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Watch out reality TV, here I come!
A guest post from Top 50 Mom Blogger Lenore Skenazy:
Reality TV, baby! That’s where I’m heading. I’m about to become the sort of Not-So-Super Nanny who comes to the homes of overprotective, worried-sick parents and says, “You can loosen up. It’s okay.”
Why? Continue reading »
What if you’re not a helicopter or attachment parent, or a tiger mom, or have no free range kids? What if you’re a mix of all?
Unless you’ve been living in mass isolation, you’ve undoubtedly heard about the different types of parenting theories being discussed, outlined, and debated ten-fold these days. Maybe you’ve even taken a quiz. Are you an attachment parent, helicopter parent, or are you raising free-range kids? Maybe you have been called permissive because you let your kids take a mental health day off from school when they weren’t necessarily sick, or possibly you even let your kid eat all her Halloween candy in one night! (You couldn’t be a tiger mom because you live in America, right?)
According to news reports over the weekend, a Republican state legislator in Florida named Kelli Stargel – a mother of five and the chair of the state legislature’s k-12 education committee – has introduced legislation to require public school teachers and administrators to issue actual grades to the parents of their students. Continue reading »
Are you a free-range parent, or do you hover like a helicopter?
Babble has a great essay up by Elizabeth Floyd Mair on the balancing act between helicopter parenting and free range kids. It’s a topic of tension for every parent I know.
We all have the same goals. We want our kids to grow up confident, secure, capable and safe. We want our lives as parents to be rich and interesting, a combination of quality time with our kids and space to relax and do our own thing.
The compromises we make to achieve those goals define, in some ways, who we are as parents. Are we the moms who take our kids to the park and leave them there, or the ones who attend after school enrichment programs with our kids every single day?
At the edges of this spectrum, we almost seem to form opposing teams: the free range parents vs. the helicopters. In reality, most of us are in the middle, tilting towards one side or another, depending on the specific issue. Mostly I fall toward the free-range side. But only mostly.
Mom & baby from 1912. Overparenting?
When it comes to over-parenting, we know the story.”Parents these days” protect our little ones from dirt and pain. Parents call to protest if a darling isn’t invited to a party. We’re too invested in homework, we buy organic toys, and when our kids go to college, we still hold them too close. It’s a subject that writers enjoy revisiting periodically ever since the 2005 publication of Judith Warner’s blockbuster Perfect Madness: Motherhood in an Age of Anxiety. Almost six years into the exploration of anxiety-riddled, perfection-seeking parenting, is it time to move on?
The most recent report on the exhausted state of parents who try too hard to engineer perfect children comes from Katie Roiphe via Slate and the Financial Times. In it, Roiphe goes through the usual hallmarks of helicopter parenting – high design, packed schedule, careful prenatal diet. Reading her case against other parents I felt mostly familiarity until I got to this line: “You know the child I am talking about: precious, wide-eyed, over-cared-for, fussy, in a beautiful sweater, or a carefully hipsterish T-shirt.”
Actually, I don’t know that child. Because the perfectly turned out little guy who’s also and always a perfect little charmer, I’ve heard about him, but I haven’t actually seen all that much of him. Continue reading »
Is dirt an RIE approved toy?
Tobey Maguire does it! Helen Hunt and Felicity Huffman do it, too! The “it” is an approach to parenting called RIE (Resources for Infant Educators). Described as a “back-to-basics” approach, RIE and its celebrity parents reject enrollment in swim and dance classes in favor of quieter times shared by baby and parent at home and, you know, in RIE classes.
RIE sounds like a touch of Montessori mixed with a smidgen of Waldorf in its attention to quiet, order, and common sense in early childhood education. Up until recently it’s been mostly local to LA, but now they’re ready to roll out into 1,700 Head Start classrooms and into your local bookstore. The latter must be why we’re hearing about how some celebrities are raising their kids. So what’s it all about? Continue reading »
Hummingbird parents allow safe independence
If you believe everything you hear from the news media, the great outdoors can be full of dangers just waiting to strike—from Lyme disease to predators, both human and feral, to poison ivy.
But the risks of helicopter parenting your children to the point that they become stay-at-home kids can deprive them of both memories and independence.
Bethe Almeras, director of Education & Outreach for Head Start Body Start National Center for Physical Development and Outdoor Play and author behind The Grass Stain Guru, says the answer may be in hummingbird parenting—keeping an eye on your children, while letting them explore and commune with nature on their own. Continue reading »
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