Too much risk and we endanger a child says social worker and Professor Michael Ungar and too little risk and we fail to provide a child with healthy opportunities for growth and psychological development.
In Ungar’s book entitled “Too Safe For Their Own Good: How Risk and Responsibility Help Teens Thrive“, he refers to a new youth phenomenon called the “Bubble Wrap Generation” – kids who are being denied opportunities to experience risk and responsibility.
Young people coming from quite stable, nurturing, middle class homes, are showing up for counseling for one of two reasons – either they are very compliant young people with depression and anxiety and an incapacity to take on responsibility or to show much common sense in getting on with their lives, or they are coming in with very dangerous, risk-taking behaviours that they had come up with on their own to cope with what they felt were very restrictive or overprotective environments at home.
Our fears have become our children’s problems
Many of the families I meet in my private practice are driven by a state of fear and have the means to “bubble wrap” their children’s lives. It is that fear that is stunting children’s growth. We see the results all around us. Children who don’t leave home until their late twenties, but who don’t contribute financially or emotionally to their families either. Young people who, despite the opportunities they’ve enjoyed, still grow up troubled, addicted, and even possibly headed for jail, those without meaning in their lives, or worse, suicidal. A whole swath of our youth is feeling lost amid the sanitized, prescribed, regimented order of their too safe upbringings. These children share that they have everything but what they need: opportunities to experience some measure of risk and responsibility, responsibility both for themselves and others.
“A concerned parent provides scaffolding for growth, not just a life jacket for safety.” (Michael Ungar)
The Russian educational psychologist Lev Vygotsky wrote decades ago that all learning follows from experience. We simply cannot grow up without getting our hands dirty, without grappling with whatever it is that we need to master. A child who has never had to find her footing on anything but flat, safe ground will grow up clumsy. A child who has never had to make his way in a crowd on his own will grow up shy and unassertive. Vygotsky advises adults to provide children with what he calls “scaffolding,” a supportive structure of opportunities. We do this by offering small, achievable challenges, served up one at a time, like rungs on a ladder.
Some kids are resilient; place them in tough situations and they will (seemingly) do just fine. Resilience is like Bozo the clown, that almost life-sized blow-up creature with sand in its base. Pu
nch him, he rocks, and soon enough, corrects himself, he stands upright again. No matter how hard or fast you punch, Bozo keeps coming back for more, smiling the whole time. I don’t think Bozo had resilience, but he sure was grounded and that gave him the ability to bounce back. Grounding could be a characteristic of resilience.
According to the American Psychological Association, “Resilience is the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or even significant sources of stress – such as family and relationship problems, serious health problems, or workplace and financial stressors. It means ‘bouncing back’ from difficult experiences.”
So what does bouncing back look like for a child versus a teenager? How do we know how to provide our children with enough risk and responsibility without endangering them more than they already are?
How do we as parents teach resiliency to our children?
How does our parenting style foster resiliency in our teens and tweens?
How much supervision is enough? How much responsibility?
What is an appropriate amount of risk-taking behaviour for an eight-year-old? What about a twelve-year-old?
Think of the most resilient person you know. What do you see as their strengths, the traits that keep them coming back and facing their challenges?