Keywords

Johanne was never allowed to go with the rest of us to the sea to swim. Her mother was far too scared that anything would happen. Then the terrible thing occurred during the war when the ferry was bombed and sunk not far from the shore. Johanne and a friend were in the ferry. The friend could swim, so she managed. But poor Johanne had never learned to swim, so she drowned. (Marit Boyesen, 1997)

Marit Boyesen wrote this story in her doctoral dissertation (Boyesen, 1997, p. 204) examining parents’ views on child accidents, accident prevention, and their experience of risk. In her work, Boyesen showed how parents are in a dilemma when they have to decide whether they want to let their children, their most valuable possessions, take risks, and thus increase the likelihood for things to go wrong. In the story above, Johanne’s mother was so afraid that her daughter would get hurt or drown if she joined the others in swimming in the sea and that she had not yet learned how to handle the risk that the deep water entailed.

We have previously mentioned how risky play can contribute to children’s development and learning in a positive way. This can provide good reasons for providing a practice where children are allowed to explore and test boundaries because we believe it is good for them both here and now and in a longer perspective. If risky play has so many positive aspects, one can further consider what it means for a child if the main focus is to protect them by stopping or banning play that involves risk. Simply put, the downside of such a strategy is that you miss out on all of the positive effects of this type of play. In this chapter, we will go deeper into research on the effect of growing up with little opportunity for risky play, with overprotective parents and an environment strongly characterized by an injury-avoidance strategy.

The Ethical Dilemma of Proving Negative Effects

It is ethically difficult to prove the positive effects that risky play can have. For example, negative consequences in children’s play are avoided because they have been allowed to engage in risky play throughout childhood; therefore, they have learned to master risks appropriately. It is also challenging to point to hard facts to prove that children are less skilled, develop slower, and learn less if they are deprived of the opportunity for this type of play. How can one “prove” that children who have poorer risk management are injured more? Forcing children, for research purposes, not to play freely or to seek challenges and risks in their activity is unethical and not something that a researcher can do within the required research ethics. We also believe that no researcher would be interested in such a dubious experiment; all the while, existing knowledge gives reason for assumptions that such deprivation from play will have negative consequences for children. It is therefore a more sustainable strategy to enter the field with a retrospective perspective where one examines whether there are connections between how children have grown up and what they have been doing as children, as well as how they handle risks, how much they injure themselves, or other health-relevant factors.

Lack of Development and Risk Management

Few studies have managed, in an ethically sound manner, to investigate the positive or negative effects of children engaging in risky play. Nevertheless, one can find indications of this relationship by looking at research that is thematically related. One example is what we know about physically active play and how it affects physical and motor development.

Research has shown that children with poorer motor skills injure themselves more than those with good motor skills (Myhre et al., 2012). Good motor skills are thus an important factor in avoiding injury when you face situations that require proper and effective physical action in order to handle the risk in a good way. Risky play challenges children’s motor competence and contributes to enhanced motor skills being practised and improved, and, as such, research has indicated that risky play could also lead to fewer injuries. On the other hand, risky play leads to a greater degree of exposure to the possibility of injury. However, research has also shown that children who are physically inactive injure themselves more than those who are more physically active (Bloemers et al., 2012), even though the physically active children are more exposed to the possibility of injury. One would think that the opposite was true. The reason for this may be found in what we know about what happens when children participate in risky play, as well as through experiences gained in situations that challenge them both physically and mentally. Simply explained, this means that children who are not given the opportunity to engage in risky play are worse at assessing and managing risks than those who gain the experience and learning that risky play entails.

In Chap. 2 we argued for the positive effects of risky play. Similarly, we would assume that being restricted from risky play may have a negative effect and may cause children to become more inactive and demonstrate poorer social competences and psychosocial health. There is also reason to believe that children who have not been involved in rough-and-tumble play will be less able to handle their own and others’ aggression and that this type of play is more often characterized by real aggression in those who have not been “trained” in it (Eide-Midtsand, 2009, 2015). If we follow this logic, it will also be in line with the argument from Chap. 2 that risky play has an anti-phobic effect where innate fears, such as a fear of heights, a fear of water or separation anxiety, are habituated by children learning to deal with these fear-triggering situations through play. Research has found that children who were never allowed to play by water and learn to swim, to a greater extent, are among those who have a phobia for water as adults (Poulton & Menzies, 2002a, 2002b), as Johanne in the introductory story might have had if she had survived the accident.

