Photograph by Bagus Pangestu on Pexels

One of my absolute favorite things about living in Berlin isn’t the vibrant urban art scene or the abundance of cultural landmarks. It’s the playgrounds. Visit the city (actually, given how many tourists there are I’ll just assume you’re here now) and you’ll discover a playground on almost every street corner, each with a distinctive theme- from fairy tale castles to Sherwood Forest to 1001 Arabian nights and so on.

Why am I so excited about playgrounds, you might ask. Unless you’re a parent. In that case you will know that playgrounds are the lifeline to those of us drowning in a primary-colored sea of toddler tunes, pureed foods and diaper changes, a rare opportunity to change into real clothes and interact with same-sized humans.

Having lived in both the US and Germany with young children, I consider myself something of a cross-cultural playground expert. Let me tell you, it’s been a lesson in parenting styles.

Playground Parenting Styles

A typical scene at a German playground involves parents idly chatting over brown paper cups of coffee while a toddler crawls along an unsecured, splintering wooden bridge over a six foot drop, another child straddles the roof of an eight-foot-high tower, and a group of three-year-olds plays hide-and-seek in the bushes among God-only-knows-what in between handfuls of nuts and hard candy. It’s honestly a miracle most Germans make it to adulthood.  

Meanwhile, somewhere on a playground in the US, there is a second grader sliding down a four-foot-tall plastic slide as his mother waits with anxiously outstretched arms before feeding him grapes that have been carefully quartered to prevent choking.

If that sounds judgmental, I should add that that the mother in the latter scenario is me.

Balancing Safety with Autonomy

As a pediatrician and someone who leads pediatric emergency simulations in her spare time (hey, we all need a hobby) it’s hard for me not to immediately conjure every worst-case-scenario I’ve ever treated when it comes to my own children. I’m aware that this is problematic.

On a recent trip to the playground, as I watched what appeared to be a parentless five-year-old with a whittling knife sharpen a stick, I began to ask myself: How can we as parents balance our children’s need for safety with their need for autonomy? How do we know when it’s time to step away from the proverbial bottom of the slide and let them find their own footing?

In the course of our training, pediatricians learn all sorts of developmental milestones: when children should be able to sit without support, build a tower of six blocks, draw a square, or understand opposites. What they don’t teach you is when a kid should be allowed to cut up their own apple, use the stove, stay home alone, or take the metro by themselves (I assume in Japan it’s when they’re three).

A Moving Target

Aside from differences in parental levels of anxiety, answering the question of safety versus autonomy is challenging because it’s a moving target, based on societal norms that are constantly shifting across generations and cultures.

When my then six-year-old son was starting school in Berlin, the local government sent out informational brochures encouraging parents to teach their first graders to walk to school alone. My immediate reaction was to throw the brochure in the trash before my husband could see it and get any ideas. (Just kidding. Obviously, I threw it in the recycling bin.)

And yet, when I was growing up in the city, I took public transportation by myself to get to school. But I also played hide-and-seek in a paper dumpster with the neighborhood kids while my babysitter looked on, because that was considered adequate supervision at the time.

My son is now seven-and-a-half years old and desperately wants to go to school by himself, which in his case involves two stops on the metro. And while I understand the importance of encouraging him to develop self-sufficiency, he did nearly fall backwards down a flight of stairs the last time we were out for a walk because he got distracted by a garbage truck. You see my dilemma.

The Risks of Overprotection

I know there are significant downsides to offering our kids an overprotected life. Overparenting in the name of keeping our children safe from the world they inhabit comes at a cost, one which is paid by both parent and child. We rob them of the opportunity to develop the skills they need to confidently navigate their environment. Skills like problem solving, resilience, an ability to handle setbacks, to assume responsibility for their actions, and to regulate their emotions. We also risk signaling that we do not trust them and, by extension, they cannot trust themselves, which can profoundly impact their decision-making capacity going forward.

