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post_date: 2022-06-14
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# On helicopter parenting
I did an interesting thing rather automatically today, and it made me think.
I'm on vacation in northern Italy, and today we took a day trip over the border to Switzerland to hike around in the mountains. On the way back I was driving down the narrow swiss mountain roads when I came upon what appeared to be a mother and her two daughters, each around 8 or 10. She was looking intently at the cars on the road and holding her daughters' hands on the sidewalk. I slowed down a great deal without really thinking about it, the semi-conscious explanation being that it's better for me to have a little shorter stopping distance just in case the kids were to do something unpredictable.
It wasn't until a few curves later that I realized there had been another, subconscious, reason. At this point I passed another pair of girls around the same age, this time wearing backpacks and clearly making their own way home from school, no parent in sight. They were totally at ease with their surroundings, and I went by them with a good deal more speed than I had the previous group (not really more or less than if there were an adult casually walking on the sidewalk).
Why did I do that? On paper, the second group should have been more perilous - no parent around, and no heightened alertness as to the giant metal boxes flying by in close proximity. But I'm going to side with my own subconscious and say that it's the other way around. The first girls had not been sufficiently taught how to be safe for their mother to let them walk along the street alone, the seconds girls had. The first girls' mother, being on edge, put everyone around them on edge, while the second girls' cool demeaner put everyone at ease.
On autopilot, I am like the first girls' mother with my own kids. I know it's my job to protect them, I can't remotely bear the thought of something happening to them, and so I do the thing that comes most naturally under those values. It takes a step back, and a smidgen of intentionality, to realize that over-protection actually endangers them. That the safest kids are the ones that know how to keep themselves safe, to a degree that the adults in their life know deep in their bones that they'll be safe.
> Note: This was ported from my old gemini capsule, still served on gemini at `gemini.ctrl-c.club/~tjp`
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