Let Grow - Restoring childhood resilience by fighting the urge to overprotect

Jonathan Haidt Lets His 9-Year-Old Daughter Walk to School Alone for the First Time

haidt tweet maybe bigger

Prof. Jonathan Haidt, co-author of "The Coddling of the American Mind" and one of the three people who joined me in founding Let Grow, posted that lovely Tweet last Wednesday.

This was not just a great moment for the Haidt family, it is a great moment for all families hoping to give their kids a little more independence. By announcing this milestone in public, Jon is starting to re-normalize what was once completely routine:

Taking our eyes off our kids.

We need to hear about parents doing this, to break through the ice of fear. What I have been puzzling over for 11 years now is how come my nervous mom, who quit her job to stay at home with the kids, nonetheless did not immediately go to the darkest of dark places most parents routinely go to now whenever they think about letting their kids walk out the door without a security detail: "It's not worth it to take my eyes off my kid EVER, because if they are abducted I will be bereft and it will be all my fault."

This is what I call "worst-first thinking" -- thinking up the very worst case scenario FIRST and proceeding as if it likely to happen. It feels natural but actually it is a recent cultural habit.  It is not NOT "innate." Yes, worrying is innate. Love and caring are innate. But worrying constantly about abduction, molestation and death is NOT innate, as we can see from our own parents who weren't obsessed with these thoughts, and from people in other countries where this kind of catastrophizing has not become routine.

Many of the people responding to Jon's joyous Tweet cheered him and his daughter on. But some felt compelled to re-educate him: "If something terrible happens you will never forgive yourself." Paralyzing fear is held up as the only moral choice.

The fact that, as a Washington Post article stated, "There's Never Been a Safer Time to be a Kid in America" doesn't seem to matter.  Nor does discussion of the downside of over-protection -- kids becoming anxious, hypersensitive, depressed. No statistics or wise dialog can change someone seeing a coffin in their brain. The only thing I've seen that actually works is to replace that image with something radical: Reality.

How do we do that?

Parents have to be persuaded (okay, gently pushed) to let their kids go do something on their own. When the kids return home, glowing with pride or simply excited that their parents trusted them, THAT changes the parents. Because what IS innate is the knowledge that someday our children will have to survive when we are no longer here. Until they do something on their own, all we know is that they are safe because we are ever-present, protecting them. To finally see that your kids have what it takes to make it as independent humans, to carry on when you are gone, THAT is the game changer.

That is why Jon and I and everyone at Let Grow so recommend schools consider trying the Let Grow Project (students' homework is to go home and do something without their parents). It not only gives parents the push they need to loosen the reins, it does so en masse. ALL the parents are letting ALL their kids do something, whatever the family chooses, on their own: Walk the dog, make dinner, run an errand. Like Jon's tweet, the Project takes away the stigma of being the only parent letting their kids go forth.

And by the way, the Project is fast, free and takes almost no class time.

Below is one mom, psychologist Andrea Macari, who was amazed at how much more relaxed and happy her whole family became after her 8-year-old daughter started doing the Let Grow Project. The more we hear about parents letting go -- and letting grow -- the easier it becomes to do just that, and kick the habit of constant panic. - Lenore

Reader Interactions

Discussion

COMMENTS 20

  1. “…all we know is that they are safe because we are ever-present, protecting them.”

    And we don’t know when that’s going to end. Any number of happenings could put us into a position – illness, death, imprisonment, becoming handicapped, disease – where we can no longer take care of our children. So for god’s sake, let them become independent as soon as possible.

  2. I guess this is a good thing, but it’s sad we’ve gotten to this point. When I was growing up, this story would have been as remarkable as “Father lets five-year-old daughter tie her own shoes for the first time.” I started walking to school by myself in first grade (I thought I was walking to school by myself in kindergarten, but apparently my mother followed me from a distance). Granted, it was in small-town downstate Illinois, but still, most people I’ve met as adults walked to school in early elementary school, even those from big cities.

