Free to Learn Chapter 10. TRUSTFUL PARENTING IN OUR MODERN WORLD
Author: Peter Gray Publisher: New York, NY: Basic Books. Publish Date: 2013 Review Date: Status:⌛️
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Now, I’ll be the first to admit that my son wasn’t just any thirteen-year-old kid. Had he been less responsible and less capable of thinking things through, his mother and I probably would have said no. To be a trustful parent is not to be a negligent parent—you have to know your child. But responsibility does not grow in a vacuum. If you want responsible kids, you have to allow them the freedom to be responsible, and that, sadly, is much harder to do today than it was in 1982; and in 1982 it was harder than in years before that.
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I doubt there has ever been a human culture, anywhere, at any time, that underestimates children’s abilities more than we North Americans do today. Our underestimation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because by depriving children of freedom, we deprive them of the opportunities they need to learn how to take control of their own behavior and emotions.
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Three Styles of Parenting
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Trustful parenting is the style that most clearly allows the self-educative instincts to blossom. Trustful parents trust their children to play and explore on their own, to make their own decisions, to take risks, and to learn from their own mistakes. Trustful parents do not measure or try to direct their children’s development, because they trust children to do so on their own. Trustful parents are not negligent parents. They provide not just freedom, but also the sustenance, love, respect, moral examples, and environmental conditions required for healthy development. They support, rather than try to direct, children’s development, by helping children achieve their own goals when such help is requested. This parenting style predominated through the long stretch of human history when we were hunter-gatherers (as discussed in Chapter 2).
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Trustful parenting sends messages to children that were consistent with the needs of children in hunter-gatherer bands, but are also consistent with the real needs of children today: You are competent. You have eyes and a brain and can figure things out. You know your own abilities and limitations. Through play and exploration you will learn what you need to know. Your needs are valued. Your opinions count. You are responsible for your own mistakes and can be trusted to learn from them. Social life is not the pitting of will against will, but the helping of one another so that all can have what they need and most desire. We are with you, not against you.
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Hunter-gatherers who grew up this way usually became highly competent, cooperative, nondomineering, cheerful, valued members of their society. They contributed to their bands not because they felt forced to, but because they wanted to, and they did so with a playful spirit. One group of anthropologists summed all this up as follows: “The successful forager … should be assertive and independent and is so trained as a child.”3 Trustful parents today understand that today’s successful adults, likewise, are assertive and independent and that children today should be so trained—“trained” not by directing them, but by allowing them to guide their own development and make their own discoveries about the world.
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I refer to the other two parenting styles as directive styles, because they are oriented toward directing children’s behavior and development rather than allowing children to direct themselves. These styles work against, rather than with, the child’s will.
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The directive-domineering style of parenting arose gradually with the rise of agriculture and reached its zenith during feudal and early industrial times. As discussed in Chapter 3, unquestioned obedience to lords and masters during this time often meant the difference between life and death, so the goal of parenting shifted from that of creating free and independent people to that of creating subservient beings. Rather than foster the child’s will, directive-domineering parents attempted to quash that will and replace it with a willingness to abide by the wills of others. Physical beatings were a regular and widely approved means of suppressing the will.
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In recent times, at least in some homes, psychological beatings have replaced physical beatings as the primary means of directive-domineering parenting. Regular inductions of guilt or shame, or threats of abandonment or withdrawal of love, can be even more powerful than the rod or whip in beating children into submission. But whatever its means, the goal of the directive-domineering parent is to turn the child into a servant. Yet history tells us that directive-domineering parenting has never been fully effective. Freedom is so strong a drive that it can never be fully beaten out of a person, regardless of age. Even in the humblest servant or the meekest child, free will continues to bubble below the surface, ready to boil over when the lid is loosened. That is why societies in which the masses are controlled by the few are never stable. In the long run, the directive-domineering style works no better in homes than it does in nations.
