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I was pleased to see that Time did a cover story on the overprotected child. Odd, however, that this idea is only now becoming such big news. In 2007 I published a book called "Too Safe for Their Own Good: How Risk and Responsibility Help Teens Thrive". It was difficult to get published in the US (it was a bestseller in Canada and Australia) because I was told by my colleagues "Children can never be too safe!"
Hmm, I think we're beginning to think otherwise. There is the danger that if we fail to provide children the experiences they need to develop properly, we cheat them of what I call "the risk-taker's advantage."
Let me explain...I run a 3.5 million dollar research program on resilience that gives me the opportunity to visit with stone-throwing children in Palestinian refugee camps, unsupervised teens on Israeli kibbutzim, children who dodge gunfire to go to school in Colombia's poorest mountainside communities, student paramilitaries in remote parts of India, teenage mothers in the cinder block slums of rural Tanzania, glue-sniffing children on Native reserves in Canada's far North, and bored disenfranchised youth in monochrome suburbs across the United States, Canada, and Europe. In many ways, these children are not all that different one from the other. They are all at risk of being harmed, or harming others -- living desperate lives that force them to find creative ways to survive. And survive they do. The world over, young people say the same thing: they will do whatever they need to do to convince themselves that they are competent, capable, contributors to their communities. They are all, in one way or another, steadfastly committed to making their lives better.
For these children growing up amid real danger, our task is simple. We need to offer them a safer world in which to grow. We need to give them safer homes, safer streets, immunizations, connections with adults who won't abuse them, and most of all, hope.
However, for many other more fortunate children, we are offering them too much safety. Odd as that may sound, there is a connection between the security we offer children and their violent behaviour, their experimentation with drugs, and their risk-taking with their bodies, their minds, their emotions and their spirits.
What's going on? Why would a child who has everything choose the life of the delinquent, the bully, the runaway, the street kid, or the drug addict? Why would a child with everything insist on taking on responsibilities that parents insist are beyond her years?
To answer these questions, Too Safe for Their Own Good offers some unconventional wisdom that comes from the kids themselves. They say that whether growing up with lots of advantages or few, they all crave adventure and responsibility. Both come with a sizable amount of risk. And both are often in short supply in families and communities dead-set on bubble-wrapping their children.
No one wants to see young people drift into problem behaviour; but we may be helping to create it. It's not our commitment to raising healthy children that is the problem; it's simply that the methods we use to keep our children safe inadvertently put them at much greater risk of serious harm.
According to the kids, the real problem is that they must search hard these days to experience danger or risk or responsibility that makes them feel more adult. This is a good-news, bad-news story. On the one hand, it is a testament to our collective success as middle-class families. The statistics tell us our children are physically safer than ever before. Fewer children are hospitalized for accidents or childhood illnesses. Fewer children suffer debilitating diseases. Fewer children drop out of school today than ever before. Fewer children have unprotected sex. Fewer children drink and drive. Fewer children attempt suicide. Even youth crime is down!
Families everywhere are teaching me:
• We need to be vigilant when real risks exist, but ease up when our fear gets the better of us. Well-founded worry conveys to children they are loved; senseless ungrounded worry debilitates children in ways far worse than the few bumps and bruises they may experience without us.
• When children do act out and put themselves in harm's way, we need to force ourselves to listen to them closely so they can tell us why they have chosen to take more risk and assume more responsibility than we think they can handle.
• Then we need to provide children with safe substitutes for their inappropriate risk-taking and responsibility-seeking behaviour that can provide just as much excitement as they found when they put themselves in harm's way. These substitutes must help kids feel like adults in ways meaningful to them. It must provide them with the risk-taker's advantage!
