Ep 1: Are We Over-Parenting Our Kids?

09/18/24 • 47 min

4 Listeners

When Emily was a kid in the 1980s in New Haven, Connecticut, she grew up on a block with a lot of other children. Every day after dinner, around 6:30, everyone emptied out of their houses and went down to the church parking lot where they engaged in all kinds of unsupervised activities—throwing balls at each other in front of the church wall, climbing up trees and sometimes falling out of them, riding Hot Wheels until people skinned their knees. There was street hockey and there were scrapes. There were a few broken arms.

That experience of playing outside unsupervised in the dark—or walking a mile home from school in kindergarten—is very different from her own children’s experiences, even though they’re growing up in a very similar environment, with very similar parents. They aren’t leaving the house every day after dinner. If Emily had suggested that they walk home from school in kindergarten, even though it’s only a couple of blocks, there’s no chance that would have been met with the school’s acceptance.

Since 1955, there has been a continuous decline in children’s opportunities to engage in free play, away from adult intervention and control. In 1969, 47 percent of kids walked or biked to school, whereas in 2009 that number had plummeted to 12 percent.

How did we get here? What are the consequences of hypervigilant parenting? On kids’ happiness? On their well-being? Their mental health? And on their ability to grow into independent, self-sufficient, and successful adults? And, maybe most importantly, how can we alter this trajectory before it’s too late?

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Resources from this episode:

Timothy Carney: Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be (Bookshop))
Jonathan Haidt: The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Bookshop)
Lenore Skenazy: Free-Range Kids: How Parents and Teachers Can Let Go and Let Grow (Bookshop)
Let Grow
Free Range Kids
Jonathan Haidt in The FP https://www.thefp.com/t/jonathan-haidt

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Resources from this episode:

Timothy Carney: Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be (Bookshop))
Jonathan Haidt: The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Bookshop)
Lenore Skenazy: Free-Range Kids: How Parents and Teachers Can Let Go and Let Grow (Bookshop)
Let Grow
Free Range Kids
Jonathan Haidt in The FP https://www.thefp.com/t/jonathan-haidt

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Raising Parents with Emily Oster premiers Wednesday, September 18, 2024.

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Ep 2: Have We Forgotten How to Discipline?

There are a lot of different approaches to discipline, and they’ve changed wildly in America over the decades. On one end of the spectrum, there’s the old school, 1950s approach: spanking. Then, there are middle-ground approaches: time-outs, warning systems, consequences, and punishments. And then, there are the fairly new approaches on the way other end of the spectrum. These are the kind of approaches that claim that the right way to parent is not to punish your child, but rather to help your child understand why they’re frustrated and to help them work through their frustration. “Gentle parenting”—sometimes called “respectful parenting” or “attentive parenting”—has become really popular in the last few years, and if your social media feeds are anything like ours, you’ve heard all about it and been told you need to do it.

The question many parents are asking is: We have been told that spanking was bad, and we shouldn’t go back to it. But have we gone too far in the other direction? Has gentle parenting led us to permissive parenting, where kids are learning that they can do whatever they want, whenever they want? And yes, there are consequences of being too hard on your kids, but what are the consequences of being too soft on them? Today: How should we be disciplining the next generation of kids? And have we gotten too soft on them along the way?

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Resources from this episode:

Abigail Shrier: Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up
Dr. Thomas Phelan: 1-2-3 Magic: Gentle 3-Step Discipline for Calm, Effective, and Happy Parenting
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be
Hal Chaffee: How to Spank Your Kids the Right Way