Say Yes to Independence
When kids want to do things on their own, let them.
My 9-year-old son came home from school last week and said he wanted to buy some Beyblades, which are the current toy craze in his classroom. He had cash in hand from his piggybank and asked if I’d take him to Walmart. I couldn’t. I had 45 minutes to get dinner in the oven before taking all the kids to their dentist appointments. I said I’d take him later that evening, but he burst into tears and said he’d been waiting all day for this.
He offered a solution. “I can go on my own! I’ll ride my bike. I’ll be back before we have to go to the dentist.”
I said no. The store was 1.5 miles from our house. There was a lot of traffic at that time of day. He would have to navigate a large, busy parking lot, find a place to lock his bike, locate the Beyblades inside that giant store, and conduct the whole transaction himself. We didn’t have a lot of time. It was too much.
“But I know I can do it,” he said. “I want to do it! Please, please, please?”
Then I thought, What am I doing? Of course he should go. I was letting fear get in the way of letting my kid exercise some independence. He was highly motivated to succeed—Beyblades awaited, after all—but more importantly, he believed in his own ability to do it. Deep down, so did I, even though it felt inconvenient in that moment.
When a child feels confident that they can accomplish something, and a parent knows it, too, but second-guesses that capability from a place of irrationality, it stunts an opportunity for growth. It might cause the child to doubt their ability, which is the last thing we want for them. We parents have to fight the urge to overprotect and micromanage.
So, I changed my mind. We discussed the slightly longer and safer back route I wanted him to take, where he should cross the four-lane highway, and where the bike rack was located. He strapped on his helmet and took off, a gigantic grin on his face. I returned to cooking, trying not to worry about the passing minutes.
He is my third child, and his older brothers, 13 and 15, are almost entirely independent at this point. They go everywhere on their own, meeting friends, exploring bike trails, running errands, going to the beach, and getting themselves to music lessons, swim practices, soccer, and volleyball without parental supervision. The youngest has tagged along with them for years, so he is probably more capable than the oldest was when he first started venturing out solo.
But it’s still hard to let go.
I am a mother who’s comfortable with and committed to a free-range parenting philosophy, but I think that, no matter how many kids you have, it is always tough to send them off. As parents, we are hardwired to think about worst-case scenarios, but we have a responsibility to confront those emotions and override them whenever appropriate.
It can be difficult to shift our minds away from the initial parental assignment—to protect our offspring at all costs—but we have to evolve as our child grows. The protective instinct remains, but kids need other things from us, too. They need encouragement, firm nudges out of their comfort zone, explicitly articulated belief in their ability to do hard things. They need “lifeguard parents”, who are present on the sidelines, poised to jump in if there’s an emergency, but otherwise minimally involved.
While it might not feel “protective” to send a child to Walmart on a bicycle on the far side of town, in a way it is, because it’s preparing him for life in the big, real world. It gives him a small, manageable slice of what it means to manage one’s own affairs, instead of waiting to dump it all on him at age 18.
And you know what? He loved it. He burst through the front door just before we needed to go to the dentist, shopping bag in hand, his grin even bigger than when he left. “I did it, Mom!” He said he’d forgotten his bike lock, and it took a while to find the Beyblades in the store, but he persisted. He even had enough money to buy two. When his dad came that night, he was excited to show off his new toy, but I could tell he was even more excited to say, “I got them all by myself.”
I was relieved I gave him a chance to prove himself. Kids need opportunities to push the boundaries of their abilities. The next time your kid expresses an interest in doing something on their own, don’t respond with an automatic “no”. Take a moment to think about it, and consider how important it might be to them—and what they could learn in the process.
Okay now this article I LOVE. It takes courage to publically say that your 9 year old rode a bike 1.5 miles to a busy big-box store. But if more people don’t stand up for it, we’ll never get back to that level of independence being normal!
A friend of mine who is on our kids’ parent council with works for the Ontario Ministry of Children, Community, and Social Services (that’s the name for this week anyway; these things are constantly changing names). She has some horror stories about the kind of things that get parents investigated by Child Protection Services. Unfortunately, there’s a racial dynamic to this too, as investigations are often triggered by public reports, and we know there is bias in reporting.
So I think for people who don’t have such factors already weighing on their perceived fitness as a “responsible” parent, it’s even more important to stick our necks out here and “go public” with free-range parenting to blaze a trail for everyone else.
As a new mom who is already seeing the helicopter parenting of my peers, I love reading stories like this! But how are we supposed to reconcile this appropriate need to develop independence for our kids with general society propagating the opposite? I just read an article about a mother in rural Georgia arrested on charges of child endangerment/reckless conduct when her 11 year old son walked to town alone, less than a mile from their home and a town of 300 people no less. I’m just shocked by this. What are we supposed to do?