Taken Away

A friend mentioned today that her kid was overly sensitive and that got me thinking. I know my kids are super sensitive - fragile almost. And I always thought it was just my kids' genetic makeup.

But it got me thinking. Is this over-sensitivity an effect of the sheltered life that my kids (as well as a lot of kids in my community of family and friends) lead?  As a generation of parents - we have definitely veered towards helicopter parenting, and maybe it is justified given the world we live in today. But our extremely “loved and protected and taken care of” kids have had the opportunity to develop a thick skin taken away from them.

And while this is not a groundbreaking observation by any means - there are a ton of articles and books about how we live in the age of over-parenting and how kids today do not have the coping skills they need because of... well the way we live.

But it was still an interesting realization for me. Especially when it struck me how we have this weird culture of taking away something in its natural form from our kids, and then trying to give it back to them in a more packaged, parent approved, processed sort of way.

We don’t let them run around freely and get hurt and climb boulders and rocks but we take them to play structures or trampoline parks instead to burn energy. We don’t let them mingle with the rowdy neighborhood kids but instead hand pick their friends for them from within our own social circles. We have play dates instead of play time.

I am not trying to pass judgement - this is exactly how I parent too. A good example is how my husband and I decided that we want to send our kids to an Islamic school. But then we worried that she would be living in a bubble and that she needs to have some diversity thrown her way. So we decided we would take her to community events and other secular activities. And of course we have her best interests at heart. But it is SO ORCHESTRATED.

This processed food diet that we are giving our kids takes away their natural and organic childhood and it is obviously gonna result in kids that are too fragile because we haven’t let life rough them up enough.

So this is what I propose. We need to form a “Life’s hard knocks” summer camp. It must have a rigorously tested and AAP-approved curriculum of hardship, adversity and general non-pandering techniques. But each activity must remain well within the zone of “harsh but not scarring”.

And then every morning during summer break, we should drop our kids off, along with their snacks and water bottles, sign them in, watch like a hawk to make sure they go straight to their toughen-up class, and then come running back to pick them up 2 hrs later.

That should do the trick. What say??