What is Over Parenting?
It can be defined as being excessively involved in the day-to-day life of one’s child or children, typically in the desire to shield them from difficult situations or help them succeed.
We as parents feel responsible to protect them at ALL times and from ALL things and beeeeeeeeeeppppp!!!!! The buzzer just rang off and you crossed the border entering the “Overparenting” zone. Hold on, take a deep breath and let’s try to understand the difference in becoming a parent vs. in becoming a regulator.
What do most of us DO?
In our minds lie these 2 sets of activities that proportionately we execute as parents i.e. instilling in our children, the DOs and DONTs of life But more than often, we cross our limits where we start increasing the list of DONTs in our child’s life as compared to the things they can DO.
Our list of normal DON’Ts is as follows:
- Don’t go there (Just because you can’t run around him/her)
- Don’t touch that thing (just because you cannot afford any destruction of your pieces collected over these years)
- Don’t eat that (because it is not baby food coming from a baby’s dietician or tetra pack box)
- Don’t sit there (because you’re afraid that he/she would spoil his/her clothes)
- Don’t play outside (he/she might hurt him/herself)
- Don’t put that in your mouth (because you are afraid that he/she might fall ill)
…… and the list continues.
Where do we go wrong and WHY?
It is not wrong to care about your child but the DON’Ts mentioned above are literally connected to your child’s care. Putting a NO at every dimension of your child’s life, which initially is the feel and taste dimension, affects your child’s development and confidence to a great extent.
Our little child is like a scientist who learns by experimenting and documenting the conclusions in their mind. It is important for them to learn most of the stuff by doing it themselves rather than not doing it because of your directives given to them (obviously we are not referring to extreme experimentation here like touching fire and learning that it burns),they never get to learn it but at a certain point they shut that door where they are not allowed to step in just because you apparently cared or were in reality scared.
“Raising a kid is a challenge”, ACCEPTED, but we make it a horrible one by restricting our child from a lot of normal things that he would love to do with an instinct of learning rather than destroying. Science has proved that kids who are given more freedom to experiment in their lives are the ones who turn out to become relatively smarter than their counterparts who spent their life balancing the DO’s and DON’Ts of their life over petty matters.
What should YOU DO?
Please start doing the following:
- Let your child sit in the mud, he/she would love to do that, your child, it is on a proper healthy diet, won’t fall sick just by merely sitting or playing in the mud.
- Remove your lifeless showpieces from your child’s reach to allow your child the freedom to play and explore in their own home.
- Kids up to a certain age go by the rule; touch and taste, and that happens with everything even if it’s a dirty shoe but that also can be dealt by keeping dirty stuff away from his/her reach but by keeping you floor adequately swiped at all times you can let your child pick up and lick his toy from the floor because he/she is in safe hands
- Kids love to sneak into little corners and spaces, an open cupboard or under the bed and even sitting in water swept washroom floor, let it be and don’t worry about the clothes, he/she enjoys that and learns from that. You can wash their clothes as many times as can but their learning can’t be done at a later stage
- Let them play in their gardens, if not on the roads or in the streets, arrange for the kids to come in and play in your garden because kids want someone their age to play with them and mess around just like us ADULTS
- As far as the food you make in your house is healthy to consume since you also eat it, let your child has a bite of it ,it becomes easier for the parents as well to feed their child whatever healthy they have rather than sticking to his/her specific baby food because it doesn’t let your child’s taste buds develop completely and he is therefore restricted to a certain type of food for the rest of his/her life.
They are little Human scientists!
Your child is like a little human who has some needs and prefers experiential learning because they have been made like this. We adults also fail at times which even costs us at times a fortune but still, we experiment to get ahead. Let your kids also have that benefit of the doubt that they might learn something from it, let them have the freedom to explore their surroundings and develop a personality accordingly, let them touch and try to enable them to identify their likes and dislikes (which kids start doing from a very young age). Let them see the world from their lens rather than yours because at the end of the day he/she is only 2 years old whereas you are 30, he is bound to behave like a kid because he is a kid, you need to stop behaving like a kid because you are an adult.