NY Times parenting article

RedZee

My friend posted this on Facebook. Worth a read, I think.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/opinion/sunday/raising-successful-children.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

RedZee

I think it's definitely scary to let your kids venture into the world. And it's hard to know how much freedom to give. (I'm not there yet, but that's what I think anyway.)

I make an effort to tell my daughter how smart she is so that she has confidence and doesn't think we only value beauty. For me, this complicates the matter.

Parenting is hard.

sooner1981

jgslr said:

It got kind of long tl;dr. But I think this line kind of summed up the gist of it for me.

"Mastery of the world is an expanding geography for our kids, for toddlers, it’s the backyard; for preteens, the neighborhood, for teens the wider world."

I think a lot of parents now get too scared to trust kids enough to venture on their own. I definitely hung around the neighborhood and was allowed some freedom. I think media hype of kidnappings and the news have made people falsely believe we live in this highly dangerous environment. I don't think it's as bad as we all think and I also agree with that we have to let go and hope we raised them right (easier said than done, I'm sure) as teenagers.

We can say kidnappings are media hype--but bad stuff happens to unsupervised teens all the time.

My 12 year old niece was at the local, smallish-town mall with her friends on a weekend afternoon a few weeks ago and a 19 year old showed her naked pictures of himself and tried to pressure her to go Into a bathroom with him and have sex. He had a pocketful of condoms and apparently had done this same thing before. It is a crazy world out there...

I definitely don't want to be a helicopter parent. But I also don't want my kid to have an unrecoverable experience because I wanted her to spread her wings at an early age... Yuck!