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Today, at least in our culture, most people are repelled by the idea of beating children into submission, whether by physical or psychological means. In today’s globalized, networked world, initiative, creativity, and self-assertion are generally valued. We see that blind obedience doesn’t work as a style of life. Unskilled labor has declined, replaced by machines, and people must be creative self-starters to find ways to support themselves. People today espouse many of the same values as hunter-gatherers. Over the past century or two, with the decline in need for child labor and the return of democratic values, the directive-domineering style of parenting has continuously declined. For a while—peaking around the 1950s—trustful parenting seemed to experience a renaissance, but in the decades since then, this parenting style has been gradually replaced by a new kind of directive parenting, directive-protective parenting.
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Directive-protective parents do not limit children’s freedom in order to force them to labor in fields or factories, or to make them servile, as directive-domineering parents did. Rather, they limit freedom because they fear for their children’s safety and futures and believe they can make better decisions for them than the children can for themselves. With all good intentions, directive-protective parents deprive their children of freedom at least as much as did the directive-domineering parents of the past. Directive-protective parents don’t beat their children, but use all of the other powers they have as providers to control their children’s lives. While trustful parents view children as resilient and competent, directive-protective parents view them as fragile and incompetent. While trustful parents believe that children develop best when allowed to play and explore on their own, directive-protective parents believe that children develop best when they follow a path carefully laid out for them by adults.
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Decline of neighborhoods and loss of children’s neighborhood play groups.
In the 1950s, most people—adults as well as children—knew their neighbors. This was partly because most women were home during the day and formed friendship networks, but men, too, tended to be home more than they are now. Workdays were shorter, on average, and people were home on weekends. Because people knew their neighbors, they trusted them. They weren’t afraid to let their kids run freely in the neighborhood and socialize with everyone there. They also knew that their neighbors knew their kids and would keep an eye out for trouble. Today, in contrast, out-of-home work has come to dominate adult life for both men and women, and most adult friendships are formed at work rather than at home. A result is that parents are uncertain about the character of other people in the neighborhood, and this, of course, leads to distrust.
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The biggest attraction for children to the outdoors, or to any place, is other children. So, when some parents begin to restrict their children from playing freely outdoors, the neighborhood becomes less inviting for other children. Moreover, the neighborhood may become truly less safe for any given child when fewer children are out there. There is safety in numbers. Children look out for one another and bring help if an injury occurs. (This is especially true if the playgroup includes a mix of older and younger kids.) And if child predators do exist, they are far less likely to prey on a child surrounded by witnesses than on a child alone. It’s a vicious cycle: Fewer children outdoors means that the outdoors is less inviting and less safe than it was before, which results in still fewer children outdoors. To make neighborhoods inviting and safe once again for children’s play, that cycle must be reversed.
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Decline of local common sense about parenting, and rise of a worldwide network of fear.
In the 1950s, most adults had more familiarity with and understanding of children than they do today. Families tended to be larger; extended families tended to live in the same town and share time together; and older children helped to care for younger ones. By the time people started their own families, they already had lots of experience with children. They knew firsthand something about child development. They knew something about children’s competencies and the value of play and adventure for children. They were also part of a neighborhood network of other parents, who were friends and shared stories about their children. In contrast, people today often start families with little firsthand experience with children. Their ideas and information about childhood and parenting often come from what they read or hear from “experts” and the media.
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The “experts” see it as their job to warn about dangers. Almost everything, to one authority or another, is a potential danger to children: knives, fire, germs, small toys (small enough to swallow), ticks and other biting insects, poisonous plants, ultraviolet sunlight, playground equipment, peers, older children and teenagers, and, of course, child abductors and predators (who, if you listen to the media, lurk behind every corner). If you listen to it all, and if you don’t consider how small each risk really is, you begin to see the world as a terribly frightening place indeed. On all of these counts, some caution is called for. These dangers do exist and we should let our children know about them if they don’t already. But when the fear becomes so great that we don’t allow children to play and explore and take risks on their own, we prevent them from learning how to take care of themselves. That may be the greatest danger of all.
