What's Wrong with Pintrest Parenting

I’ve noticed this parenting trend lately that I like to call “Pintrest Parenting”. This is where parents spend an exorbitant amount of time creating the perfect birthday bash for our little ones and setting up crafts and activities to keep them engaged. This really needs to stop. There are entire blogs and Pintrest pages upon pintrest pages dedicated solely to the many ways we, as parents, can entertain and engage our children. From making homemade moonsand (whatever that is), to sensory activities up the wazoo, and every kind of craft project imaginable. You pull up these activities online thinking it’ll keep your kids engaged for some arbitrary amount of time only to find that it takes longer to set up the thing, than it takes your kids to get bored with it. So how are we supposed to keep our children from diving us crazy all summer long without setting them in front of the TV all day or spending an arm and a leg on toys and activities? The answer is so much simpler than you could ever anticipate. Kids don’t need to be force fed activities, instructions, and rules all day every day. Kids need freedom! They need to go someplace new to investigate. They need the freedom to touch gross things in order to discover that they’re, well… gross. They need to stack a pile of rocks in the sand to see if they can build it as high as they can in the dirt. They need the opportunity to solve their own problems and answer their own questions. I propose a new trend. I want to see kids out playing in their neighborhoods and nearby parks. I want to hear the scream of children splashing in the sprinklers until the sun goes down; or crying over scraped knees from falling off their bikes. I want to hear the neighborhood kids argue over whose ball it is in a game. How are kids supposed to learn to entertain themselves, toughen up, or resolve problems on their own if we never give them the chance?

When I was 17 I babysat these 3 kids. When I took the job I remember thinking. “Sweet, this will be easy money.” I held out for 3 whole days before they broke me. I couldn’t take it anymore! If something didn’t change, those kids were going to drive me crazy. I wasn’t about to spend my hard earned money trying to entertain someone else’s children all summer, so what was I to do? I remember sitting in their living room somewhere between total boredom and utter insanity when I decided that we all just needed to get some distance from each other. The 4 of us piled into my little brown Tempo, and drove to the park on the other side of the lake. As soon as we pulled up, those kids took off like pack of wild animals. You’d think they had never been to a park before. The funny thing is, they had been to that park plenty of times. They were just so excited for a simple change in environment. They were so well behaved that day that I thought I’d try it again the next day. We ended up spending most of our days that summer visiting the various parks in our small town. On the rainy days I’d take them to the pool at the hotel I worked at on the weekends. This worked out great because it was free. It was indoors, and the kids could get all their energy out. At the end of the summer their parents told me that they had never seen those kids as well behaved as they were that summer. All that pent up energy had to go somewhere. They had never had an outlet like that with their previous sitters. The only thing I had done was change up their environment by taking them to different parks every day. The only time I spent any money on them was my last day on the job. I took them bowling and bought a small cake for the 4 of us to share. I still take my own kids to the park and let them play while I read my textbooks for school or type on my laptop.

On a separate matter, my own son has always been a huge crybaby about the tiniest little bumps and scrapes. I started noticing though, when he has other kids to play with or he’s on his skateboard he won’t cry about anything. If he’s engaged and having fun he’ll suck it up out of fear that he won’t be able to play if he cries about something. It’s kind of like kids holding their pee when they’re playing only because they don’t want to have to stop playing. He used to be terrified of heights, sleeping outdoors, getting swept away by the ocean and his own shadow (okay the last ones an exaggeration), but with a little encouragement and the fear that he’ll have to give up all the fun that goes along with whatever activity we’re participating in, he has overcome all those fears and more. In fact, I have seen his athletic ability blossom tremendously over the past few years. Now, whenever he’s afraid of something, I’ll hear him mumbling a little pep talk to himself. He genuinely wants to overcome his fears and only backs down if he thinks he’s going to get hurt.

The last childhood life lesson I want to talk about is the fact that parents don’t let children resolve problems on their own. We all know someone who’s a helicopter parent. It’s one thing to hover over your own child, but when you step in to resolve a disagreement between two children you’re deprive both those kids of an important life lesson. I’m not saying we should let a kid beat up another kid and take his lunch money, but when that happens we should encourage our kids to take back some of that control and stand up to the bullies. Then make sure the parents of that bully know what happened so that situation can be handled appropriately. When I was a kid, my big sister beat me up every, single, day! I learned to take a hit and eventually to stick up for myself. When I was in 7th grade these older girls started harassing one of my friends. Everyone else just sat there eating their lunch. No one wanted to get involved because they knew what these bullies were capable of. I didn’t, but I knew what I could handle and there was nothing they could dish out that I couldn’t handle. That was the first time I stood up to a bully, but it was far from the last. Now I’m not saying you should let it escalate that far, but I’m glad I had the opportunity to learn that I was made of tougher stuff than most others. I honestly think I got in more fist fights than anyone else in my grade and I was typically pretty reserved. I just couldn’t keep my mouth from sounding off when I saw someone getting pushed around. This example is definitely on the more extreme end. My point is, I learned what I could get away with, how far I could push people, and how to deflect the situation all together to avoid getting into fist fights in the future. Kids are mouthy and aggressive by nature. They need to discover their limits so they don’t carry that into adulthood.

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