Please Don't Help My Kids
A Patch blogger's post about not helping her children on the slide is being debated across the country.
A Patch blog from Alameda, Calif., called “Please Don’t Help My Kids” has struck a nerve with readers across the country.
Posted in September, the blog has taken off over the past few weeks as it has found a second life through social media sharing. The blog has 124,000 Facebook recommendations and 833 people have tweeted the blog.
The blog is an open letter to other parents at the playground. The blogger Kate Bassford Baker’s basic request is for parents to not help her daughters on the slide. She wrote that she wants her daughters to do things and learn things on their own.
Learning to walk up the slide’s ladder is the first step to learning new things and overcoming obstacles, she wrote.
“Because, as they grow up, the ladders will only get taller, and scarier, and much more difficult to climb. And I don't know about you, but I'd rather help them learn the skills they'll need to navigate them now, while a misstep means a bumped head or scraped knee that can be healed with a kiss, while the most difficult of hills can be conquered by chanting, ‘I think I can, I think I can,’ and while those 15 whole feet between us still feels, to them, like I'm much too far away,” she wrote.
Read "Please Don’t Help My Kids" by clicking here.
What do you think? Do you agree with the concept that children should do these things on their own or do you think it’s unwise to allow children that freedom?
Steven Cavaretta
11:42 am on Thursday, January 24, 2013
Bottom line they are her children. It's somewhat refreshing that this parent doesn't cover her kids in bubble wrap.
Audra Myerberg
1:01 pm on Thursday, January 24, 2013
I agree and only stood close when it was a safety issue. A little struggle as children goes a long way.....
Martha Creedon
10:57 pm on Thursday, January 24, 2013
Absolutely, I agree! My kids are now in their mid and upper 20's, but recently I had the occasion to go to a playground with a friend's grandchildren. The playground area was crawling with parents, and the benches where parents would normally be sitting and chatting it up were deserted. Many of the little kids also had cell phones, but that's another story for another day.
Vineyard Worker
8:05 am on Friday, January 25, 2013
Hype.
Michael Fleming
9:43 am on Saturday, January 26, 2013
Agree. "Play" is actually an activity children use to learn many lessons, test limits, explore their world and learn its rules. When you protect your child from every little micro trauma, he or she learns no lessons, explores no boundaries, finds no knowledge of limits. They wind up living on the basement couch, afraid or unable to deal with a world that offers no such coddling. The author of this article is right. Let your kids play.