"Bruises, Not Scars"
Freeing children to take the *right* risks
A few announcements: I’ve been on the road, but I’m home for the rest of March (yay!). If you’re near Stanford in April, I’ll be moderating a debate between Ross Douthat and Kimberly Callinan, the head of Compassion and Choices, on the morality of assisted dying.
For Boston area-folks, Erika Bachiochi will take on Scott Yenor in another ISI debate on R: Feminisms Necessarily Undermines Family Life (she’s the neg). I won’t be moderating, but I’ll tune into the stream.
An Other Feminisms reader alerted me that the Burdett Birth Center in upstate NY is looking for help to resist closure. The majority of the mothers they serve are on Medicaid, and the center is “the singular Midwife-led birth center in the entire Capital Region, [and] it is the ONLY maternity ward in all of Rensselaer county.”
There’s been a little boom of books about children and families this spring, and I had the pleasure of pairing two for a joint review in First Things. I read Tim Carney’s Family Unfriendly and Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, and saw the books as telling a shared story about taking on the wrong risks.
Haidt puts it very simply, and, I think, accurately:
“We are overprotecting our children in the real world while underprotecting them online. If we really want to keep our children safe, we should delay their entry into the virtual world and send them out to play in the real world.”
Haidt makes the case against letting your teens roam the internet without supervision, and both he and Carney (and me!) are interested in how to find things to say yes to in the real world.
Here’s an excerpt from my review, with a particular focus on what children gain from unstructured, un- or lightly-supervised play:
Both Carney and Haidt are deeply interested in our tolerance for risk and our capacity for play. The turn from the real world toward the hyper-world of images and “social engagement” destroys the opportunity for “free play.” It robs children of the chance to try on new responsibilities, and to continue growing into adulthood. For Haidt, the core element for free play is that “mistakes are generally not very costly.” It might seem that the unreality of the online world lowers the cost of mistakes, but when children are exposed to their peers (and the whole world) on social media, any misstep can become viral. Even a semiprivate error in a group chat can be screenshotted and live forever, as a passing remark in an in-person conversation cannot. […]
Part of what the kids lose when their lives are too regimented is the chance to work out their own conflicts and practice self-governance. When every game comes with adult umps, the kids become rule-followers, not rule-negotiators. […] As Rusty Keeler, the author of Adventures in Risky Play, tells Haidt, the best playgrounds include heavy, movable objects like hay bales and sand bags. The kids can reshape their play environment, but not alone. They have to ask things of each other to remake their world.
Read the rest at First Things…
That last idea, that the best of kids’ play means They have to ask things of each other to remake their world is a strongly Other Feminisms, interdependence idea.
Part of what I liked best about college is that we were entrusted with a lot in our extracurriculars. We managed budgets, bank accounts, succession plans, physical sets, etc. We had to navigate personal and political struggles with only our wits and Robert’s Rules for help.
It’s not that I didn’t get a lot out of my classes, but I grew up a lot less in seminar than in my extracurricular endeavors, because I was trusted with less, and because mistakes and failures ultimately mattered a lot less.
If I didn’t do a good job on a paper, I’d get a bad grade. If I messed up the snap seam for the stepmother’s rip-away skirt in Pippin, she’d get tangled and fall down on stage.
I was thrilled to watch the SpaceX starship launch this morning, and I promised to rewatch it with my 4yo after school. By default, little kids only see adults do things the grown-ups have mastered. It makes it feel like pushing the edge of your mastery is childish.
When we watch the rockets go up (and blow up) together, my girls see grown-ups trying and struggling to do hard things. They see grown ups who have taken on projects where they have to ask things of each other to remake their world.
We are specifically moving to an area where there will be more outdoor opportunities for our boys to have unmonitored free play. And we’re also specifically moving closer so they’ll be around cousins with whom we share similar values. I want them to have that freedom to have to figure stuff out. We try to practice this as much a possible at home — even just with things like sibling relationships. I very rarely take sides & try to get them to unite around a common “enemy” (me 😆). But I have to work pretty hard to find ways to give them extra independence and I worry about neighbors etc… It’s hard when kids just don’t play outside much anymore.
As a kid, doing things like being allowed to bike to the library by myself, learning how to adult in college (like learning the hard way about overdrafts! Ha. I didn’t forget)
My 3yo recently asked me, "Who makes bread?" I thought about it for a minute, then I said, "Let's try!" So I looked up a recipe and we made some bread, which I had never done before. It wasn't great, but I learned some things, so next time I think it will turn out better. One of the most valuable things my mom gave me was an attitude of "I don't know how to do this, but I can learn. And if I don't do it perfectly, what's the worst that can happen?" It's a helpful way to assess whether to take on a project. In many areas of my life, I'm not afraid of failure *as such* because I know how to think about what failure would actually look like and assess whether it's actually a bad thing. What if these seeds don't grow? Well, I've lost a few dollars and enjoyed some time in the sun, and probably learned some things about gardening. What if I hold the drill bit while trying to remove it? Well, I could tear up my hand, so let's not do that one, let's be more careful about learning how to do it correctly. This is something I hope to instill in my kids.