The Overly Protective Parent

If society is going to raise children who have character, grit, tenacity, and the ability to solve problems on their own, it will need to consider some of the excellent points made in Chapters 8 and 9, Paranoid Parenting, and The Decline of Play. Both chapters reveal important truths that scholars have touched upon elsewhereparticularly, the importance of developing grit and the importance of play (which teaches kids a great deal). Too much coddling causes children to never have to experience adversityand so they do not know how to address it later in life when they actually face it. Thus, the whole point of being a good point is not to protect children from harm, from challenges, or from trials, but rather to give them the experience, confidence, support, and opportunities to rise to challenges, overcome adversity, and dig down deep within themselves to find the grit needed to work through problems.

Paranoid parenting is a problem because it assumes children do not know how to apply themselves, think critically,...

Paranoid parenting takes the opportunity for kids to prove themselves away from them. This harms children because it does not allow them to grow into their adult selves. As Erikson shows with the psychosocial stages of development, every human...…the cold and telling them to solve but rather a matter of giving them the tools, training, and positive warmth that will encourage them and motivate them to succeed.

Parents are necessary and their role is a positive one. But parents also need to be aware that they can do more harm than good when they coddle or over-protect their children. Children need challenges and need free time to play and learn. That is how they develop, and this has been shown in numerous examples in the reading as well as in other research by scholars in the field, who have discussed the zone of proximal development and the positive side of grit and…