My kids and notes: Year 7.11
January 24, 2023
Life with JB
I’m a highly risk averse person, and that absolutely influences how I parent and what I let JB do. They’re still not allowed to cross the street or go to the store alone, though I’d wager I was probably doing that when I was close to this age. I was walking my dog to the vet alone by the time I was 13. We live on a very busy street with reckless drivers, and their level of attention is not nearly where it should be for something like this.
This article suggests that modern parenting is preventing kids from getting reasonable doses of stress, impairing their flexibility and growth. This is a question and a balance I struggle with.
I don’t feel the need to expose them to truly stressful situations like harassment and fighting but we also don’t want them to be Pillsbury doughboy soft.
We saw a neighbor kid walking their new puppy last year. I thought he was JB’s age. It took me aback, and made me reevaluate what I considered safe or unsafe for the kids. I mean, I still wouldn’t let JB walk Sera alone. Unlike neighbor dog, Sera outweighs JB and is a STRONG pibble. Seamus used to drag me on runs and I had to sprint to keep up with him in my 20s when I had experience with dogs. So this is me being sensible. Would I / we let them walk a small dog? Hm. I’d be willing to have them practice short solo jaunts. Maybe. But we aren’t likely ever to get a small dog. I’ve had them and I love them but I tend to need a big dog to get my arms around for a therapeutic hug.
We had some conflict the other day when they came shrieking about a bug in the garage. I was quite impatient with them for panicking and not investigating the situation a little bit more before running to me. It was dead! I took care of that one but I made them sweep out the second dead bug they found. They were highly resentful but this feels well within their capabilities to hold a broom and push a dead bug out the door.
I try to give them more “advanced” responsibilities in our day to day lives but I do still worry that I’m sheltering them too much.
Life with Smol Acrobat
The new year brought a few happy changes: they seem to be eating more, and on their own. By itself, not eating much wouldn’t bother me, it’s the fact that they were constantly distracted and wouldn’t just eat their little portion and GO. They’d dilly dally and mess about and then repeatedly come back asking for more little bits. It’s such a pain!
Now that they have more of an appetite, they are more focused on eating until they’re finished and then we can move on. I hope this sticks.
Their language is developing more, they’re trying to gabble out more syllables if not not words. Some words are coming through.
I’m less enamored with the memory and object permanence related development. Specifically to do with vaccines. They’d gotten their bivalent booster and instead of forgetting all about it a minute later, they remembered. They wouldn’t stop talking about it. They kept pointing at the injection site and telling us “poke”. But they also wanted to turn back around and go back to the vaccine clinic, asking for “more” so I’m not clear on what was going on there.
Pupdate
Sera’s been extra snuggly of late and I like it. Though it is hard to work with her constantly prodding me with her nose for attention, I like that she’s been coming to hang out with me during the work day. Usually I can’t convince her to come into the office, much less hang out for petting.
Sera’s sweater arrived and it’s Very Cute! She’s so snuggly in it!
Precious Moments
JB: I wish the laundry would just wash itself so I could put it away faster.
Boy howdy, me too! On all counts.
*****
JB looking at a McLaren: hey! That looks like a Hot Wheel!
Kid perspectives make me laugh.
My oldest got separated from his dad at a ski resort. To say I was panicked is an understatement. But he navigated the situation beautifully and wasn’t scared one bit. It’s given me a newfound confidence in him. He practices asking adults for help and going out with friends so he has to navigate life without us. He’s 11 and I agree that a little stress now will make him stronger in the future.
He’s ELEVEN now! <3 I knew he was older than JB but hadn't done the math in a while. I'm so glad that he figured it out and found you both safely. I very much hope to nudge JB and Smol in that direction as well. We frequently remind JB that we are helping them build necessary skills for life, independent life without us, now when it's not so scary to mess up.
Our DC2 had an amazing memory even as a small child. But DC1 didn’t really talk about memories until age 3 or so when we went to Disneyland and some time later zie was like, “Do you remember when Mickey kissed me?” and we were like, *we* remember but YOU remember?
Given our area is relatively safe, we’ve been providing cell-phone and with it outdoor independence around 5th grade for both our kids. Which is very different from my childhood where I was mostly free-range starting around age 4. But there were always other kids around outside so I wasn’t by myself like people are now.
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I always wondered how much kids remembered on their own and how much was from us telling the stories of their early years.
I remember free ranging at a similar age too! I don’t know if that was because it was a safe neighborhood or mostly out of necessity. But we traveled in packs back then, too, so that was one type of safeguarding. Not a great one, one of us could easily have wandered off. Our friends a couple cities away found a neighborhood where the kids play in packs, so their kid was able to roam more freely earlier too. I’d like that.
Also on a busy street (no parking) where people tend to speed. But luckily Spud is very very cautious and I genuinely would not worry much on his behalf. (He has been insisting on locking the car door internally before we drive off!) Hope to not live here forever, but it’ll be awhile (like traffic safety probably won’t matter by the time/age we move…)
Dogs are way too strong for him to walk them (they drag me!) sadly.
Photo please of Sera in sweater!
And yessss. Thinking that it will teach him to cope with adversity when people are being unreasonable is my saving grace … but also as you say, what is the right amount of healthy stress at this age?
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Super glad that Spud is super cautious. The non-cautious kids are going to make my heart stop one of these days!
Even small dogs are surprisingly strong, especially when they’re motivated by cats, fear, or the promise of treats.
I guess we’re going to have to keep working on figuring out how to allow the kids have a “reasonable” amount of stress.
We have a teenager like the ones described in the article in our extended family. She’s 16 now, and her mom is now talking about how of course, she’ll have to live at home when she starts college, because living anywhere else will be too stressful for her. If you’d told me ten years ago that this would be the conversation, I would have thought you were insane–she was a good, bright kid, and there was no reason to believe her incapable. But now… there are stressors she should have experienced and navigated as a child and as an early teen that she hasn’t had to deal with because of her mom’s choices. The pandemic didn’t help, but the parenting approach was there before the pandemic. I still think she’s a good, bright kid and has the capacity to rise to challenges, but she herself has bought into the idea that she shouldn’t have to do things that she feels are stressful.
We saw her and her mom recently, and it has me really looking at my own parenting. I wish there was some sort of way to know that I was balancing things in the right way, or what to do differently.
Oh that’s sad.
What did you observe that you think she should have experienced? Hoping to avoid any obvious-to-others pitfalls.
I hope she learns not to let others limit her, in the future.
“modern parenting is preventing kids from getting reasonable doses of stress”
On the other hand, there’s the past three years. Mind you, I don’t think that’s a reasonable dose. But it definitely is stress, and I think it’s just about impossible to overestimate how it has affected children.
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True – I viewed the past three years as unreasonably catastrophic stress, not the kind of stress that is healthy to learn to manage and endure.