4 Powerful Parenting Practices That Most Avoid
After writing Bad Therapy, Abigail Shrier learned that she needed to do a number of things differently with her own children.
Hello Bar-Setters!
Last week, I gushed about Abigail Shrier’s new book Bad Therapy. Today, I want to highlight a few specific parenting practices that are not normal, but which Shrier does with her own children. Bari Weiss asked Shrier what her research had prompted her to do differently with her kids. Here’s her list:
1. Young One, Transport Thy Self
One of the things I totally reversed on, among many, was that… my daughter was eight and she begged to be able to walk home alone from the bus stop to our house. And I hated it. And she was so small. And the cars were all so big…
But I learned something by talking to parents. If you don’t give your child a certain amount of independence and risk-taking when they’re young, they won’t even seek it out when they’re older.
I talked to parent after parent who couldn’t get their teenagers to leave the house. Because an eight year old who shows up having walked home those few blocks home alone by herself, shows up at the door full of triumph. And the thirteen year old knows it’s no big achievement.
I’ve said the same on a number of occasions:
If you don’t allow mild risks at a young age, your kids won’t want to get license at 16. They won’t become antifragile adults who see the world as a place full of opportunities that are open to them. So, let them walk home from bus stop, or bike to school on their own, or scooter up to the store to get laundry detergent…
2. Give Your Kids Errands… Like at a Young Age
I started giving my sons errands—a lot more errands to do for the family, because I learned that giving kids responsibility, far from making you into a taskmaster, was a good way to set them on a path for a happy life.
Her 10-year-old boys had no smartphones and no car, but Shrier constantly sent them to the market. She sent them on their scooters with backpacks and her credit card. And they loved it!
Apart from being good for her boys, she says that this was actually quite helpful. That shouldn’t cause you to feel guilt. In fact, it makes this practice that much more important and impactful.
Young people want to be helpful. They want to be seen as someone who is truly capable and deserving of respect. Self-determination theory holds that people need three things to be fulfilled: they need to feel competent, in control of their lives, and connected to others. Running errands for the family accomplishes all three.
3. Give Them a Planner & Stop Being Their Reminder Service
I stopped following their homework. I gave the kids a planner. I said “You are in charge of knowing what your homework is and if you don’t know what it is, I will not follow it, look up, read through the teachers emails…
And I did it knowing that they would forget their homework. And they have. And they do. And they have lost planners. But here is the tradeoff that I now understood I was facing. If I followed their homework and I remained in charge… not only would I be more miserable, but I would raise high school students that I was still tracking the homework for.
Nothing is more absurd and infantilizing than this constant concierging that we do for our kids. Last year, a mother emailed me to ask if I’d write her son a letter of recommendation for college. “Ma’am, let me give you a recommendation.”
This sort of thing is rampant. I know we think we’re being helpful and it makes us feel needed, but our job is to make ourselves un-needed. Our job is to raise adults.
So much of parenting is teaching your kids to not need you.
At age five, teach them to ride a bike and tie their shoes.
By age six, give them a few chores they are responsible for and have them understand how to be safe biking around the block on their own.
And by age ten, they should have a planner and be fully responsible for tracking their own assignments.
4. You May Have Heard This One Before…
Like Dr. Jonathan Haidt and all the tech moguls, Shrier still hasn’t allowed her 8th graders to have a smartphone. The people who know best all avoid giving their kids smartphones until they are in high school. They tend to delay social media even longer. But most parents don’t follow their lead. Why?
Shrier has a couple of theories. First, to take a kid’s phone, or tell them no, requires parental authority. And, as she says, “mental health professionals are the number one force undermining parents authority.”
More still, the mental establishment has been negligent about doing what is obvious. They have not told parents to wait until high school to give their kids a smartphone. They have not empowered parents to do what they know in their hearts is best. In lieu of this obvious advice, social pressure pulls parents to give their eleven-year-old a smartphone.
As Shrier said a few weeks ago following the Senate judiciary hearing on social media’s impact on children:
… the number of social contagions spread by social media could fill a diagnostic manual all its own. And yet, in the eight years since academic psychologists Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt first warned the world about the dangers of social media, the mental health expert complex has done nothing to curtail its use by teens and tweens.
Tech titans like Mark Zuckerberg feel no pressure to take responsibility for the damage their products cause. And why would they? The American Psychological Association… has utterly failed to take the dangers of social media to teens seriously….
… Any parent can take away a cell phone. But only mental health experts can dispense “wellness tips,” diagnoses, psych meds, and therapy. They march into schools and lecture teens about the responsible uses of social media, which is a little like school nurses advising kids about the prudent uses of Ecstasy.
It is absurd.
Earlier this year, I wrote about the unholy alliance between the American Academy of Pediatrics and AT&T. In the absence of prudence, highly destructive norms have proliferated. But at least their is a countermovement.
Voices like Haidt (whose book The Anxious Generation comes out later this month) and Shrier are out there for all who will listen.
It is up to all of us to re-set the bar!
Thank you for reading and sharing!
If you’d like more support for practices like these, check out my book (currently on sale), or these related articles:
Carry the fire!
Shane