«Real protection means teaching children to manage risks on their own, not shielding them from every hazard» (Mogel 1). Many Parents these days are defending their children from everything. The child fails an assignment, the parent calls up the school and demands if their child can redo the project or get a better grade. The child gets hit by a baseball, they take them out of the sport. Too many parents are shielding their child from idiotic things and they are not letting the child learn from their own blunders. Romeo and Juliet, is an ideal example of how parents are too overprotective of their children. For the Montagues, they consistently give Romeo the answer to his predicaments. When Romeo got banished, they acted like it was the end of the world. For the Capulets, they wanted to protect Juliet since she was their only child. They decided everything for her which made Juliet revolt against her parents by marrying Romeo. In the end, the two children took their own lives because they could not handle the problems that life gave them. Overprotecting children can lead to bigger problems than the small complications that they had before because it does not teach them to be independent and learn from their mistakes.
Overprotective parents consistently cover up their kid’s mistakes. This does not help the child at all because the child is not able to learn from their mistakes. Sometimes they continue to make the same mistake over and over again. According to the article, Teens and Decision Making: What Brain Science Reveals, “This relationship between the emotional center (limbic system) and control center (prefrontal cortex) helps to explain a teen’s inclination to rush decisions”(1). As teens grow, the increase of decisions they get to make and some of these choices are not always the right ones. Making the wrong ones is what helps the child learn from their mistake and helps them to do it better next time. When overprotective parents clean up after their child, they actually causing harm to the kid because the child does not get to learn from their mistake. Lehman implies that the child learns the wrong lesson from their parents fixing their mistake (1). They learn that power conquers responsibility when instead it should be responsibility beating power. The child does not learn any responsibility because they think they can always rely on their parents. When the child gets into its adult years, they do not know what to do because their parents have been doing it for them. This leads to many problems later on in college and jobs.
Overprotective parenting can also lead to huge health risks in a child’s life. Not giving them time to go and explore outside makes them stay inside all day playing video games or watching t.v. This leads to bad habits in their adult years too. They do not become social or make friends, which is an important aspect of everyone’s lives. The American Academy of Pediatrics argues that the decrease in free playtime could carry these risks. They emphasize that, «For some children, this hurried lifestyle is a source of stress and anxiety and may even contribute to depression.» Not to mention the epidemic of childhood obesity in a generation of kids who never got to go out and play (According to Gibbs 1). Letting adolescents play outside when they are young can help ready them for their adult years and help develop their brain. They get to develop freedom over the years of their life. In addition, allowing them to explore outside decreases the chance of them being obese, which means, there is less of a risk of getting heart disease when the child gets older.
Parents who are overbearing often think that they are helping the child by doing such things but instead they are making it worse. College students often go to college not knowing what to do or how to live on their own. They cannot do necessary tasks like doing laundry or making dinner. Marano addresses this by saying, «The middle of the night may find a SWAT team of counselors calming down a dorm wing after having crisis-managed an acute manic episode or yet another incident of self-mutilation» (According to Acocella 1). College students tend to freak out because their parents did not prepare for what is ahead in their life. They cram in study sessions the night before because they do not know how to do the simplest things and they think they can push it off till the last minute like they always did. They fall behind because they have to learn everything about responsibility all at once. This can become overwhelming and stressful.
As a parent, not being overbearing is not only beneficial for the child but for the adult too. Ann Cinzar expresses that raising a child is like being married. The adult is going to have to not only put faith in the child but him or herself too. The parent learns how to fail as does the child. The parent gets better at doing the job as the kid grows. They learn how to handle each situation better each time. They can sense relief by not overparenting their child because the child learns responsibility. They will not have to drive up to the school just because the child forgot something. This takes a lot of stress off the parents back. They can be proud of their child learning how to do things on his or her own.