There was a piece in the New York Times recently about kids and anxiety and how anxiety levels of children are through the roof, so to speak. It was a guest essay titled, “This Simple Fix Could Help Anxious Kids.” It was written by Dr. Camilo Ortiz and Lenore Skenazy. Ortiz is a professor of psychology at Long Island University and Skenazy is the author of the book Free-Range Kids.
The piece is about how excessive caution in parenting, cowed in part by a 24-hour news cycle that is driven by, “if it bleeds, it leads,” reporting, has resulted in a generation of kids who don’t have much freedom and how that lack of freedom has resulted in a bunch of really anxious kids.
Now, I should say, I don’t see anxiety in my kids, but I have to admit, I don’t often see them venturing out of their comfort zones. My eighth grader has far less freedom than I had at his age, which is tragic considering where we live. Same for my fifth grader. And neither of them have friends they regularly go to hang out with.
The piece explores some of the possible factors, but posits that kids are growing up so overprotected they are afraid of the world.
That breaks my heart. When I was a kid and got on my bike, I was overwhelmed with possibility. There was a great big world out there and I felt like a kid in a donut shop being forced to pick just one donut. Where to start?
The essay does an excellent job of breaking down where the breakdown is, and anecdotes of individual successes. Ultimately, it lands on a question. Now questions usually beget more questions, more work, but this question is a kind of answer. They are suggesting that parents ask their kids, “What cool things would you like to do on your own?”
I’m going to pivot from that to an experience that occurred this past weekend, before I read this piece.
My girlfriend Jennifer was down visiting from Seattle, and for anyone who wonders how being in a long-term, long-distance relationship is, well, I can say it’s getting harder, but that’s because when she leaves, it’s not just me missing her, but my boys miss her as well, which might be about the coolest ache ever.
So, she has a very cool connection with Matthew, my fifth grader. She sees him in a way that is truly profound for him. He lights up around her. Well, I was off doing something—I don’t know what and somehow she got Matthew talking about going for a bike ride. And he was down.
Well, I walk up to the garage and see them pulling out bikes and I ask what’s up and Jennifer tells me she and Matthew are going for a ride, but he wants to take my BMX bike, not his Prevelo mountain bike. My BMX bike is a freestyle bike, which is to say it was built with steel pipe and weighs more than any bike I own save my cargo e-bike. But Matthew thought it would be more comfortable than his bike.
I had the presence of mind to let go of the situation—and yes, I did try to point out gears and size and when he disagreed I just shut up—I gave them my blessing and ducked out because while I really wanted to enjoy a ride with my boy, this was his experience, not mine. And to me, any win with bikes is worth what it costs, even if what it costs is me not being part of his experience.
They rode off and he led her to a park he likes and he showed her around and they did a bit more riding and then they headed home.
How was the ride? He was smiling. I don’t need anything more than that. And Jennifer was just thrilled that this kid wanted to spend time with her.
So when I read the essay in the Times I realized that what I need to do is be right less and ask more questions. So this coming weekend, I’m going to pull each boy aside and ask them, “What cool thing would you like to do ON YOUR OWN?”
Philip, my 14 year old, spun off into fantasyland. The first thing out of his mouth was, “Learn to fly a plane.”
Try again.
Matthew, known to many and sundry as “The Deuce,” went concrete. He got the concept. He told me he wanted to go to a nearby park on his own. I said we could make that happen. And then he added he wanted to take his bike. I said, “One thing at a time.” What I was really worried about was him locking the bike up and then losing the key. Or just not locking the bike up.
The next day we walked to the park, me shadowing him, but him making all the choices. We got to the park and unfortunately he wanted to take off and play, but I said we needed to walk back so I would know he knew how to do it in reverse. He was bummed, but I could see his eyes light up from seeing the logic in that. I got such a charge from that.
Philip has moved onto helicopters.
I suspect parents are way too overprotected. Not just helicopter parents but parents in fleets of helicopter gunships. And the kids inherit the paranoia.
I was a kid in the sixties. Nineteen sixties, for those too young to know there was a previous century. We rode everwhere. Shot tin cans with 22 rifles. My neighbor Mark was blown off his bike on a truck route leading to our grade school by an eighteen wheeler. When they took out the stitches from his forehead, a pebble fell out so from then on, Mark was the kid with rocks in his head.
We all grew up, survived, and prospered. But because we grew up being blown off the road by a tractor trailer, or having to dice it out with cars on country roads to get four miles to the schoolyard pickup baseball game, we all grew up pretty fucking confident of ourselves. That is what is missing today. There ain’t a pervert behind every tree. Just too many paranoid parents driving their kids to school in SUVs.