, ready to face it forthrightly, without you.

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Dedicated to my Father, a shining example of caring, loving parenthood, and of what it means to be a man, and a worthy human being.