Helicopter parenting, along with helicopter schooling, are doing our kids no favors. We’ve lost sight of the fact that bad decisions, and the accompanying failures are as much a part of growing up and learning as anything else a child does. Our school environments and our neighborhoods are designed to give children nothing but monitored safe places to inhabit and in which to move around, this gives them a false understanding of the world around them and their place in it.
On my way in to work in suburbia I see children waiting for the bus to school. Every single child in his or her own driveway, some even waiting with parents in the parent’s automobile; monitored as they carefully board the yellow school bus. As there are no sidewalks students cannot be trusted to agglomerate, the buses even pause if a particular student is not in a particular driveway at the normal time to be sure they’re not running just a few seconds late.
I walked to school K-9, even as busing began under integration my elementary school was within walking distance, but I remember those morning when I left the house just a few seconds late and as I walked up the street I could see the bus flash by if no one was at the stop, a blur really, as it sped by. Sometimes I’d go home and ask for a ride, sometimes I’d walk to catch the next city bus headed downtown, sometimes I’d just skip school and do other things. Each of those decisions held different consequences, different chickens to come home to roost at different times.
One day during the Iranian hostage crisis I decided to not go to school altogether and I just spent the day at Forest Park. It turned out that on that day Iranian students from the college up the street had planned a march down State Street to protest American involvement in their country. The march took the students by three high schools with 5,000 or so angry American high school kids riled up by “Day 274 of the Iranian Hostage Crisis” headlines without any knowledge, of course, of American complicity in the overthrow of Mossadeq, the placing in power of the Shah, and what the Shah’s secret police did to people, and so, their righteous indignation overflowing, students poured out of the high schools as the march passed by and they promptly chased the few Iranian students down the street in what turned into a riot of patriotism. It was breaking news on TV(it was the opening story on CBS nationally), it was on the radio, and when I got home my mom wanted to know if I was ok and what my account was of this significant event. “It…was…alright. Umm…yeah….ummm, yes ‘it’ was…umm, no…I’m…uhhh…ok.” At which point I ran next door to ask my neighbor what I had missed.
Even at the elementary school my daughter attends in a walkable city environment dozens of parents crowd both sides of the street in front of the school, all parking in no parking zones, to pick up their children rather than allow them to walk home. The walk home was always where the day’s denouement took place. Social debts were paid, important discussions were had and, yes, bullies plied their trade. But learning to deal with bullies is part of life, even the understanding that an institution like a school can be used as tool to confront your enemies for you, but they cannot always be trusted once the bell rings to get you home without incident.
I once asked my mom when she stopped walking me to school. Kindergarten? First grade? She said that she might have walked me to school on the first day of kindergarten in 1969, but that was it. I knew where the school was, I knew how to get home(some days I even came home for lunch!), and I was trusted to do get there and back again. I was told to “go out and play”, and to be back “when the street lights came on”.
I learned to walk to friends’ houses, to ride my bike there, and to take the bus to do whatever else I needed to do. I walked, or rode my bike, or arranged my own rides to baseball games, which I never expected my parents come to: I was playing because I liked it, not because they did.
As someone who has taught for 27 years in public schools I have had my fair share of former students who have died. Some have died of illness, but many have died in circumstances which were indicative of making some really bad choices. I often wonder, well to be honest, I don’t wonder, I’ve concluded, that in many ways their parents and the schools were complicit in their deaths because we failed to give them opportunities to make really bad small mistakes and so they ended up making really bad big mistakes.
Yes, bad things can happen when you give your children freedom, even well thought out, incremental freedom, but in the end we want them to be autonomous fully functioning individuals, don’t we? There is a little danger in giving young people opportunities to make mistakes, but not giving them those opportunities can be disastrous.