The Overprotected Kid

"Even though women work vastly more hours now than they did in the 1970s, mothers—and fathers—of all income levels spend much more time with their children than they used to. This seemed impossible to me until recently, when I began to think about my own life," wrote Hanna Rosin in an article in The Atlantic.

"My mother didn't work all that much when I was younger, but she didn’t spend vast amounts of time with me, either. She didn't arrange my playdates or drive me to swimming lessons...On weekdays after school she just expected me to show up for dinner; on weekends I barely saw her at all. I, on the other hand, might easily spend every waking Saturday hour with...my children, taking one to a soccer game, the second to a theater program, the third to a friend’s house... When my daughter was about 10, my husband suddenly realized that in her whole life, she had probably not spent more than 10 minutes unsupervised by an adult...

"When you ask parents why they are more protective than their parents were, they might answer that the world is more dangerous than it was when they were growing up. But this isn’t true...For example, parents now routinely tell their children never to talk to strangers, even though all available evidence suggests that children have about the same (very slim) chance of being abducted by a stranger as they did a generation ago. Maybe the real question is, how did these fears come to have such a hold over us? And what have our children lost—and gained—as we've succumbed to them?"

Source: "The Overprotected Kid," by Hanna Rosin, The Atlantic, April 2014

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