Remove The Bubble Wrap

We drank water from a hose and lived.
We stayed outside until dinnertime and we never ran out of things to do.
We rode our bikes wherever we wanted to go, without a helmet.
We played jump rope, hide and seek, and we climbed trees; well some of us climbed trees.

We liked to swing so high on swing sets the metal pole actually came out of the ground.
We never wore seat belts and often sat three across the large bench seat in the front.
Our only parental warning was, don’t take any candy from strangers.
If you did something wrong, your mother knew about it before you even got home.

We walked to school if we lived less than a mile away.
We trick or treated on Halloween night and went to all of the houses in the neighborhood.
We walked by ourselves with only a flashlight.
We went to our town’s parades and flew our American flag proudly.

We tried out for teams and sometimes got cut from the lineup.
We drank Kool-Aid filled with sugar and ate pixie sticks, which was simply sugar in a tube.
We followed the mosquito man’s truck with our bikes.
We played down by the creek, got wet, and dried off in the sunshine.

We had fights that we settled ourselves.
We got mad and we got glad again.
I’m never going to speak to you again, quickly ended when you needed someone to play with.
All the moms talked together and stuck together; you couldn’t win.

We survived.
We actually thrived.
We thought for ourselves.
We babysat, cut the grass, shoveled sidewalks, raked leaves and we flourished.

We got our feelings hurt but we didn’t sue anyone.
We managed to avoid the bully since we only saw him in one class.
We didn’t have cell phones so we communicated face to face.
We waited for the TV to warm up before it came on.

We watched our favorite movie if it came on TV which was usually only once a year.
We had three channels to choose from and we were content.
We had record players that only played one record at a time.
We had transistor radios that we carried around in its leather case.

We had a library card and used it.
We wrote all of our homework in cursive and had to do it over if it wasn’t neat.
We learned to type and had to use whiteout to make corrections.
We didn’t have copiers so we used carbon paper that turned your fingers blue.

There were no child resistant medicine caps and we survived.
We used wooden cutting boards for our meat and lived to talk about it.
We ate white bread.
We waited for Mr. Softie to come around with ice cream on a summer night.

We were free to be a child.
A child with limits and consequences if we disobeyed.
We didn’t get everything we wanted; we didn’t even get half of what we wanted.
We saved up for the special something we dreamed of having and it meant so much more.

I thought of all of this when I read a “Quick Take” in WORLD magazine.

To protect students from emotional torment and physical assault, the Mercer Island School District in Washington state has banned the childhood game of tag. Parents, who were informed by their children rather than the school district, are not happy. In an email, the district communications director said, “Students are expected to keep their hands to themselves. The rationale behind this is to ensure the physical and emotional safety of all students.” (WORLD, October 17, 2015)

I shook my head in disbelief.
An isolated incident I told myself.
Not by a long shot.
I read another story right after that one.

Protecting young people from emotional harm is a noble aim, but have we gone a bit overboard? Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College, sees what he calls “declining student resilience.” At one major university, “emergency calls to counseling had more than doubled over the past five years. Students are increasingly seeking help for, and apparently having emotional crises over, problems of everyday life.”

Gray said that one student felt traumatized because her roommate had called her a nasty name. Two others sought counseling because they’d seen a mouse in their off-campus apartment. They called the police, who, he says, “kindly arrived and set a mousetrap for them.” The Atlantic calls this kind of thing “the coddling of the American mind.” Many of these emotionally stunted students can’t handle a bad grade, and their professors live in fear of negative student reviews or lawsuits. Or as one director of counseling said, “There has been … a decrease in the ability of many young people to manage the everyday bumps in the road of life.” What’s going on?

Dan Jones, the past president of the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors, points at parents, saying, “[Students] haven’t developed skills in how to soothe themselves, because their parents have solved all their problems and removed the obstacles. They don’t seem to have as much grit as previous generations.” In other words, there’s been way too much helicopter parenting! Too many kids take the easy path, which is the only path they’ve ever known. They’re afraid to fail so they avoid risk at all costs.
(John Stonestreet, Breakpoint, October 15, 2015)

Childhood with parameters is necessary.
Limits need to be defined and maintained.
However, a parent cannot live their child’s life for them.
We learn from our mistakes; we are not helping our child if we never allow them to fail.

Parents should be parenting in such a way that they are working themselves out of a job.
Each year a child should have incremental increases in their independence.
We do our children harm if we hover over them and smooth the path before them.
We need to find our voice and say, NO, and mean it.

When you are raising children, you are not their friends.
You are their parent.
God gave you that job to instill discipline and self-control in your child.
God gave you that job, first and foremost, so they will learn about Him through you.

There is time enough for friendship with your child when they get older.
But when they are young, it is not the time.
Children feel safer when there are limits.
Children need to be taught, they don’t catch good behavior by osmosis.

What are we doing to this generation of children?
We allow them to be inside most of the time.
We give them free reign to the Internet and more privacy than they know what to do with.
We say, YES, when we want to say, NO, because, saying NO is too hard in our frenetic lifestyle.

We are afraid of our children and try at all costs to keep the peace.
The balance of power has shifted and it is not good.
It needs to be righted again.
Parents need to be the parents and allow their children to be the children.

This needs to be done with God and his Word as our guide.
God created our child and knows them far better than we ever will.
We need to go to Him often for help in our child rearing.
We cannot do this most important job on our own.

Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.
(Proverbs 22:6)

The breakpoint article ended with a wonderful image.

Remove the bubble wrap…encourage them toward a God-sized vision for their lives. Help them see their giftedness and how it relates to the needs in their world, so that they can pursue their role in God’s restoration of all things under the lordship of Christ.

And as their leaders, parents, and mentors we need to give them permission to try . . . and room to fail.

Amen!

2 responses to “Remove The Bubble Wrap”

1. So much wisdom in such a simple form.
   Why is it so hard for so many to understand?

   Reply

   • Thank you, Carl.
     I think We are the ones who make God’s lessons difficult. We complicate things far more than we should. God is patient and gracious with us as we raise our children. We can learn much from Him and His Word.
     Gina

     Reply