The Case for a Dose of Benign Neglect

While reading the "It's About Learning" blog from Bo Adams, an educator at Mount Vernon Presbyterian School in Atlanta, I came across this article from the Deseret News in Utah.  Entitled "When Kids Were Breakable," it does far more than, as the title might suggest, look back wistfully to a vanished and idyllic past (a practice for which I generally have extremely limited patience).  Instead, it explores the slow but relentless process we have been engaged in as a society for the past 30 or so years; namely, attempting to "bubble wrap" our children and prevent them from experiencing any danger, frustration, or disappointment as they make their way through childhood.

As an increasing anecdotal and quantitative body of evidence suggests, such an attempt is not merely futile, a vain effort at an utterly unrealistic goal.  It actually has significant pernicious effects on the children on whom it is practiced, stunting emotional and psychological growth and denying young people the powerful learning experiences (positive and negative) that come from being free to make bad decisions outside adult supervision.  The article cites one of the fundamental paradoxes that I believe does so much to fuel the perceived need for (over)protecting our children. "Parents today," the author writes, "operate under the assumption that society is more dangerous than when we were kids, when in fact the opposite is true. Crime rates in the United States are at an all-time low." This incontrovertible fact is constantly undermined by the ubiquitous coverage of the most gruesome and salacious events in the relentless media news cycle. But the statistics speak for themselves and demonstrate a huge drop-off in all categories of major crimes nationwide.

I have come to believe that a healthy dose of benign neglect would do our children a world of good.  Bad things can and will happen to children, and a reasonable amount of caution is, of course, essential.  But we're beginning to understand that there is a real and lasting cost to harboring the illusion that we can and should shield our children from every possible danger.  And a willingness to expand our tolerance for risk and freedom seems a logical reaction against the irrational trend towards over-protection that has been so prominent among our generation of parents.