When I was around eight years of age i lived in a relatively small village in England. At weekends and during the vacations it was common for me to head off around a mile away from home to go to play at the homes of two of my best friends – ALONE! Part of the route was by a small path that ran between fields, another part through a wood and another part beside the main road through the village that had no pavements. Once I’d met up with my friends we would sometimes play in fields, sometimes head in to the woods. There was a fluctuating group of boys and girls. We climbed trees, skidded down hills, skinned our knees and bashed our elbows. We got in to scrapes and solved our own issues. Inevitably, sometimes people fell out with each other and had disagreements. When those times happened it was deeply important to us, but we figured out between ourselves how to solve those conflicts and repair friendships.
Often our play entailed creating fantasy worlds of our own, our vivid imaginations blending to concoct amazing scenarios. One day we might be spies, another day city planners creating a new nirvana. At such times, we’d often lose all track of time. We were all tasked with responsibilities to reach home in time for meals (with consequences if we failed). Of course, we had no phones and most of the time no money (so, no phoning home with excuses for why we would come late). So, if you were tight on time, you ran – simple.
Young people tend to roll their eyes when people like me talk about our childhoods and our experiences or the vast differences between our childhoods and theirs. However, I tell this little tale with some very genuine concerns that what today’s young are missing out on were the learning environment for the very skills, competencies and character traits considered to be most important in the Industry 4.0 environment; emotional intelligence, resilience, problem solving, communication, interpersonal skills and creativity.
The shift, across the world, to helicopter parenting and wrapping children in cotton wool is a response to very real and driving fear for parents. This is terribly sad and ironic when we consider that the world in which children are growing up is actually safer when considering data on crime etc. Worse, as it has always been, children are more at risk statistically from people they know within their homes than they are from strangers in the outside environment.
If children are given freedom, will they get in to scrapes and problems? Yes, almost certainly – we did. But, solving those problems, working through the implications of our own actions was a very big part of our learning and development. And, almost always the implications are really not so terrible.
Data today about how little time children get to spend outside is deeply worrying. To me, it’s inevitable to find direct correlations between these changes in the process of growing up, exposure to nature, levels of independent activity and the increasing levels of compulsive behaviours, depression and mental illness as well as the challenges that flow from over-sensitivity to setbacks, disappointments and life challenges.
Ironically, with hours of computer games and social networking exposure, I would hazard that in some ways children today are at greater risk in the very state their parents are keeping them to ensure their safety. With growing pollution (and in Asian cities summer heat) the temptation to use these as justifications for the children being in for many hours, staring at screens is obvious.
Lenore Skenazy became famous, or rather infamous, in the US a few years ago when she let her child ride on the subway unaccompanied. The media went in to a frenzy as she was labeled ‘the worst mother in the world.’ To her credit, she didn’t roll over, but rather has spent the time since expanding on her approach as a philosophy she calls ‘free-range parenting.’
Here’s a video of an interview she gave last year, sharing her views.
Lenore and others have created an organisation in the US that seeks to work with schools and parents to provide help and to encourage loosening of the reins:
Let Grow
Can we bring these ideas in to other parts of the world effectively?
To help with some of this, researchers have identified four types of parenting style:
- Authoritarian.
- Authoritative.
- Permissive.
- Uninvolved.
A detailed discussion of the four styles I’ll save for another post, but there are some good summaries available through searches online.
As educators, we have to meet children and parents where they are and not where we wish they might be. This means that if children have been used to sheltered, helicopter parenting, then we have to understand that’s the starting position. However, if we are serious about a responsibility to educate and develop the “whole child” then we need to pay close and careful attention to;
a) What we can do to educate and support parents to be realistic and support their children in the most responsible ways (and this includes making sure that teachers are informed and playing their part, including sharing a consistent message)
b) What we can do to expand the horizons of children, to help them to develop the characteristics of independence and interdependence, as well as creating an engaging environment in the school that enables children to develop and practice character, real problem solving.
Childhood has the potential to be such a special time in a person’s life. When we deny children a natural childhood we don’t only deny them all that’s good, but we deny them so much of the growth and learning that will enable them to be their best and to grow up living effective lives. Free the children!
Filed under: Educators of tomorrow, Leadership, Life, Our Environment, School, Teaching Practice | Tagged: America's Worst Mum, authoritarian parents, authoritative parents, childhood, education 4.0, freerange kids, freerange parenting, helicopter parents, industry 4.0, industry 4.0 skills, Let Grow, parent fears, parenting styles, permissive parents, play, play in child development, univolved parents, world's worst Mum | Leave a comment »