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Some “experts” also seem to believe that we must protect our children’s fragile self-esteem, so they will always think well of themselves. Parents respond by praising their children’s smallest achievements, attending their games to cheer them on, and trying to arrange their kids’ lives so they never fail. This, too, is part of the directive-protective parenting style. Most children recognize such continuous praise and support as false and shrug it off as one more annoyance they have to deal with from their parents. A few don’t, however, and those are the ones we need to worry about.
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The “experts” also warn that we must protect children from their own foolishness. We read regularly of new data purporting to prove that children and especially adolescents are, for biological reasons, knuckleheads. It can’t be true; if it were, we would not have survived as a species during all those tens of thousands of years when children were trusted, and when real dangers—such as predators—were much more prevalent than they are today.
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The news media also are great purveyors of fear. Almost every day brings another story of a terrible thing that happened to a child somewhere. If hundreds of thousands of children go outside to play without adult supervision and come home healthier, wiser, and braver, that is not news. But if one child somewhere is abducted, drowns, or is run over by an automobile, that news is broadcast throughout the state or even the world, depending on how lurid the story. The information parents receive does not reflect statistical reality, and it feeds into every parent’s worst nightmares.
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Rise in the power of schools and in the need to conform to schools’ increasingly restrictive requirements. Perhaps the most significant of all the contributors to the decline of children’s freedom has been the continuous rise in the power of schools to interfere with the lives of children and families. School was an inhibitor of children’s freedom in the 1950s, but it is even more so today. The school year is longer, the sanctions for missing days of school are greater, and the activities conducted at school are more rigidly controlled than in times past. Moreover, schools today extend their influence beyond the school walls and into family life far more than in times past (as discussed in Chapter 1). There are summer reading lists, for example, and parents are supposed to make sure their children get those books and read them. (“No, Mary, you can’t read the book you want to read, because that’s not the book you need to write a report on.”) Homework is assigned even to the youngest students, and parents are often required to sign homework sheets and act as enforcers. Parents are regularly called in for conferences and made to feel guilty when their children misbehave in school or don’t do well on tests. Parents are expected to play the role at home that teachers play at school, pushing and prodding their children to do the things the school system has decided they must do. Parents who complain about any of this are viewed as troublemakers.
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It’s hard, if not impossible, to be a trustful parent in these conditions. The state, through its compulsory and increasingly prison-like schools, almost forces parents to be directive rather than trustful. You have to fight with your kids to get them to adapt to the school, and you have to fight with the school to try to get it to adapt in some small way to your kids.
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Rise of a school-centric model of child development and parenting.
In addition to its direct influence on families’ lives, the school system has had an even more pervasive indirect influence. Increasingly, researchers, parents, and society at large have come to view all of childhood through the lens of schooling. Everyone categorizes children according to their grade in school. Most research studies of children are conducted in schools and focus on school issues and concerns. The result is a school-centric view of child development that distorts human nature.
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In schools, learning is adult-directed, not child-directed. In schools, learning is considered to be sequential, along established pathways. You have to learn A before you learn B. In schools, children’s companions are all the same age—there is no learning of skills through play with older kids, or of responsibility through play with younger ones. In schools, self-initiated play and exploration are disruptions. All these are components of the school-centric model of child development. As a result, people have come to believe that learning is fundamentally sequential and adult-directed, that the proper companions are other children of the same age, and that self-directed play and exploration are largely a waste of time for children beyond the age of four or five. Developmental psychology textbooks, for example, commonly refer to the preschool years as “the play years,” as if play naturally stops or takes a backseat after that. We have allowed the schooling system to blind us to the natural ways of children.
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It is not hard to see why parents buy into the school-centric model. They become convinced by the rhetoric that their children will fail at life if they don’t get high grades in school and get into a top college. They begin to see themselves as competing with other parents to produce kids with the best résumés.
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Sadly, in many cases, the assumption that children are incompetent, irresponsible, and in need of constant direction and supervision becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The children themselves become convinced of their incompetence and irresponsibility, and may act accordingly. The surest way to foster any trait in a person is to treat that person as if he or she already has it.
Note: intresting. Maybe some of the kids in the special needs classes internalized the disorder that their teachers insisted they had