Mental Problems

The opposite of play is not work; it is depression. (Sutton-Smith, 1997)

Brian Sutton-Smith (1997) pointed out that play is a voluntary and lifelong activity that occurs in various forms at all ages and that it gives those who engage in it an optimal experience of engagement, excitement, fun, thrill, joy, and exhilaration. Sutton-Smith also pointed out that play gives children the opportunity to try out and realize their full potential. In this also lies the opportunity to gain experience with the dark aspects of play, including feeling at risk and being anxious, and learning to master these sides of life. This can be illustrated through the following episode:

The fact that the children walk around on this uneven surface in the kindergarten and stumble around a bit gives them a very good feeling that “This is a little too much for me; I have to practice a little more, then I can do it!” … We want them to be confident that they can handle the real world and learn how to work their way through resistance, whether it is here on the rock wall when they shout “I want to climb up!” but are unable to manage it, or when they stand in frustration when they are angry or upset. Experiencing that, you can come out on the other side of the frustration and see that “I did it! It was not so bad.” We believe that we work to teach children to manage their emotions in a good way, which means that they may not need antidepressant pills when they reach puberty but can endure their first grief of love and see that, “Okay, it feels awful now, but life goes on!” (Katharina Søreide, kindergarten director)

In the United States, psychologist Peter Gray (2011) argued for the importance of play in people’s lives and, among other things, expressed a strong scepticism about how the education system and safety hysteria rob children of the opportunity for free and exciting play. He drew a logical line between the fact that children’s opportunities for play have been greatly reduced in the last fifty years, both in the United States and in other Western cultures, and that in the same period there has been a sharp increase in anxiety, suicide, experience of helplessness and narcissism among children, adolescents, and young adults. Among other things, research among American college students has shown that the proportion of students diagnosed with anxiety or depression has increased between five and eight times during the course of fifty years (Twenge et al., 2010). The same trend applies to psychopathic disorders and hypomania (manic disorders).

Corresponding Norwegian figures, although not entirely comparable, do not show an equally gloomy picture, although there are tendencies in the same direction, especially among girls. According to Reneflot et al. (2018), there has been a decline in mental health among fifteen- to seventeen-year-old girls, but not as much among boys. The decline in girls’ mental health can be seen in figures showing an increase in general mental disorders, anxiety disorders, depression, consultations for mental health problems, and an increase in the use of antidepressants in the years from 2008 to 2016 (Reneflot et al., 2018). Bakken (2017) reported the same trends, where some of the figures also go in a negative direction for boys aged thirteen through nineteen. Bakken points to stress in connection with school work and less physical and social contact with friends, as a result of more screen activity and virtual contact, as possible reasons for the decline in Norwegian young people’s mental health. Similarly, Twenge et al. (2010) went so far as to point out how American society’s emphasis on external goals such as money, status, and academic success, rather than unity, meaning in life, and belonging, is a reason for the gloomy development in American youth’s mental health. Similarly, Gray (2011) highlighted how a society that emphasizes such values has downgraded children and young people’s opportunities for play, as well as how this in turn is a cause of the trend of increasing mental health problems.

The story is both ironic and tragic. We deprive children of free, risky play, ostensibly to protect them from danger, but in the process, we set them up for mental breakdowns. Children are designed by nature to teach themselves emotional resilience by playing in risky, emotion-inducing ways. In the long run, we endanger them far more by preventing such play than by allowing it. And, we deprive them of fun. (Gray, 2014)

In particular, Peter Gray highlighted that today’s youth are deprived of the following important health-promoting skills: joy, unity, and friendship with other peers, emotional regulation, decision-making, problem-solving, and rule following. As mentioned earlier, research has shown that a challenging parenting style has a positive effect on children’s mental health (Majdandžić et al., 2018). This parenting style is characterized by parents often encouraging their children to stand up for themselves; thus, children are challenged and learn to handle things that can be difficult, such as risky play. On the other hand, some parents take a more protective parenting style, ultimately what is also referred to as overprotective.

The Effect of Being Overprotected

Children and young people may experience being overly protected and restricted in their activity in various contexts. Kindergarten teachers, teachers in schools, leaders of leisure activities, parents, and grandparents often have the opportunity to place restrictions on what children are allowed to do. There is virtually no research on the effect of children being overprotected in kindergarten, school, or leisure activities, but there are some studies exploring the effect of parents’ overprotection.

Overprotective parents are sometimes called “helicopter parents” or “curling parents,” and their parenting style usually differs from normal and healthy parental involvement; for example, whereas normally involved parents may recommend their child to talk to the teacher about a character they are dissatisfied with, helicopter parents will call, or seek out the teacher themselves to speak up for the child and thereby influence the grade (Bradley-Geist & Olson-Buchanan, 2014). It is thus a much greater involvement, intervention, and/or limitation on the part of the parents in the children’s lives and activities than what has normally been regarded as the limit for what parents should care about. The term helicopter parents is meant to conjure a picture of how parents hover over their children like a helicopter and constantly ensure that nothing bad happens to them. In the same way, the term curling parents depicts how parents constantly sweep away all the bumps and humps that their children may encounter. The point is more or less the same: to make sure that the child is as comfortable as possible and that they do not get injured or feel upset or defeated. This is a parenting practice where the principle is to protect the child from negative and harmful experiences. Somers and Settle (2010) estimated that the proportion of American helicopter parents is between 40 and 60 per cent.

