Parenting trends come and go, but the over-parenting trend is an especially entrenched one that’s changed the nature of childhood. Over-parenting harms kids, shielding them from real life and leaving them unprepared for adult responsibilities, as described in this recent Kansas City Star article. But parents have heard for so long that over-parenting is the only responsible parenting, it may be difficult to get them to change their ways. How do you identify over-parenting?
Stranger Danger
While the over-parenting parent acts like danger is lurking around every corner, data disproves it:
* Only .2 percent of missing children are abducted by strangers.
* Of 74,200,000 children in the U.S. in 2010, 494 disappeared and were coded “abducted by stranger” in police databases.
Lenore Skenazy, author of Free Range Kid, said statistically you could leave a child outside alone for 750,000 years before he’d be kidnapped.
Over-parenting uses a “worst-first” mindset in which parents make everyday decisions based on worst-case scenarios rather than realistic ones. This deprives kids of the opportunity to practice skills needed for their eventual independence from parents. They develop unrealistic fears, fail to assess danger accurately, and lack the ability to size-up situations and implement effective strategies for handling them.
Activities Galore
Parents who provide kids scheduled activities around the clock do them a serious disservice. Defining family life around the child like this is a recipe for disaster, the Kansas City Star noted. Overly child-centric parenting produces self-absorbed children. Days filled with prescribed enrichment activities also distances them from the discovery process and hampers their ability to overcome boredom.
Success Insurance
Over-parenting parents try to insure their children’s success at every endeavor. They’ll often go so far as to do an assignment themselves rather than risk their child’s receiving a failing grade. Obsessed with how others judge their child’s performance, they deprive their child of the important lessons learned from occasional failures. And they teach their children by example that it’s imperative to win at all costs, even by cheating.
Many parents believe that times have changed since their own childhoods, warranting the extra caution inherent in over-parenting. But again statistics are against them. Crime levels today are about equal to what they were in 1974, Skenazy said, a time when kids roamed their neighborhoods and made use of local transit systems instead of parent-chauffeurs.
More by this contributor:
Explaining Good People with Bad Habits to Kids
Stop Bullying: A Parent to Parent Approach
5 Fun Activities for Kids, Guaranteed to Conquer Rainy Day Gloom