The Atlantic Monthly recently published a wonderful article titled “The Overprotected Kid”. In it, author Hanna Rosin makes a compelling case that children benefit from taking risk, especially with peers – gaining valuable social, emotional, and logical life insights from successes and failures (getting hurt, discovering, challenging fears, arguing, etc). Rosin speaks to the phenomenon in which many of today’s parents attempt to shield their children from all possible risk, pain (physical and emotional), and danger. Rosin shares statistics which indicate that these cautionary measures have not made our kids safer over the last few decades but instead less autonomous, confident, socially and emotionally aware of others, empathic, and self-reliant. A Piagetian nightmare.
I’m posting the article here because I believe it supports the idea of maximizing exposure to peer interaction and gently reminds parents to fight the urge to save and fix instead of allow room for rich, sometimes painful, learning and development.

I’d love to start a dialogue on this topic, so please leave comments if you have an opinion.

The Article: http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/03/hey-parents-leave-those-kids-alone/358631/