KILLING THEM WITH KINDNESS
Free Range Parenting, is this really a new concept for raising children, what now days is called parenting, or is the concept being revived from the past. Allowing children to go outside without constant supervision and make decisions as to what is and isn’t wrong in what they do is not what parents have been doing for the last generation or so but it is what parents did previous to that. We have raised a generation of kids that have been told exactly what to and not to do in life. Instead of letting them make their mistakes and then figure out how to make things right, we feel the need to correct them and tell them how to do it in the manner that we would do it instead of letting them struggle and find the solution to the problem on their own and in their own, way not necessarily in the manner that we would perform it.
As parents we think that we are doing our children a favor or helping them when we choose to fix the problem for them instead of allowing them the room to figure it out. When we let the child struggle to find the answer and offer them support from afar, instead of intervening and showing them the way that we would do it, then the child learns to deal with frustration and how to find the answer to the problem instead of relying on others to either give them the answer of doing it for them. In this manner we get them out of their comfort zone so that they can grow and expand their minds instead of narrowing their views and doing only what they are instructed to do.
By letting them come to the conclusion on their own and giving them positive support, not the answer, they are less likely to fail later in life and more prone to being able to work through their problems. They use these lessons, taught at an early age, later in life as young adults and then adults. When all we do is praise them on how smart they are children are less likely to take a chance on doing a task at which they could fail, as they don’t want to disappoint us by not living up to our expectations of how smart they are. Without these risks of failure they truly cannot find out how smart they are because they are never challenged or move forward. By pushing their boundaries they will find themselves and grow as people, developing skills that will help them cope with problems later in life. Few people are born with intelligence that doesn’t require nurture or teaching so for the rest of us there is learning. Learning means challenging us to push the limits of what we know, or think we know, and grow our minds in order to take in more information and learn how to process this information.
Learning that failing is ok and how to deal with failure and how to deal with things when they don’t go the way that we expect is a big part of coping with life. We must teach our children how to deal with diversity in the world, how to deal with being wrong, how to deal with being right, how to be good people and not be part of the problem. This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t be supportive of our children but not telling them the truth is in reality not supporting them. By not letting them be “free range” and getting some bumps and bruises along the way are we saving them or are we killing them with kindness?
I will also be posting this article to my LinkedIn page as it is another original by
DanN