  3. Isn’t the whole point of raising kids is to turn them into adults. Considering the babies at the colleges I think we have failed. Although the number of adults who actually act the part seems to be shrinking every time I turn around. Common sense is an endangered species. Afterthought has become like an invasive species

  4. My husband and I have started letting my 4-almost-5-year-old play in the park across the street without looking at her constantly. She loves it, and it is entirely appropriate for her maturity level. She has blossomed socially since, making friends on her own with the 7-year-old across the park.

  5. I hope this is a trend. I walked to school by myself (about a ten minute walk to elementary and about a 30 minute walk in middle school) since kindergarten—albeit, often with other kids but not always.

    My mom was a single working mom so we also learned in elementary school to make our own lunches, do homework without coaching. We would go out all day and not come home until dinner at 6:00. We also fought like cats and dogs when she wasn’t around but we also learned from these less than ideal circumstances what worked and what didn’t work. We sometimes did stupid things without getting caught (and we got caught as well)…but, by doing so as children we learned skillsets that would later help us to be independent and strong adults.

    This is why there are so many young adults who act more like we would act as teens. They’re having to learn everything they would have learned throughout childhood as adults rather than as children.

  6. Don’t know if many here are familiar with the recent case of the 3-year-old boy who went missing from his grandparents’ backyard. He went missing for 2 days and search teams were called out. The situation looked pretty grim BUT it all ended good because the little guy was finally found all tangled up in some weeds and calling for his mom! He was in good health but hungrier than a horse. Apparently he had just drifted away and got lost. Can you imagine? A 3-year-old child somewhere outside all by himself overnight!

    But the real good news is that he wasn’t abducted by a pervert nor were his grandparents or parents arrested. What was really surprising is that I couldn’t find any posting below the article that condemned the grandparents or parents because the kid drifted away. There may have been a posting somewhere that did, but I couldn’t find any. Instead everybody posted that we are finally reading good news about a lost child!

    • Yes, I thought the same thing! Thank the goodness the child was found safe, and I’m glad the parents/grandparents aren’t being shamed.

  7. In the ’50s, I started taking the subway alone from Fieldston (Riverdale) into Manhattan at age 9, for ballet lessons at the Met. Kids in our neighborhood were 100% unsupervised after school: we went home when the streetlights came on. When I there with my 6-year-old daughter in the ’80s, clearing out our house, I found a teenage babysitter who lived nearby: her mother insisted on driving her the two blocks, over and back, each time. Was it the influx of TVs and their alarmist news slant that fed the paranoia? I appreciate your efforts to restore the freedoms of childhood.

    • I think bureaucracy drives a lot of paranoia (and vice versa, but hear me out). I’ve seen so many stories about the minimum ages for “unaccompanied minors” on public transit and on airplanes, rising up, and up, and up, dangerously close to the age of majority (eighteen in most places). For the places that still allow unaccompanied minors, they often have rules that are so stringent that it doesn’t really work for most families; for example, the U.M. must be seen onto the vehicle by an adult, and picked up by another adult at the other end, it has to be nonstop/no transfers, not allowed to get off at certain stations (for example, our long-haul bus service here only allows U.M.’s to get off at the main bus station in Toronto; not at the mall), et cetera. So, for a lot of people, it simply wouldn’t be possible to send a nine-year-old to an out-of-town dance class on the bus, even if the child was able to do it, and the parents were fine with the arrangement–because the bus lines wouldn’t allow it.

    • When you realize that was in Manhattan, where finding your car, driving it, and reparking it each time is a little more complicated than just pulling in and out of your driveway (for most people at least) that sounds even more insane.

  8. “What if” liability drives the bureaucracy. I rode the bus with my Mom 10 miles one way to the capitol city and back since infancy. I had a YMCA membership at age 9 and rode the bus by myself. Of course that was 1961 and no one blinked an eye.

    • How things change. Nowadays, I don’t think a nine-year-old can even be unsupervised in the YMCA here.

