27 Feb Free-Range Parenting (with Guardrails)

There’s a private elementary school in Washington, D.C., that advertises itself with this adage from Plato’s Republic, “The beginning is the most important part of any work.”  As 2017 launches, I am thinking a lot about the concept of “process” as it relates to my children’s activities and how I model my own skills and routines for my daughter (8) and son (almost 13).

I’m trying to do something a little different from my own experience. When I was a child, I had a mother who was older, tired, and who had already raised her five older children almost to adulthood. I was blessed with the kind of “free-range” childhood that many Americans bemoan the disappearance of: By age four, I was walking alone around the corner to buy penny candy from a local market. Once I discovered my mother’s trove of Time-Life Foods of the World cookbooks, my mother allowed me to try out any recipes I wanted to make, and I was trusted with a hot stove—alone—by age seven or eight.

There was a lot that was great about that independence, especially in the kitchen. What I did not learn in my enthusiasm, however, was how quickly experiments can go awry: with spills, broken bowls, scorched fingers, and burning cookies smoking up a 450 degree oven.  And how quickly that excitement could shift to anger, frustration, and abandoning a scene of dirty dishes—which my mother always uncomplainingly cleaned up, without even asking me to help.

And as I grew, I felt a certain amount of shame for the childhood-without-guardrails I’d had.

Ultimately, the lack of any thoughtful process meant that if something went wrong, I concluded the fault was with me: I would “never get it right,” and just “wasn’t any good.” My mother’s answer—“you’re just fine!”—was never any help, and I was filled with self loathing. This was not just in the kitchen, by the way—it was also true of sewing, roller-skating, and other new things I tried.

As a result, I was determined to supervise my children during activities more than my mother had, and to offer constructive directions along the way. I imagine a lot of us who are dedicated to home learning came to our vocations in just this manner!

We’ve had some good times that way—cooking and planting bulbs in the yard and crocheting chains of bright yarn. I’ve done the thing that psychologists today swear up and down we should do: to Praise the Effort and Not the Result. I’ve set up the tools for the activity, modeled the process of whatever we were going to do, and supervised progress aggressively. I was ready to help draw out any spiritual or philosophical lessons that might emerge.

And whatever they did, I did not want them to Leave a Mess. Sometimes, that meant that I kept the scope of our plans intentionally narrow. Too narrow…

As my son and daughter have grown, I think my and my husband’s involvement has given them a sense of boundaries that I lacked, and that as a result, they don’t swing back and forth as much between enthusiasm and discouragement.

But lately I’ve concluded that my desire to preserve control has helped kill some of my children’s excitement—and that I wanted my children, who are older now, to feel some liberation in trying out things on their own.

Last weekend, for example, I let my daughter and her friend Sophia make biscuits. I oversaw them as they collected the equipment they needed, and turned the oven on.

They had the first steps in a good beginning—and beyond a simple direction to “follow the recipe,” I let them do everything. I even left the room—though I did admonish them to remember to “clean up their mess.”

I picked up a book and sat down on the sofa. After a while, the yummy smell came drifting in from the oven.

Some of the biscuits came out great, while some of them on the bottom rack were burned. All of them, though, were perfect.

Question for Thought: Spend some time thinking about the kind of mother you had, and are. Are there areas where you need to add boundaries in teaching your children—or remove them?

Project: Let your children guide you to a creative activity they want to do. Spend some time developing suggested steps that will help them take on the task themselves. Then sit back and let them feel the pride of completing it—obstacles and all!