There’s an old proverb that says if you give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day; if you teach a man to fish, he’ll eat for the rest of his life. This saying has tremendous relevance for parenting. As parents of children and teens growing up in an increasingly competitive world, we want to give our kids every advantage we can afford and protect them from every harm we can imagine. It’s tempting to wrap them in bubble wrap before sending them to school. The reality is that we can’t protect our children from every harm and we can’t make life always easy for them—nor should we.
The temptations to over-protect children come from a good place—parents not wanting their children to hurt. But in trying to keep our children safe, we can inadvertently set them up for difficulty. Over-sheltering children teaches kids that the world is a dangerous place to be feared, and this can lead them to be overly cautious and anxious. It also leaves them ill-equipped to handles life’s ups and downs. How will a child learn to stand up, dust herself off, and try again if she never falls off the bicycle? Some kids who are overprotected internalize a sense of inhibition which prevents them from appropriately exploring the world, trying new experiences, and engaging fully in life. Another common secondary effect of over-protecting is an autonomy-seeking teen who rebels against the bubble wrap, exploring the world with wild abandon. Either way, the outcome of over-sheltering children is generally not what parents were aiming for in the first place.
Similarly, over-functioning for our children can lead to undesirable outcomes. In an effort to help our child rise to academic challenges by helping them with every math problem, designing every poster, and coordinating every school project, we may forget that the point of all the homework and projects is that the child learns to do them himself. The key to helping and not handicapping your child is to provide only as much scaffolding as he needs. If your kid looks at his project and says, “Wow, Mom! You did a really good job on this,” then you’ve gone too far. When the job is done your child should feel a sense of accomplishment and have learned or improved skills.
It is important that we teach our children to be independent and resilient. The training we give them as children sets them up to be self-sufficient adults. If we don’t allow them to fail sometimes as kids, they will be rocked by the experience of failing as an adult, when they don’t have the safety net of home to catch them when they fall. Teach your children to fish, and they will be able to provide for themselves as adults.
Melissa K. Hunt, Ph.D.
Licensed Clinical Psychologist