Let your child break your dishes

Feb 08, 2024

Welcome! In case you missed it, The Parenting Guide is the newest email newsletter from Guidepost Montessori. We’ve condensed our most valuable insights about raising children, from infancy all the way through high school, into a skimmable newsletter that will land in your inbox every week. If you want to raise independent, capable children — you’re in the right place.

A parent’s most important job is to keep their child safe.

Or is it?

Safety is such an obvious concern for parents that it seems silly even to discuss it. What reasonable parent wouldn’t advocate for their child’s safety above all else?

But “safety” can easily get skewed into sheltering our children from all risk, whether that’s:

Running in the backyard barefoot
Walking to school by themselves
Owning a smartphone

Many risks are the best (and most developmentally critical) parts of growing up.

What happens when we delete those experiences from our children’s lives?

What do they lose when we prioritize their safety above all else?

Risk is the prerequisite to independence

Most parents would rather be safe than sorry — because they assume there’s nothing to lose by being cautious.

But here’s what’s at stake: a child who has no experience dealing with risk is a child who cannot distinguish discomfort from real danger.

When they become adults, and they can’t rely on you to bail them out of scary situations anymore, what will they do?

Karolina Potterton takes her 5-year-old to the slopes — and it’s awesome.

To raise confident, competent, and fully independent adults, our children need experience handling risks on their own.

They need experience charting their own course so they don’t go through life looking for someone to tell them what to do.

This is how we raise children who:

Trust themselves
Believe they are the authors of their own stories
Dare to build something that doesn’t yet exist

These are the people our society desperately needs.

So… what’s stopping us from raising our kids this way?

Why are parents so freaked out right now?

Anxiety about our children’s safety has gone off the rails.

Even when we debunk the dangers of Halloween candy or see statistics that child abduction is extremely rare, our fears aren’t abated.

Left unchecked, this fear is costing parents the ability to judge for themselves what is a reasonable level of risk for their own child.

And the consequences are mind-boggling.

When Arizona mom Sarra allowed her son to play in a residential park while she picked up the Thanksgiving turkey, her name was added to the Central Registry.

Despite there being trusted adults at the park, the judge found Sarra guilty of neglect — because, as the judge said, no child should be left unsupervised.

“If no child is left unsupervised, what are you giving up?” asks Matt Bateman, VP of Pedagogy at Guidepost Montessori. “What you’re actually doing is ending an enormous portion of childhood — just setting it on fire.”

This doesn’t mean abandoning your child

Allowing children to take risks is a far cry from abandoning them to their fates.

We can actively support our kids in their adventures without challenging their belief that they can do hard things.

As a parent, you might:

Stand by to catch your climbing toddler
Model how to use a knife before cooking with your preschooler
Plan the route home from school with your elementary student
Explain cyberbullying and misinformation before handing your teen a smartphone

Giving our children space to be independent doesn’t render our input obsolete.

In fact, our support is more crucial than ever.

What is an appropriate level of risk for my child?

Defining the appropriate level of risk for your child can be controversial.

To say the least.

That’s what Lenore Skenazy discovered when she let her 9-year-old son ride the subway on his own. After writing about it in her newspaper column, her story spread like wildfire.

She earned so much criticism (including threats of arrest for child endangerment) that she was monikered “America’s Worst Mom.”

But she also channeled her philosophy into a book, Free Range Kids — and sparked a movement.

“We want our children to have a childhood that's magical and enriched, but I'll bet that your best childhood memories involve something you were thrilled to do by yourself,” says Lenore. “These are childhood's magic words: ‘I did it myself!’”

Ultimately, the best way to figure out what risks your child should take?

Let your child lead.

Ask them what they’ve been wanting to try, and then let them. That could mean:

Running an errand on their own
Riding a bike without training wheels
Using social media to market their business

Most of the time, risks aren’t all that terrifying. They simply allow our kids to exercise their competence.

There’s no better time than now

Graham Frey, CEO of Hallcraft School Studio, argues that giving kids free rein within the relatively safe incubators of school and the home is the best way to teach kids about risk.

“If you don’t let those natural collisions occur at that age, where else is it going to be that safe?” asks Graham.

Yes, danger is real. So, let your kid meet it first on the playground with adults nearby, at school with a nurse onsite, or in a child-proofed playroom.

Raising confident and independent children is why Rebecca Girn, Chief Programs Officer at Guidepost Schools, allows her children the risk of using real dishes: