There are a whole lot of things that cannot be taught and/or done for another person—not even for one’s own child. These things can be taught—and a lot of them are learned—but there is nothing like learning from experience in the moment and self-discovery, which do not begin in school, college or the workplace but at home from an early age. These lessons teach problem-solving and resilience—crucial strengths for navigating life. Unfortunately, parenting today is more about providing crutches than enabling a child to walk, run and swim.
An article in Bolde, titled Kids Raised in the ’60s and ’70s Handled These 10 Things Alone Before Age Twelve, and Researchers Say the Skills Were Never the Point—Kids Who Solve Problems Without Adult Help Learn They’re Able To, and That Belief Is What’s Gone Missing, more or less sums up modern parenting styles.
The article begins:
“If you were a kid in the 1960s or ’70s, a good chunk of your childhood happened with no adult anywhere near it.
“You came home to an empty house. You were gone all day. You handled the money, the stranger, the scraped knee, and the argument behind the school, and you handled all of it yourself, because there was nobody around to hand it to.
“It’s easy to look back and see the tasks. The paper route, the walk to school, the babysitting at eleven. But the tasks were never the interesting part.
“Something else was getting built underneath, one unsupervised afternoon at a time, and nobody involved had the faintest idea it was happening.
“Psychologists have a name for it, they can measure it across generations, and the measurements say it’s been quietly draining out of childhood ever since.”
The article highlights: 1. Coming home to an empty house and letting themselves in with the key on the shoestring; 2. Being gone all day with one rule: home when the streetlights come on; 3. Calling a friend’s house and negotiating with whichever adult answered; 4. Riding their bike across town with nobody knowing where they were; 5. Walking to school alone from age six or seven; 6. Being sent to the store with cash and coming back with groceries and the correct change; 7. Babysitting other people’s children at eleven or twelve; 8. Settling a playground fight with no adult stepping in; 9. Being bored for an entire afternoon and having to solve it themselves; and 10. Getting hurt—the scraped knee, the bee sting, the splinter—and handling it before deciding whether it was even worth mentioning.
In another Bolde article by Harleen Kaur, titled 9 Reasons ’80s and ’90s Kids Are Actually the Most Mentally Resilient Generation Alive Today, she writes along the same lines about another generation. She writes:
“They were the kids nobody was watching.
“Not in the tragic sense. Their parents loved them. But nobody tracked their location, logged their grades on an app, or scheduled their Saturday, and the result was a childhood with an enormous amount of unattended space in it.
“These are the people who were children in the eighties and nineties. The last ones whose entire childhood happened before the phone existed, and who then watched it arrive as they got a little older.
“And something’s clear about them. They’re the people who don’t fall apart when things get bad. They handle a bad diagnosis, a divorce, a layoff, without needing to be assembled by other people afterward. They can be told no and go home and eat dinner.
“That isn’t a personality. It’s training—and most of it was accidental.”
She cites the following points: 1. They were allowed to fail; 2. They couldn’t back out of a plan; 3. They got good at things in private; 4. They couldn’t cut people out of their lives; 5. They had to entertain themselves; 6. They had to talk to strangers; 7. They had to wait for everything; 8. They had no one to complain to; and 9. They spent hours unreachable.
Kaur concludes:
“…To be fair, some of this was neglect. A lot of them were lonelier than anyone knew, and there were things happening to some of those unsupervised children that nobody caught, precisely because nobody was watching.
“They’d give a fair amount of it back. Most of them are raising their own kids the opposite way, deliberately, having decided it wasn’t worth what it took.
“But the training was real, and it isn’t repeatable, and they’re walking around with a set of capabilities nobody set out to give them—and nobody quite knows how to build them on purpose.”
These may sound very American, but we did have a version of our own along similar lines. And, in some sections cutting across the rural and urban divides, our old version of parenting still persists due to various factors such as the persistence of family cultures and economic necessity, which can limit access to widely advocated modern parenting styles. What the articles emphasise is that parenting styles in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, warts and all, provided children with ample space to do—or not do—things, draw on their innate abilities, experiment, think and learn for themselves, work things out independently and take responsibility for themselves, thereby enabling them to handle the pulls, pushes and pressures that are inevitable later in life. And this was universal.
Yes, the world has always been a dangerous place in which wicked and evil people prey on women, children and other vulnerable people. The world is no different now—perhaps made worse by technology enabling the wicked and the evil to take their perversities to unimaginable levels. But technology cannot be blamed for humanity’s perversities; unfortunately, it does hamper the organic growth and development of children. This is exactly what we see happening now with over-anxious, overprotective and overindulgent parents.
Think of the centuries of great, inimitable and irreplaceable literature, art, painting, sculpture, music, mathematics, scientific discoveries, geographical discoveries, architecture, films and the rest of what constitutes our culture and heritage. Would we have had Leonardo da Vinci, Vincent van Gogh, Beethoven, Rumi, Rabindranath Tagore and so many others if their parents had structured, scheduled and controlled every minute of their waking hours? Children need structure, no doubt, but not one that disables them from learning to navigate life as they grow up. Nobody can claim expertise in parenting, but because it is central to the quality of society and the future, it is imperative to draw lessons from past eras and learn from best practices.
There appears to be a great deal of rethinking and revisiting of parenting across the globe. The Bolde articles mentioned above, and many similar pieces published in journals, underscore this. Now, for us in the Northeast, who are only too eager to follow the “latest” in every aspect of our lives, especially pop psychology, perhaps we could look back at the various facets of parenting in our tribal communities several decades ago. We may discover just how relevant they remain today.
(Monalisa Changkija is a Dimapur-based veteran journalist, poet, and former Proprietor, Publisher and Editor of Nagaland Page.)