Keeping our children in a protective bubble also conveys the message that the world is a scary and dangerous place, one best left untouched. But we don’t just want our children to be safe, we want them to feel safe. Overprotective parenting may even place our children at greater risk of harm. Try as we might, we simply cannot always be around to shield them from potential dangers. When dicey situations inevitably do arise, a lack of exposure likely means our kids will be less equipped to navigate them.

Misappropriated Energy

Add to this the fact that overparenting places a huge burden on the parent. We (Moms, I’m looking at you) are constantly taking on additional responsibilities rather than ensuring that our children have the tools they need to function independently. Since the laws of physics dictate that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, the energy we invest in overparenting is appropriated from other things, things like our health, our careers, our leisure time, or our personal development. Women in particular are burning themselves out by way of snowplow parenting.

The sociologist Juliet Schor notes that contemporary culture has evolved… “the most labor-intensive style of mothering the world has ever seen”, a level of involvement in children’s lives that is without precedent. What’s baffling and ironic is that this has occurred at precisely the same time that women have entered the workplace in significant numbers and begun to achieve high positions.

-from How Women Rise, by Sally Helgesen

The Cost of Autonomy

While overparenting comes at a cost, so, too, does autonomy. In an age of helicopter parents, we tend to romanticize the days when children roamed more freely, able to explore the world without the constant intrusion of well-meaning adults. The catch is that children were also significantly more likely to experience unintentional injuries in that golden era of increased autonomy. According to the WHO and Unicef’s World Report on Child Injury Prevention, the number of injury deaths among children under the age of 15 years fell by half between 1970 and 1995 in developed nations. That’s because, in their words, “Injuries are not inevitable; they can be prevented or controlled.”

Looking for the Sweet Spot

So where is the sweet spot between safety and autonomy? How do we know when the time has come to meet those ‘autonomy milestones’, like carving a pumpkin or lighting a candle or riding a bike in traffic?

I wish there were a universal chart I could attach for reference, but there isn’t. These are questions every family will have to answer in their own way, based on a whole host of factors including their child’s character, their particular environment, practical realities and individual priorities.

While I don’t have a chart, here are some thoughts as I tackle this challenge with my own kids:

Plan ahead.

Don’t wait until your child is already pushing for permission to begin considering when something might be appropriate. Start to think about ‘autonomy milestones’ in the context of your child’s trajectory and think about what skills your kid needs to work towards to acquire them. That way, we can start discussing goals and practicing skills early on the road to promoting our children’s autonomy.

Set goals.

We can talk to our kids about what specific skills they will need to master before we give them full autonomy. For example: “I need to see that you don’t leave the scissors on the floor after crafting before I let you use a knife, because that shows me you can be handle sharp objects responsibly.” Or “I need to see you look both ways every time we cross a street without me reminding you before I let you walk to the bakery alone.”

Start small.

Like I said, I don’t let my children walk home from school or daycare alone yet, but they love to walk ahead and pretend they’re by themselves. Meanwhile, I get to observe how attuned they are to their surroundings. If something doesn’t lend itself to a practice version, we can think about equivalent skills they may be able to demonstrate successfully before moving on to higher stakes scenarios. Assessing equivalent skills may involve looking at how adept your kid is at problem solving when things go wrong, how well they follow instructions, how distractable they are, how easily tempted they are by things they know to be off-limits, etc.  

Demonstrate trust.

I want my kids to know I believe in them. That I trust their ability to acquire the skills they need to successfully navigate their world. One way to demonstrate trust is by giving our kids responsibility in areas that don’t jeopardize their safety but still involve some risk. I can let my four-year-old set the table with the good china (Idk, does anyone have good china anymore, is that still a thing?) and risk losing a plate. I can let my preschooler pour her own milk and risk having to mop the floor. I can send my son into the store while I wait outside and risk him coming back with the wrong change or with eggs instead of bread. Over time, these small displays of trust add up to a strengthened sense of self-confidence and self-sufficiency.

I’m not advocating for a world in which every three-year old gets a pocketknife for their birthday or fires up the family barbeque. But I suppose getting to that parenting sweet spot requires stretching beyond my comfort zone so that my kids can eventually become self-actualized humans. And finally cut their own damn apples.