When I was seven, I was allowed to ride my bike around our neighborhood. The thrill was to ride down the massive hill as fast as we could, which spilled into a busy intersection. 

When I was nine, I used to walk home a mile from school with a few friends from my neighborhood. If we were lucky enough to have some pocket money, we would walk the “long way” and stop at the neighborhood convenience store to buy PopRocks. If we were feeling really rich, we would splurge on Fun Dip, which cost $1.50.

When I was 12, I was responsible for waking up with my alarm, packing my snack and lunch, and walking to school. (And at risk of sounding like my parents, I grew up in Massachusetts and some of those mornings were cold.)

I contrast these experiences to my own children’s – I make them breakfast in the morning before I drive them to school; they are picked up from school before being chauffeured to after school activities; I am aware of what they are spending their money on, and I limit what they purchase to align with what I find valuable; and in their downtime, they are closely supervised, whether at home or outside the house, to ensure that they are safe and happy and making good choices. I find value in nurturing my children in this way, and I am gratified in knowing they feel safe and cared for.

And yet, I think about the lessons I learned from those experiences I had as a child. We learned to safely cross busy streets. We learned to count money and to choose our purchases carefully, to spend our money for a smaller candy bar or to save for the bigger treat. We learned to negotiate with the group what felt safe, what felt unsafe, and what we were comfortable trying. There were key lessons in that independence that helped me to grow into a competent and self-sufficient adult. And this is not only anecdotal - in his new book The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt talks about the current culture of overparenting, linking the statistics we know about the teenage mental health crisis to the lack of independence most of our children experience. While this book is getting a lot of buzz for what it has to say about the impact of social media on our kids, less reported are Haidt’s antidotes to these dangers. As he shares, while generations are not monolithic, many studies indicate that Generation Z is highly anxious and risk averse and are starting careers, families and important companies at substantially lower rates than previous generations. Part of their story is certainly about the use of smartphones and social media (link February’s article); but some of this slower growth can be attributed to overprotective parenting and the lack of space to fail, make mistakes and grow independence. 

So if we want our children to grow into self-sufficient adults, how do we balance our children’s independence while we raise children in a culture in which nurturing and protecting is so valued? How do we feel comfortable letting our children branch out, especially in a large city like Los Angeles where we may not trust the physical environment?

Some of the answer is in thinking strategically about parenting. In Julie Lythcott-Haims’ book How to Raise an Adult, she argues that, in order to best support our children, we should think about the skills our kids will need when they turn 18 and then plan backward. If they are self-sufficient at 18, what should be true at 16? At 10? At 5? Because they don’t wake up one day simply ready to take on the world. Lythcott-Haimes offers a checklist of the skills children should develop. Some of these feel completely rational – for example, it makes sense that a 2-year-old can help set the table for dinner or put their clothes in the hamper at the end of the day and a 5-year-old should know their address and phone number. Some of the list feels scarier, like when she suggests that a 13-year-old should know how to use basic hand tools. But when we consider that just 5 years after that, they might need to assemble an IKEA desk in their dorm room, it makes more sense that we teach that 13 year old to use a hammer and screwdriver.

Some of the answer to fostering independence in our children is about consciously and intentionally overcoming the culture of overparenting. Allowing children to be unsupervised is not our current norm. It requires courage to be an outlier, to make decisions that go against the grain, even when we know it’s the right decision for our children. We need to be willing to stop worrying about what other people might think of us if they saw our children walking alone on Robertson or if they knew that our child was making dinner alone in the kitchen.  

And some of the answer to fostering independence in our children is about consciously and intentionally overcoming the fears we ourselves experience. It can feel scary when our 10 year old wants to stay home alone or our 11 year old wants to walk to Starbucks without an adult. Will they be hit by a distracted driver? Will the homeless person on the corner harass them? Haidt writes: “If more parents trusted their children with more responsibility––for example, by asking their kids to do more to help out, or to care for others––then the pervasive sense of uselessness now found in surveys of high-school students might begin to dissipate.”

I don’t know that there is just one right way to do this, but I do know that our children need more independence than we are currently allowing. They need to be responsible for preparing a simple meal (8 years old), making their beds without assistance (6 years old), and brushing their own hair in the morning (4 years old). They need to walk to the corner store and buy ingredients for dinner without us. 

It doesn’t mean we don’t feel the fear; it means that we name it and put the fear in the corner, because our kids need something more from us. It doesn’t mean that we can’t acknowledge the loss that comes when our child brushes their own hair and doesn’t need us or want us in the same way. And it doesn’t mean that it will always be easy – when we ask our children to learn new skills and grow their independence, we will see them struggle and fail. But when we do parenting right, we have set ourselves up for heartbreak. Parenting done right means that our children leave us in order to live in the world as self-sufficient, fully functioning, independent beings. And it means - even when we have to grit our teeth and look the other way - letting them spend their hard-earned savings on Fun Dip.