The other day I went with my young son Ben to his closet to help him choose some clothing. Normally, we encourage him to develop his own sense of style, which at times can include a tie over a Star Wars t-shirt and a pair of jeans, but the event that we were going to called for some less adventurous attire. As I was going through his closet,I noticed that his clothes appear neat and almost in new condition. It is certainly not because Ben is a particularly tidy and clean child – so why else?
When I was his age, I would come back from school, grab some lunch, do my homework and go outside to play until it got dark. More often than not,I entered the house dirty beyond recognition, my jeans were torn and new cuts appeared on different parts of my body. After taking a shower, my father would apply a layer of torturous purple ointment on my wounds. But more painful than anything else, was the humiliation of having to wear those same jeans just ripped,now with patches on the knees. We didn’t get new clothes because we outgrew the old ones, we got them because we literally wore them out to the point my mother was too embarrassed for her children to be seen in them.
I was not more active than the other kids, but when you play out in the fields, climb up trees, spend hours on your knees playing marbles in the mud, run, skate and cycle, your skin and what covers it constantly rip – and it was fine. Even when the cuts required a trip to the emergency room for stitches, or even when a cast was needed to fix a broken bone, it was still fine. But as I look at the children around me, they have fewer cuts on their skin, and those on their jeans are a mark of fashion and not of healthy playing.
One of the main reasons that our children spend much more of their free time in the house rather than outside is that my generation of parents is so overprotective to the point that we shield our children from any potential bruise or failure. We forget that one way to grow is to fail – to get hurt and to learn how to deal with it. When we hover over our children we deprive them of this crucial mechanism, and as a result they are getting weaker and less resilient.
I’m not a big sports fan, but since many of my friends are, especially when it comes to Philadelphia teams, I didn’t skip an article about the Eagles that happened to be on the front page of the paper. The article I read, and saved,was not about any magnificent game, but about a cancellation of one. It was last year, when the NFL decided to cancel an Eagles game due to inclement weather. When Governor Ed Rendell was asked about it he said:
“We’ve become a nation of wusses. The Chinese are kicking our butt in everything. If this was in China, do you think the Chinese would have called off the game? People would have been marching down to the stadium. They would have walked, and they would have been doing calculus on the way down.”
Is it true? In a future article I will refer to the concept of the “tiger mom” coinedby Yale Law Professor, Amy Chua, who compares the Chinese and American parenthood models. But here, the governor’s statement reminded me of the title of another important book “A Nation of Wimps” by Hara Marano, the former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today. The author brings vast evidence to show how our kids end up without the ability to make their own decisions, cope with anxiety, or handle difficult emotions. She demonstrates how teens lack leadership skills, college students engage in deadly binge drinking, and graduates can’t even negotiate their own salaries without bringing mom or dad in for a consult. Why? “Because hothouse parents raise teacup children—brittle and breakable, instead of strong and resilient.”
Readers of the Bible have been wondering why Moses’ children did not succeed him. After all, the ancient Israelite society was hereditary; hence one of the sons should have become the leader after Moses’ death. Among the many attempts to answer this question I particularly like the one that reminds us that on his way from Midian to Egypt to free his people, Moses decided at the last minute to send his children back to Midian. He wanted to keep them away from the experience of slavery and oppression. But by shielding them from the reality of Egypt he disqualified them from a position of leadership.
Please don’t get me wrong. I am not encouraging you to take unnecessary risks. You will never see me riding my bicycle without a helmet. You should not plan your family vacation this summer in Syria, nor should you take your children to the top of the lighthouse with a bungee cord to “de-wimpify” them. But by overprotecting our children we don’t do them any favors. Do your child’s jeans ever show signs of wear and tear? We cannot make it in the big world as adults if we hide from needed experiences as children.