Protectiveness

This Atlantic article on letting kids do more on their own is making the social media rounds. For anyone following along here, it's not at all surprising that kids today are overprotected. It's a prediction that Strauss & Howe made when they first published Generations over twenty years ago.

...during the Crisis eras at the other end of the cycle, the constellation produces the opposite form of nurture: the suffocating overprotection of Adaptive children.  

Generations, William Strauss & Neil Howe, 1992, page 99

"Constellation" here refers to a particular pattern of generational types that signals a particular Turning. Adaptive generations are those raised during a Crisis / Fourth Turning - Strauss & Howe later started referring to them as the Artist archetype.  In other words, this says that children raised during the Fourth Turning end up extremely over-protected, by parents and society.

And here we are, in the Fourth Turning, with children so over-protected that they aren't allowed to go to the corner store on their own.

When looking at how similar events recurred over time, one of the drivers Strauss & Howe noted was the change in child nurturing over the course of the 90-some years of each Saeculum. When generations like the Baby Boomers were young, in post-war eras, parenting was becoming less protective - they were given more freedom to do what they wanted to do  For Millennials, on the other hand, the trend was toward more protection. Right now, as in other Crisis periods, the tendency is to protect children, as much as possible, from everything that is happening. Which makes sense, during these crazy times.

Generations also noted that parents tend to raise their children in the opposite way in which they and their generational peers were raised: Boomers raised Millennials with increasing protection, for example, whereas as the GI Generation raised Boomers with decreasing protection. There are limits to how over- or under-protective parents can be of their children, so at some point the cycle peaks and reverses. This cycle then affects how people are raised and grow up during each Turning, reinforcing the overall generational cycle.

Incidentally, being aware of this doesn't make it any easier to avoid being a hovering, safety-obsessed parent in the current Turning. It does make it easier to see those actions happening without judging either oneself, or someone who is a little more or less over the line. Simply being different from 40 years ago doesn't make the desire to be safety-obsessed incorrect. If something goes wrong during the Crisis, after all, it can be a much bigger problem than back then.

Or maybe it just feels that way.

Although there is that California family in Ken Burns' The War that was trying to decide if they should move back. In the summer of 1941. From near Luzon, in the Philippines. Which would be taken over by the Empire of Japan a few short months later. Which would eventually lead to the two daughters making a game out of seeing how far they could push their fingers into their bellies. Caution can be a good thing.

Is this "free-range children" concept a good idea, then? It seems like nostalgia as much as anything: We did it this way, why can't our own kids? The tendency to over-protect is rational, though, in a dangerous time.  Then again, parenting these days is rather beyond what Strauss & Howe described as "the last time" in the late 1930s and early 1940s - and we aren't even to the peak of the Crisis yet. Maybe relaxing a little bit is in everyone's best interest.