Wired to learn by doing…don’t micromanage people, macromanage the environment
…we offer our kids advice and help that they didn’t ask for and don’t want, and they reject it or ignore it. And then what was a positive impulse to help becomes a confrontation.
Some few children, sadly, succumb; they stop trying to think for themselves and begin to look to adults to direct their every move and solve their every problem. But most children, happily, resist. They refuse the role of puppet. They would rather make mistakes and suffer the consequences than do just what they are told.
Children must learn to protect themselves, and to do so they must experience again and again the processes of making their own decisions, making and recovering from their own mistakes, and confronting and dealing with all sorts of dangers and disappointments. Therefore, Mother Nature—or, less poetically, the process of natural selection—designed our children to resist our attempts to control them. The “terrible twos” is no accident, nor are children’s continuing self-assertions following age two
All of us, throughout life, want to maintain our autonomy; we resist control from others. When we ask for advice, we are still in control. In fact, our asking for advice is part of our means of rational self-control. But when others give us advice that we didn’t ask for, it strikes us that they are trying to control us; and if we feel that we must follow the advice—perhaps because we are afraid of offending the advisor or because we don’t want to argue with that person—then we really are being controlled. Our children are just like us in this regard.
When your child asks for help or advice, give only what was asked for. Once she’s no longer taking an equal part, let the discussion stop before it turns into a lecture.
The matter is different, of course, if your child asks to join you in some project. If your daughter wants to help you rotate the tires on the car, for example, then you have every right to tell her just what to do. This is fundamentally your project, not hers, and in joining you she is saying, in essence, “teach me how to do this.”
Mother Nature drives children to do these things because she knows that they must learn to confront dangers and deal with them if they are to become successful adults. She has endowed children both with the drive to engage in “dangerous” play and with the good sense to know their own limits.
Children dose themselves with just the amounts of danger that they know they can handle, and that is how they learn to deal with the dangers and fears that will confront them throughout life
…think about the damage done by continuously implanting in your child the sense that he or she is incompetent to make decisions or to do anything alone, without protection.
The most significant and potentially valuable influence you can have on your child comes from macromanagement of the environment, not micromanagement of your child’s behavior
Our primary responsibility to our children is not that of telling them moment-to-moment or day-to-day how to behave. Rather, our primary responsibility is to provide them with a healthy environment in which to develop—an environment that allows their developmental instincts to operate as they are meant to operate
-Peter Gray
NOTES
This is the whole safe-fail thing, room to experiment, lessons learned. Dave Snowden’s famous children’s party analogy is brillilant…it’s futile to try and control, rather manipulate the environment in order for desirable behaviours to emerge.
(Source: psychologytoday.com)
