Season of independence?
NEW YORK — Much is made about two distinct styles of parenting. We’ve got the hovering helicopters and the risk-taking free-rangers, and back-to-school season threatens to bring out the beast in both.
Parents of newly minted kindergartners cling to school fences, while first-time middle schoolers are encouraged to find their own way.
In between are the middle-grounders, parents who embrace baby steps to independence. Encouraging, instilling and planning for more freedom and responsibility for children doesn’t have to be an ordeal, some said. And back-to-school season can be the perfect time to figure out the next round.
Take Amy McKearney, a mom of three girls, ages 4, 7 and 9, in Thomaston, Conn. While she’s still on chauffeur duty for many activities, she has found lots of little ways to foster growing independence in her brood.
“I let my oldest go to the park with my 4-year-old while I watch the 7-year-old play soccer,” she said. “It’s about 100 yards away.”
And she made full use of learning resource centers situated in some Connecticut schools for kids 5 and younger as a way to help build trust in outside-the-family adults in a play-group setting but within a school environment. Parents are required to stick around but take a backseat.
“That way, I was still there but at a distance,” McKearney said. “It’s a good way to work on things, like whether your child is shy in a group.”
Another useful tactic: While grocery shopping, she’ll wait for her number to be called at the meat counter and send her oldest to pick up other items on their list. And at a nearby familiar amusement park, her two oldest are allowed to roam together.
“They’ve been there at least 50 times. I know they know their way around,” McKearney said. “They’ll go on rides while I go with my smaller one or stay in a central location.”
McKearney’s baby steps might put fear into some helicopter parents. No worries, said mom Christina Woelffer in Raleigh, N.C. She sees opportunities to foster school-worthy skills for her three children — 3, 5 and 7 — right at home.
“My kids attend a Montessori school, of which a main principle is the child’s need for independence and the adult’s need to recognize them as a person versus a baby,” she said. “So, what we do at home closely mirrors the attitude which is found in the classroom: bring your dishes to the sink, clean up after yourself, order your own food at a restaurant, etc.”
Sound simple? It should be, experts said.
“Our job as parents is to put ourselves out of a job,” said mom-of-two-teens Julie Lythcott-Haims, a former freshman dean at Stanford University.
“I saw parents coming to campus and not leaving, literally and virtually. They began to be present in the university experience in the late ’90s. They came in greater numbers every year and we thought it was silly, then odd and a little annoying because the university didn’t have an easy way to accommodate so many third parties who thought they had a role to play,” she said.
Yet Lythcott-Haims found herself falling into the overparenting trap when her own kids were younger.
“I came home one day after gently scolding a set of Stanford parents about, you know, ‘You’ve dropped your student off today. Trust us, trust them, now go home,’ and realized I was still cutting my kids’ meat — and they were 8 and 10,” she said. “That was my big aha moment. I thought, ‘Wait a minute, when do you stop cutting their meat?”’
Kim John Payne, a former school and family counselor in Northampton, Mass., is the dad of two daughters, 13 and 16. Hovering for years then abruptly letting go once kids are older is an issue that rears regularly among kids and parents, he said.
“Rather than think about, ‘Am I helicoptering, am I free ranging, am I, am I?’ there’s a third dimension, and the third dimension is expanding our firm but loving boundaries as kids grow, so that we transition the way we hold them both physically and emotionally,” said Payne.