      • More than safety may be driving that, though. There used to be a little kid about 8 or so at our local Y who would, I think, be sent along while his big brothers played basketball or something. He would just hang around the public areas and bother people. Now he was a nice enough kid and wasn’t really a problem, but certainly some people might find it annoying, and it really isn’t appropriate to send your kid to be babysat by strangers. (And no, I don’t mean that every time you let a young kid go into public without supervision you’re doing that, but in this case that’s basically what was happening.) So I think it got to the point where forbidding unattended kids under a certain age became the only way they could prevent that, because some parents DON’T use sense and create a problem, not so much for their kids, as for everyone else.

  9. Well, I’ve written this out until I’m blue on the keypad, but one more time won’t hurt.
    Congrats, Jonathan. Looking forward to the March lecture.

    The issue?
    I was a pure Huck Finn boy, and it’s all about freedom.
    The kind of freedom that no-one seems to remember anymore (and no, I didn’t grow up in the 1880’s – I grew up in the 1960’s.)

    The freedom I had as a little kid taught me how to dream of, and then earn – the freedom I had as a bigger kid – which taught me how to dream of and then earn the ultimate freedom to leave home and exist in the world as an autonomous person, a free agent, a young man who could walk tall and proud in the land of the free.
    Kids today live the lives of inmates. They are just as controlled as convicts. They are supervised and watched. The eyes on them are constant.
    Why is it that we don’t ever seem to think about what that does to a kid?
    (You know, the older kids are kind of telling us about that, now.)
    Yeah. They’re safe. But there is no 100% guarantee of that, either.
    Yeah, we do our duty and keep the court of public opinion off our case.

    So this is the price kids pay for life in the 21st century.
    I’m old enough to look back on my childhood with a yearning and a sadness for its long gone departure.
    But if some fairy godmother wanted to wave her magic wand and turn me 5 years old I’d say no thanks. The childhood I had then, was free………..it is illegal now.

  10. The more people joining the Let Grow movement and letting their kids walk to school, the safer it all becomes. Because both my brother and I used to walk to school from about the age of 6. But then everyone was walking to school…. so we were in a group of friends from up and down the street… probably 6 of us on a bad day, to maybe 11-12 on a good day!! Safety in numbers. Even wild animals know this. 🙂

  12. I want my kids to have freedom because I want freedom. I genuinely don’t understand the parent in the video saying “now my 8- year-old daughter does her own homework!” I’m truly baffled. My 8- year-old has been doing her own homework since first grade.
    Aren’t the kids supposed to do their own homework? Why on earth would you want to be involved in that? I truly resent that my kindergartner is assigned homework. He can’t do it on his own, since he’s only beginning to read. I’ve talked to the teacher about it to no avail. I can’t wait till his reading skills improve (or he gets a teacher with different homework values) and I can dump this chore.

    I can’t help but see this expectation that parents must do nothing but spend all their free time with their kids doing/watching their activities as diminishing my own value.

    On the other hand, I don’t know that I believe giving my kids more independence will lead to calm, confident non-anxious adults. After all, we keep saying that when we were kids we as a cohort had all these freedoms, yet we’re the ones imposing these strictures on our children to allay our own extreme nervousness and anxiety.

    • I always did my homework and my parents help me when I had trouble but they wouldn’t do it for me. Even though I would have preferred no homework I still did it and gave my all. I couldn’t imagine my parents celebrating the fact I could do my homework. The thought of such a thing is nuts

  13. I walked to school by myself starting at age 5. I think my mum walked me the first couple times so that I knew where the school was.

    Just out of curiosity, where’s the guy who will preach to us about how she will probably get run over by an SUV because she doesn’t have adult supervision? Maybe he’s on vacation and will be back later to entertain us. 🙂

  14. I do think there is still a huge difference when it comes to parenting mentalities and the concept of freedom in large metropolitan and suburban areas versus more rural places. I’ve lived in fairly rural VA and WV nearly all my life, and almost nothing is close enough for kids to walk to on their own so most kids can’t wait to finally get their licenses when they turn 16 so they can actually drive themselves to school. Also, it is the norm to let young children wait in a car whilst the parents go shopping and do their errands and no one ever makes a fuss or immediately alerts the authorities