Ignore Your Kids says New York Times

The New York Times printed some surprising advice this weekend: “Parents Should Ignore Their Children More Often.”

At Let Grow, we agree!

In a culture that demands we spend ever more of our time supervising, entertaining, teaching, and, of course, driving our kids, the oped by University of Southern California Psychology Prof. Darby Saxbe, says: Enough! Doing so much with and for our kids is actually stifling them (and driving us adults crazy to boot):

“The modern style of parenting is not just exhausting for adults; it is also based on assumptions about what children need to thrive that are not supported by evidence from our evolutionary past. For most of human history, people had lots of kids, and children hung out in intergenerational social groups in which they were not heavily supervised.”

Kids’ brains – human’s brains – evolved to expect that kind of mixed-age, Peanuts-gang existence. That’s why they’re born with so much curiosity and drive. For instance, they learn to speak the language, and sometimes more than one, just by being around us. We are not required to sit them down and teach them this.

Given more chance to observe, copy, play, and practice on their own, they also learn other valuable lessons: How to share, help, argue, figure things out. In her piece, Saxbe says that even when kids are with us, we don’t have to – indeed, shouldn’t – always defer to their needs (a.k.a. interruptions).  Being with adults who are busy with their own lives and conversations is actually a gift!

Being around pre-occupied adults “gives children the tremendous gift of learning to tolerate boredom, which fosters patience, resourcefulness and creativity. There is evidence from neuroscience that a resting brain is not an idle one. The research tells us that the mind gets busy when it is left alone to do its own thing — in particular, it tends to think about other people’s minds. If you want to raise empathetic, imaginative children who can figure out how to entertain themselves, don’t keep their brains too occupied.

“An excellent way to bore children is to take them to an older relative’s house and force them to listen to a long adult conversation about family members they don’t know. Quotidian excursions to the post office or the bank can create valuable opportunities for boredom, too.”

The author says the reason she isn’t recommending more free, unsupervised time as well as tag-along time is because in many cases “that sort of ‘free range’ experience is not an option.”

Ah! But Let Grow, which grew out of the Free-Range Kids movement (and my book, Free-Range Kids) is actually trying to make that option an easy, normal, and legal choice again.

To that end, we recommend schools assign The Let Grow Experience, or parents get the family version called The Independence Kit, which is a homework assignment that tells kids to go home and do something new, on their own. Depending on their age and neighborhood, this can be anything from walking to the store to exploring the woods to making pancakes for the family.

Anytime a child does something beyond their current comfort zone – and beyond their parents’ purvue – they grow! They realize how competent they can be. They figure out the problems along the way. They see that they, too, are competent and often helpful individuals – givers, not just takers. Young people, not just babies. They also re-normalize the idea of kids out and about on their own.

A collective problem – overburdened parents, over-assisted kids – needs a collective solution. First, start by recognzing, as Saxbe does, that kids are born wired for curiosity, adventure, competence and play – when we step back a bit.

Second?

Step back a bit!

That’s the whole Let Grow mission: Getting an entire generation of parents to do this and see how glorious it is.

Trust kids to do some things on their own and they will. Simple as that.