In Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation, alongside recommendations about delaying smartphones and social media, he talked about the importance of giving kids unsupervised play.
But what do we do when unsupervised play turns into bullying? This week I’ll share part of how I’m navigating that with my son.
Coming up:
Why I let my son play neighborhood kickball without (much) adult supervision
Are the so-called “digital natives” going to bring back analog?
The great helmet fight.
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My son has been playing a lot of baseball and kickball with other kids at our neighborhood park.
The games are mostly unsupervised by adults, although I usually do check in at least once when he’s out there. (Other parents do too.)
And to be honest, I don’t always love what I see and hear coming from the kickball field.
The other kids can be bullies. They sometimes use foul language. And they generally act like the 6-12 year olds that they are.
Sometimes they call my son names, and make fun of his athletic abilities.
A couple of times he came home so discouraged because of what they were saying to him that my wife and I discussed whether he should be allowed to continue going out there at all.
But we also recognized a couple of things:
Our son had never played kickball before, so he didn’t really know the rules and hadn’t gotten much practice kicking yet. This put him at a disadvantage, but one he could overcome if given the chance.
The bad language mostly seemed to be one-off instances of 12-year-olds trying to look cool in front of each other.
The more our son played, the more he started coming home with a smile on his face. He started getting better at both kickball and baseball. Eventually, the other kids learned his real name, and started calling him by it.
In short, by continuing to go, my son overcame adversity, did something he really wanted to do (play with the other boys at the park), and he built resilience.
Resilience and IRL bullies
As a general rule, millennial parents have tended to over-index the risk of in-person social scenarios, and to under-index the risk of online social scenarios.
Those twin issues were at the heart of Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation.
As he puts it, “These two trends—overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world—are the major reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation.”
Growth requires discomfort. And letting my son play kickball with some of the not-always-nice kids from the neighborhood was ultimately a low risk way to give him the chance to grow through an uncomfortable situation.
Compare that to the relatively higher risk of online bullying.
A 2014 study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health found that, compared to those who were only bullied in the “traditional” way, those who were bullied online were much more likely to experience lasting mental health effects, and to act out.
Said differently: a few mean 12-year-olds that we can actually see are way easier to deal with than an internet dogpile. And it’s way harder to learn useful social adaptations from interacting with a crowd of vicious usernames than it is from a group of people who live in your neighborhood.
Embracing the tension
Please don’t misunderstand. I’m definitely NOT to saying, “I let my kids get bullied and you should too!”
Bullying is never good.
But unsupervised play is good. Resilience is good. And unfortunately, developing resilience requires having something to develop resilience through.
So how do we handle this tension as parents?
Well, first, we should recognize that real-life social scenarios are almost always going to be a better place to practice resilience. But second, you have to know your kid. You have to know what they can handle—when to push them, and when to pull them back.
Toward those ends, here are a couple of questions that you can use for your own reflection:
What’s one area where your kid already has a level of resilience? How can you encourage it?
What’s one are where they seem easily defeated, and could stand to develop some more resilience?
What, practically, would developing more resilience in that area require?
