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Are we bubble wrapping our children?

There is a line in Charlotte's Web (which I read every year to my first graders, and just re-read again yesterday) where E.B. White stops narrating the story, and turns for a moment to the reader. "Children always hold on tighter than their parents think they will," he says, in reference to a high arcing rope swing that sails out from the Zuckerman's barn, but also in reference to the way parents tend to over-protect their kids. "Be careful," we chirp. "Watch out." We can't help ourselves.

With this in mind it is shocking to read about the way childhood was experienced by 8-year-old Fern Arable and her brother Avery, who live their days unfettered, for the most part, by adults. They go to the pond, to the barn, to the haymow, and to the county fair more or less unsupervised.. They tote frogs in their pockets, and bring air rifles to school; they are at large, outdoors, every day after school. They show up for dinner, but in between, their activities are of their own creation. And though the characters are of course, fictional, the childhood portrayed by them is not. Kids were different fifty years ago. Parents were different. Childhood was different.

Today there is an overreaching perspective that childhood is something that must be orchestrated by careful and ever vigilant parents. From soccer practice to hand sanitizer, kids are raised in an environment that is at once both entirely child-centered and adult-directed. Children of previous generations lived in a world where their lives occupied a wedge of family life parallel to adults, perhaps, or orbiting them. Today children are the axis around which most families turn. Or at leas this is what Robin Givhan would have us to believe in her recent Washington Post article.

Before I had a baby I had no idea what a minefield parenting is. I had no concept of how competitive and anxious and overbearing parents can be--each one as posturing as though they have discovered the one and only secret for for how a child is raised the best. Nor did I realize how terrifying parenting is. How much responsibility, angst, and inevitable failure.

My husband and I were pretty much on the same page about our approach to parenting when Bean arrived on the scene, and our approach could more or less be summed up by the phrase: laid back. We've leaned towards letting our kiddo figure things out by trial and error--even at the expense few scraped knees; and we tend to shy away from things like hand sanitizer and table corner covers. In our house if something lands on the floor, we have a very lenient ten-minute second rule. But we're often realize that we're swimming against the main stream amongst our friends. There is a lot pressure from the parenting powers that be (not sure who they are exactly, they're out there) to be more cautious, more concerned, more vigilant.

Is it possible that as a culture we've swung too far towards the protective, preventative, sanitized, monitored version of childhood.? Do you think that as a generation of parents we're bubble wrapping our kids?

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