In this podcast for St. Lawrence University, Steven Horwitz defends Lenore Skenazy and her concept of Free Range Kids; kids should be less supervised and more trusted to navigate their own way through the world, better to prepare them for adulthood. Kids are seen as constantly in need of management, lest they fall victim to a physical or social danger – scraped knees and paedophiles, respectively. In a bit of gratuitous econo-centrism, he suggests that unlike most modern mothers, Skenazy is “thinking like an economist,” by keeping in mind the Bastian insight that the unseen negatives of not allowing kids to take chances are just as much a cost as the various perils that come more easily to mind. Sure, but that’s like saying people are thinking like economists when they hear the other side of an argument.
(According to Ron Alsop, Horwitz could be on to something. He believes the Millenial generation is spoiled, unable to take initiative due to a relatively coddled upbringing.)
Brink Lindsey, on the other hand, has made much hay of the fact that kids who are doted upon by micro-managing parents from day 1 are higher achievers in their adult life. From the planning of extra curricular activities to the contribution of a large word-sum score through a talkative home environment (“utterances” in the words of Betty Hart and Todd Risley), it would seem that the less “free range,” the better for future success. People like David Friedman have made the case for Unschooling, which I’m sympathetic too for Nockian reasons of “elitist anarchism“, but it’s easy for Friedman to say, with his strong genes, Phd. and house in the leafy south bay area ‘burbs likely full of other nerds for his kids to play with.
Maybe these are two separate issues, one relating to obvious existential threats and the other to acquiring skills and habits crucial to a productive and well-integrated adult. I’m not sure. But it sure seems to me that an overly cautious, near-neurotic parenting style would, at the very least, imbue children with a sense of preparation and planning. In other words, my hunch is that being cognizant of safety (stranger danger!) and holding early success in school in high regard are positively correlated, as is the inverse.
I suppose there is a good deal of wiggle room between being an overbearing parent and being merely a parent that plans (perhaps excessively) for their kids to make their own plans.
May 4, 2010 at 11:58 pm
This issue, as described here, points out the modern era’s penchant for minimalizing everything into 1 dimensional thought structures. It’s either micromanage or utter chaos. As ever, there’s a 3D world out there, so deal with it.
What kids crave is organizational skills and opportunities for insight and perspective. It is when these are denied to children that they go running off the rails. Therefore, the sane 3D road here means that there is micromanagement, but it is management of the PARENT upon themselves to help and enable the child to discover the world at large, learn how to interact with it, and discover the personal skills which they can contribute to the overall systems involved.
This means that not just the child has to ‘go to school’, but so does the parent. It is extremely unlikely that any child is going to be ‘just like their parents’. Every child is born with a personality, an appearance and a set of abilities and deficits. A parent has to ‘learn’ their child and help the child ‘learn’ themselves. This process is extremely involved and time consuming.
Of course in our excessive stress inductive modern age, certainly in the USA, Europe and much of Asia, where we are doing work within some game system, typically business, it is enforced upon us that our game system work is the ultimate priority. This is always to the detriment of children. It is a weakness of capitalism to think of short term profits and ignore long term consequences. Ignoring the learning process for both parent and child results in chaotic parents and chaotic children that cannot communicate with each other and who have dysfunctional roles within the family structure as well as human society at large.
I’m willing to go out on a limb and point to such atrocities as the Neo-Cons and the Tea Party as excellent examples of where chaotic, un-learned minds will wander. These people are of benefit to no one, particularly their society. Instead they are ignorant, incapable of logical thought and adamant in pursuit of ludicrous concepts that have little bearing on the systems they are applied to. I’d go so far as to say it is a modern crisis of psychopathy.
Here, at least, is one point of view on this critical subject. Please tear it apart, but be certain to add your own constructs.
:-Derek
May 5, 2010 at 9:16 am
“Brink Lindsey, on the other hand, has made much hay of the fact that kids who are doted upon by micro-managing parents from day 1 are higher achievers in their adult life.”
I would suspect this to be a behavior-genetic artifact. Parents who are especially – or intrusively – engaged in their children’s upbringing would tend to be very different from their less-engaged counterparts. Does the effect survive after controlling for parental IQ or SES? Do the adopted children of micromanagerial parents show the same later tendency toward exceptionalism?
May 5, 2010 at 11:43 am
Parents who play classical music around the house have smarter / higher achieving kids, but the music is not causal, just a reflection of smartie genes in the parents. In general, parenting style differences that we find in modern America have no effect on differences in adult IQ, achievement, or personality.
So I don’t think the helicopter parents are giving their kids a spoiled personality — they’re just preventing their kids from having a life. Plus all that hovering keeps the parents from having a life of their own.
May 5, 2010 at 12:12 pm
“In general, parenting style differences that we find in modern America have no effect on differences in adult IQ, achievement, or personality.”
That is only true if you don’t include dietary supplementation during pregnancy in “parenting style”.
May 5, 2010 at 12:16 pm
This is somewhat on topic. Warren Farrell, author of The Myth of Male Power, is looking for a summer intern to research his new book, The Boy Crisis. It pays a little:
http://sfbay.craigslist.org/nby/wri/1724878664.html
It’s in the north bay area. I’d do it myself but I’m actually in Sacramento, so the two day per week in-office requirement won’t work for me.
In his words: “A non-PC interest in male-female issues is ideal.”
Must be college educated.
May 5, 2010 at 5:58 pm
When I was a child more than half a century ago, parents generally paid much less attention to what their children were doing than they do now. There was not much trouble a kid could get into, especially in a small town.
I’ve observed the obsessive planning that many parents nowadays impose on their kids’ lives, and wonder if the reason for it isn’t mostly their fear that something awful will happen to little Johnny or Janey if they are not constantly under the watchful eyes of their folks, or other adults trusted by their folks. Such fear is sometimes real – narcotics, for example, were something we Midwestern small-town and rural types knew only from newspaper articles about crime in large cities. On the other hand, I’m not sure whether there were fewer predatory psychopaths about – child molesters, kidnappers, or what have you. There was certainly not the publicity about them then that there is now in the day of 24-hour cable news coverage that dwells ghoulishly on murders and other lurid crimes.
In some sense it may be that the emphasis on programming every moment of a child’s life exposes them to more rather than less hazard. Who are the child molesters we read most frequently about? Priests get the greatest publicity, but I have found reports of schoolteachers and coaches involved in some sordid affair of this type in my nearest urban daily just about every month. Not too long ago, there was such a case involving a policeman that ran a ‘youth program’ for his suburban department.
The child molester is more likely to be such a person, who seeks out work that involves contact with children, and who is implicitly trusted by their parents, than it is to be some complete stranger lurking in the bushes of the local park. Most kids instinctively recoil from what seems ‘icky’ to them, and are more likely to flee from the random creep than they would be from someone they know who is put in a position of authority or trust.
May 5, 2010 at 9:20 pm
I agree with Chip about Brink Lindsey. I don’t think he’s even addressed the issue. Someone needs to send him a copy of “The Nurture Assumption”.
May 6, 2010 at 12:48 am
“That is only true if you don’t include dietary supplementation during pregnancy in “parenting style”.”
Why would anyone be so retarded as to include that under parenting?
May 6, 2010 at 6:23 am
What is really interesting is how much variation in life outcomes and personalities there is between siblings, without even looking at different SES groups.
Parents are indeed becoming more controlling within certain sub populations but I doubt that we will see the achievement gap between different SES groups widen in a linear fashion.