Recently, our family dropped off our ten-year-old son at sleepaway camp for a week. On the way home, we stopped to walk along a nearby river. In the grass alongside the river dam was a bird’s nest lying on the ground, containing a few newly hatched eggs. These birds, having left the place where they developed and grew, had flown away. I stared down at the eggs and thought about our son.
The symbolism was quite direct.
When we left him at camp, though excited, he appeared anxious and a little tearful as I drew back from our goodbye hug. Having grown up an unusually adventurous kid, he’s typically bursting with enthusiasm for new activities, so I was taken aback to witness his reservations at the camp drop-off. We had chosen a camp he had visited before on a school trip, and he even had a couple of classmates sleeping in the same bunkhouse that week. His unexpected reaction reminded me that as children grow, they are always changing, sometimes responding differently to new challenges or situations. Harry Stack Sullivan, an American Neo-Freudian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, believed that different stages in the course of child development corresponded to different ways of interacting with others. He attributed this to an individual’s self-identity being built up over the years through their perception of how they are regarded by others, mainly significant people in their environments. Likewise, I’ve observed while raising my children that their reactions to circumstances are not as static or predictable as adults.
Images of the camp drop-off kept coming to my mind throughout the week. The first time he departed for camp, I wrote him a letter, a child version of the physics theory quantum entanglement. This phenomenon describes how two subatomic particles, once linked, maintain a relationship even when separated, and a change induced in one can occur simultaneously in the other, even if the particles are far apart. Of course, the letter contained a more simplified version of this theory, where I reminded him that if he’s lonely and thinks of us, we will also think of him since we’re his parents and he is a part of us. Like the first camp experience, when he arrived home this more recent time, he was very glad to be reconnected with us, but he was also glowing from the novel experience of being away and having his own adventures in the world as a separate particle. He had a wonderful time.
I think back to my own childhood, where some of the most thrilling and memorable experiences were those I had separate from my parents. By later elementary school, my sister and I were regularly riding our bikes around our neighborhood together without adult supervision. My mother had taken a part-time job, and we walked home the two blocks after school and let ourselves in with a key my sister kept on a string in her bookbag. The time I was growing up in the suburban 1980s was surely different from the current state of our community, but sometimes I ask myself, how different was it really? Is the difference in community safety proportional to the reduction in childhood independence today? Exploring these questions, I was surprised (but partially validated) to find a Children’s Commissioner report from 2018 that cites the area outside the home in which children are allowed to range unsupervised has shrunk by 90% since the 1970s!
Furthermore, last fall The Journal of Pediatrics published findings that linked the rise in mental health disorders to a decades-long decline in activities where children operate independently of adults. In this article, “Decline in Independent Activity as a Cause of Decline in Children’s Mental Well-Being: Summary of the Evidence,” the authors point out that as parents are regularly reminded of all the real-world dangers that may befall their children, they become less willing to allow the free play and roaming behaviors that children and teens previously enjoyed. Consequently, kids have developed more anxiety and depression as a result of not feeling as capable as those from past generations. Likewise, activities that involve some degree of personal risk for children have also been discouraged by parents who are now wary that the child will get injured. As a result, the deprivation of children from these experiences increases the risk of phobias as well as anxieties that they won’t be able to deal with challenging or frightening experiences. In contrast, the authors argue that allowing children to take calculated risks helps them develop self-confidence to interact effectively with the larger world. It’s not only parents who have become more restrictive —parents respond to societal expectations and school policies of the like. Reflecting on Sullivan’s theory, it’s natural to deduce that if we collectively (parents, teachers, and other adults) perceive our children as incapable, they will become so, their identity developing from our own perceptions of them.
Since we can’t turn back time, it seems the sweet spot between fostering independence and affording protection lands somewhere in the realm of parental decision-making. Most of our decisions as parents occur while unconsciously calculating how much challenge our child can grow from while factoring in their own strengths, struggles, and the environment in which we find ourselves. For example, we moved from New York City (NYC) to rural Massachusetts (MA) when our son was five years old. He then entered kindergarten in MA at a school with a large outdoor campus. Recess consisted of outdoor play and occasional trips to what they call “Tree Island,” a small piece of forest where children are allowed to climb high into trees (with supervision nearby). Not having made it past the top of the monkey bars in NYC, he was now arriving home with near-death tales of having his foot stuck on a high branch, and as my stomach churned, I made strong efforts to listen, smiling all while reminding myself how good this was going to be for his mental health.
I can see why parents have grown toward overprotection—in the moment when we’re given a choice between an anxious child and a child that fell out of a tree, it’s understandable that our parental instincts lean toward safety. Add that conundrum to growing restrictions in cultural norms where you don’t want to be the only one who allows your child to take risks, especially if they wind up injured. Raising children seems to me like a mental trip to a parental Tree Island—we have to mind the risks of bodily harm and the dangers of not ever taking those risks to make the best choices, all while moored out in some psychological space with a collective of other parents living in the elements.
After the sleepaway camp, he returned to a day camp he attends every year. He remarked that a friend he hadn’t seen since the previous summer “seemed older.” When prompted to explain, he described how this usually jovial pal seemed tired, disinterested, and scoffed at my son’s suggestion they play a kids’ game they enjoyed for hours last year. They’re growing up, I thought, and the tween phase is here. One night over dinner, he asked what it’s like to be a teenager. Half-jokingly, I described how he would reject us, not wanting to be with his parents, preferring to be alone in his room, and when pressed to interact, speaking mostly in abbreviated sentences or grunts. He looked at me incredulously and denied he would ever think or act that way. “No way, not me,” he said.
“We’ll see,” I replied with a half-smile.