The other day, I was working with some students, teaching something new. It wasn't hard per se, it was just new. One of the students--the strongest of the group--stood in the middle, afraid to move. Afraid to try. With encouragement, she finally gave it a whirl. And then immediately berated herself that it wasn't "good."
Meaning, it wasn't perfect.
And she didn't want to try again because (in her words) "it was bad."
I had to put the brakes on the whole thing to give the group a pep talk. It's a pep talk I give almost every single day. Actually, I do give it EVERY.SINGLE.DAY. It's about learning. How we learn. That people don't learn by being perfect; they learn by making mistakes. As long as you know the mistake you made, your brain starts rewiring and you are able to correct in the next trial.
You literally learn by doing the wrong thing.
But a trend I've noticed lately (and not a good trend, like less-plucked brows or leggings) is that children don't know how to fail. They don't know how to take a risk and try and NOT be successful. They expect to be perfect out of the gate.
And I think we're making our kids this way.
We literally don't let them fall. When I was a kid, almost everyone I knew had a scar somewhere on their face from falling. Mine's on my chin, the result of falling into a rusty pole while "ice skating" in the babysitter's back yard. I was lucky--my mom worked for a plastic surgeon at the time, so the four-inch-long scar is barely noticeable. But I was three or four, outside playing with about six older kids, and no adult in sight (the babysitter was inside the house). We were racing around the poles on the ice in our boots, and as I turned the corner, I fell right onto the pole. In all honesty, I remember it feeling like I'd dinged my funnybone, only on my face. It wasn't until someone turned around and saw the blood and screamed that I even started crying.
But at least I was outside, moving with a freedom and abandon that I don't think kids feel anymore. As a school-based physical therapist, I teach kids how to move. I challenge their muscles and their motor planning and their balance.
And overwhelmingly, I hear whines and cries that, "I can't do it. This is hard." Much of the time, it's before they even start moving. Kids are so terrified of failing (which in their mind is defined as not being perfect or being able to accomplish it the first time) that they can't move. Pretty much paralyzed.
Then, there are the tantrums--the whining and crying and yelling--because something is hard. Task avoidance is huge. Disturbingly, disconcertingly huge. Because what it's creating is a whole passel of little people with HUGE amounts of anxiety. Current statistics from the CDC put the rates of (diagnosed) anxiety over 7% in children 3-16. That's actually diagnosed anxiety and doesn't include the number of children who show anxious behaviors without a diagnosis.
Clinical anxiety is no joke. It's paralyzing. In a moment of anxiety, the working memory shuts down and the IQ drops 10-15 points. Someone in a state of anxiety literally CANNOT learn something new. But I fear we're CREATING this in some of our kids.
It starts from the moment we bring our children home from the hospital. We don't let them move about and explore. As babies, we keep them in containers to keep them safe. We don't put babies on their bellies because they might die. Or they don't like it. Or because we don't want to sit on the floor and play with our babies, entertaining them so they forget they don't like being on their bellies. We babyproof everything so they don't climb or open or mess anything up. We carry our kids everywhere because they might get into something. We don't turn our children loose in the neighborhood to play for hours every day because they might get kidnapped. We entertain them by sticking a screen in front of them.
"The obligation for working mothers is a very precise one: the feeling that one ought to work as if one did not have children, while raising one's children as if one did not have a job."