A young mother from a small village told me about her experience in the city. She was in the maternity group where she met the “mother police,” as she called it. They were shocked by how irresponsible she was to have taken the boy with her on a hiking trip up in the mountains. The boy was no more than seventeen days. They were utterly upset by the fact that she could do something like that. And they additionally disapproved that she had bought a used pram for her boy. So, she found out that, no, she would not spend time with the “mother police” in the city. (Female kindergarten teacher)

Researchers have tried to investigate how growing up with overprotective parents affects children’s health in childhood, and a study that examined seven-year-olds found that this was associated with mental internalized difficulties such as anxiety, depression, withdrawal, and loneliness (Bayer et al., 2010). Similarly, Affrunti and Ginsburg (2012) found that children aged six to thirteen with over-controlling parents had a higher level of child anxiety and lower self-esteem than those with normally controlling parents. These studies have suggested that overprotection and too much parental control limit children’s access to the environment around them and reduce their ability to develop skills or coping, especially in the face of new and unpredictable situations. Overprotective parents can negatively affect their children by communicating that they do not have the skills to succeed in dealing with challenges in the environment around them and life in general. As a result, children may themselves be in doubt about their own competence and coping ability, which in turn makes them more withdrawn and further reduces the chances that they can develop appropriate problem-solving skills (Affrunti & Ginsburg, 2012). In some cases, the doubt about their own skills can also be well-founded because they have never had the opportunity to practise vital skills, as in the introductory example where Johanne, due to her mother’s concern for water, never learned to swim.

Also later, in adolescence and early adulthood, the negative effects of growing up with overprotective parents have been found, especially when it comes to mental health. LeMoyne and Buchanan (2011) found in a study among 317 college students in the United States that having helicopter parents was negatively associated with mental well-being and functioning and positively associated with the use of painkillers and prescription medications for anxiety and depression. The study showed that children of helicopter parents had more negative feelings about themselves and that parents largely hindered their children from the opportunity to develop and learn to deal with current and future challenges alone.

What will become of young adults who look accomplished on paper but seem to have a hard time making their way in the world without the constant involvement of their parents? How will the real world feel to a young person who has grown used to problems being solved for them and accustomed to praise at every turn? Is it too late for them to develop a hunger to be in charge of their own lives? Will they at some point stop referring to themselves as kids and dare to claim the “adult” label for themselves? If not, then what will become of a society populated by such “adults”? (Julie Lythcott-Haims)

Julie Lythcott-Haims had so many experiences with more or less helpless and poorly functioning students in her work as dean of Stanford University—a prestigious university in the United States that is very difficult to get into—that she expressed her frustrations above in an interview with WBUR, Boston’s NPR News Station, on 28 August 2017. Lythcott-Haims had observed what several studies have also documented. Segrin et al. (2012) conducted a study of more than 500 pairs of parents and their children who were then young adults. They found a negative correlation between an overprotective parenting style and the young adults’ sense of responsibility for their own situation. The children who grew up with helicopter parents had a stronger belief that others would solve their problems, and in general they were more helpless in dealing with things on their own than their peers. Also, Schiffrin et al. (2013) found that having helicopter parents showed a negative correlation with students’ autonomy, competence, and belonging, as well as a positive correlation with depression and low life satisfaction. Overprotective parents are also associated with a wide range of negative characteristics in the student, such as lower self-control (Kwon et al., 2015), higher levels of narcissism, more ineffective coping skills, anxiety, and stress (Segrin et al., 2013), as well as a lower sense of coping ability and poor adaptation in the workplace (Bradley-Geist & Olson-Buchanan, 2014).

Summary

In this chapter, we looked at the more unintended consequences of adults overprotecting children in their play and activities. We have pointed out that children who are restricted from facing risk in their play may also be less able to consider dealing with risky situations both here and now and later in life. We have discussed research showing that young people and adults can end up with more mental problems, lower quality of life, and more helplessness if they are overprotected when growing up. Although protecting a child is a well-meaning strategy on the part of parents and those responsible for children, it can have negative consequences, which in the long run can hardly be considered to be in the child’s best interests. At the same time, it is challenging to investigate the negative effects of the absence of play on children in an ethically sound manner. Depriving children of such an essential element of life in the service of research cannot be defended. Therefore, there is a need for new ways of conducting research on this, which can both safeguard children’s best interests and at the same time provide the knowledge we need to continue to fight for children’s right to freedom, play, and exploration.