How Can Over-Protective Parenting Cause an Injury?

On a playground slide….that’s how. “Orthopedic specialists say they treat a number of toddlers and young children each year with broken legs as a result of riding down the slide on a parent’s lap.” In Tara Parker-Pope’s piece on this surprising risk, she quotes Jed Dickman, whose 18 month old toddler’s sneaker got caught on the side of the slide, resulting in a fractured tibia. “My wife was just trying to keep Hannah extra safe and make sure she didn’t fall; she felt very guilty about it.”

What’s the upshot?

This may be one of those counter intuitive situations when a child is actually safer by herself. During the summer, have fun and be safe!

The American Dream That Beckons Your Teen; Let It Wait

Bill Doherty, who I cite in this blog every chance I get, raises some terrific questions in his Psychology Today essay on Abby Sunderland, the teenager who sailed around the world. He makes some crucial points about the role of modern parents in how they give guidance and supervision to their children.

When the American dream is calling your child, how do you say no?
How have we allowed our adolescents to become adults and our children to become adolescents?
And how do parents lose their moorings when children profess a dream of competitive success?

Doherty described his own family this way: “Back in the ancient 1980s, before the age of the super child, when my son asked to add a second sport to his schedule, we said sure, if you want to drop the first one. We were not yet burdened by the cultural norm that every child is a bundle of undiscovered potential that parents are responsible to uncover and develop, no matter the cost.

Of course, the young have always had dreams, but we used to think that they should grow up before deciding on which dreams to pursue as part of an adult life. From Abby’s blog: "It has been my dream since I was 13 years old and began single-handing, to one day sail solo around the world. I am 16 years old and this blog will contain the story of my attempt to become the world's youngest solo circumnavigator.” Note the contemporary twist on the familiar round-the-world travel dream: it's to be solo and the youngest in history.

We now know that the human brain does not fully mature until around age 25 on average; that means Abby has 9 years of brain development to look forward to. For now, it's the job of parents to provide the missing prefrontal cortex for their offspring.

Abby's father said: "Sailing and life in general is dangerous. Teenagers drive cars. Does that mean teenagers shouldn't drive a car?” When a parent of a minor child compares a year of solo sailing around the world, including in the South Pacific hurricane season, to driving a car in the neighborhood, it sounds delusional to outsiders. But it feels sane to parents who have been seduced by today's culture of competitive childhood where the dreams of youth distort the judgment of adults. Behind every super child is a supportive but ultimately wimpy parent.

Doherty wisely concludes: “The antidote is simple: let high-achieving children be children first, with time to grow up, and in the meantime let parents be the adults in the family.”

I encourage you to read Doherty’s entire piece by clicking here

Seriously, Is This Summer Camp?

Summertime Week post 4 of 5

Camps with full-time parent liaisons?
Summer camp as a secret vacation from Ritalin?
Have meddlesome mothers and fathers forgotten that one main point of overnight camp is to give children a chance to solve problems without parental assistance?
And what is "fading parental morality"?

Tina Kelley described the changes in summer camps in her article in the NY Times. Most high-end sleep-away camps in the Northeast now employ full-time parent liaisons. The job is “almost like a hotel concierge listening to a client’s needs.”

Kelley states, “The liaisons are emblematic of what sleep-away camp experts say is an increasing emphasis on catering to increasingly high-maintenance parents, including those who make unsolicited bunk placement requests, flagrantly flout a camp’s ban on cell phones and junk food, and consider summer an ideal time to give their offspring a secret vacation from Ritalin.”

And are camp WebCams helping matters?
“I have parents calling and saying they saw their child in the background of a picture (on our website) of other children and he didn’t look happy, or his face looked red, has he been putting on enough suntan lotion, or I haven’t seen my child and I have seen a lot of other children, is my child so depressed he doesn’t want to be in a picture,” said Jay Jacobs, who has run Timber Lake Camp in Shandaken, N.Y., since 1980.

According to Norman Friedman, “They’ll give their child two cell phones, so if they get caught with the first one, just give it up and you’ll have the second one to talk to me,” he said. “That’s widespread, not isolated. I call it fading parental morality. What they’re doing is entering into delinquent behaviors with their children. And what kind of statement is that to a child?”

Summertime Week Posts:
1. Children gain more weight in summer than during school
2. Summer books: Bad Parenting stories are so funny (not)
3. (From the We-Kid-You-Not-File) Summer Strolls: the direction your stroller faces could affect your baby's language development
4. Seriously, do you call this summer camp?
5. Too much sunscreen and too much paranoid parenting

Shiri is Right; Everything's Bad for You

Overprotective parents and environmental hazards, how do we strike the proper balance?

My friend since childhood Shiri, is fond of saying, "When you think about it, really everything is bad for you." It is true to a certain extent. How do parents make the best choices for their children without becoming overprotective helicopter parents?

Peggy Orenstein wrote a great piece titled, The Toxic Paradox. She cites numerous examples that people panic about: lead in synthetic athletic turf, Bisphenol A in dental sealants, mercury in tuna, microwaving in plastic.....and she raises the question: What, in our time, does "safe" even mean?

There truly are a billion (since billion is the new million) things to worry about because we parents want to protect our children from harm. But along comes the journal Pediatrics in 2004 and explains that jittery parents have more to fear from fire, car accidents, and drowning than from toxic chemical exposure (with the exception of lead that still threatens the health of millions of children).

"You can't raise your kid in a bubble" Orenstein correctly points out. So here are my thoughts: when research is clear and numerous studies point in the same direction, then for example, you stop smoking. You learn to adapt and you change your ways, it's common sense. When we were kids growing up in Florida, going out in the sun for a few hours was beneficial because you received some much needed Vitamin D. Now you can receive much feared skin cancer such as melanoma. So you adapt, you spend less time in the sun and whenever you venture out in summer, use sun screen.

You cannot panic at every research study (coming attractions: do forward facing strollers hinder language development in infants?) but you cannot ignore them either. You have to trust someone. So when you are pregnant, bring your questions to your Ob/Gyn. When you have children, bring your list of "Is this harmful to my child?" to your Pediatrician.

Try to parent from your guts, not just from your brain!