One reason parents/teachers/adults are spending so much time hovering over kids is that they are spending so much time hovering over kids: It’s a vicious circle. (Or cycle. Never figured that out.)
My point is, when we spend a lot of time watching our kids, inevitably, we will see them do things that are dumb, mean, risky or wasteful. Which makes us feel we have to watch them EVEN MORE.
More watching, more worrying
But if we WEREN’T spending so much time scrutinizing them — if we gave them a decent dollop of unsupervised time — we would see far fewer of those nerve-wracking, “teachable” moments and hence not feel the need to supervise even more.
As Wendy Mogel — she of The Blessings of a Skinned Knee — has said: Look closely at anything and you will see the flaws. Our culture insists we electron- microscope our kids and darned if the flaws don’t seem glaring!
Less intervening, more growth.
This brings us to this classic column by Angela Hanscom, author of “Balanced and Barefoot: How Unrestricted Outdoor Play Makes for Strong, Confident, and Capable Children,” itself a classic.
Angela is a pediatric occupational therapist and founder of TimberNook, the outdoor play experience company. She is consistently fascinating when it comes to what kids get from free play, especially in nature, and how strange our culture has become when it attempts to treat very little kids as if they are PhD candidates.
Herewith, a great story from the playground:
WHY ADULTS HAVE TO STOP TRYING SO DARN HARD TO CONTROL HOW CHILDREN PLAY, by Angela Hanscom
“Cut it out!” a little girl screams at the top of her lungs.
“Yeah!” Another girl yells. “Back away!”
I look over in the far corner of the woods to see a small group of girls holding hands and forming what looks to be a wall in front of a teepee they just created. A little boy stands in front of them with a face that is beet red. He is shaking from head to toe.
“I will NOT!” he yells back. “You have to let me play! That is the rules!” He gets dangerously close to them.
The adults observing the children look over at me with worried looks. I instruct them to observe but stay close and hidden among the trees. Secretly, I’m wondering if we should intervene now, but something tells me to wait.
The little boy tears down a piece of their tepee. “Stop it!” one of the girls yells. They don’t back down. A few more girls come and form a wall with them. The little boy suddenly reaches into their tepee and grabs the “jewels” they have hidden in there and takes off running.
So: The girls chase him. He throws down the “jewels” and plops himself elsewhere. The girls resume playing house. But —
Not even two minutes pass before one of the girls from the tepee group walks over to where the boy is sitting. She does something that surprises every adult watching. She sits down beside him. She looks him in the eye and starts talking in a quiet voice. He begins to raise his voice again. She patiently puts her hand up and waits for him to stop shouting. He becomes silent. A few minutes later, they get up. She reaches for his hand and leads him over to the group of girls at the tepee. He says something to them, and they invite him to play.
What if the adults watching had intervened right away? What if we had jumped in as soon as there was a sign of conflict? We could have said, “Be nice girls. Let him play.” Or told the boy to stop yelling… [But] through this real-life experience, they learned how to stand up for themselves, how to work through anger and frustration, and most importantly — they learned empathy.
You can’t role-play empathy! Or lecture children to death on how important it is to include other children. Children need to learn these things through practice. LOTS of it!
Lenore here: She is so right! Angela isn’t saying don’t teach empathy. She’s saying that LIFE will teach kids some empathy if we just stand back some times and let it unfold.
If you’re thinking, “Wow, I’d like my kids to learn that way, too!” consider starting a Let Grow Play Club at school or in your community. It’s where adults watch over the kids free playing but don’t intervene. Result: Bickering. Blustering. Some bad feelings and some great ones — growth! – L.
Photo from Unsplash by fancycrave.