Have American Parents Got It All Backwards?

"Have American Parents Got It All Backwards?"  was posted on the Huffington Post on 5/7/2014.  It highlights 6 concepts that she has seen work in other countries.

-We need to let 3-year-olds climb trees and 5-year-olds use knives.
-Children can go hungry from time-to-time.
-Instead of keeping children satisfied, we need to fuel their feelings of frustration.
-Children should spend less time in school.
-Thou shalt spoil thy baby.
-Children need to feel obligated.    

I love articles like this that get people to think about what they are doing in parenting and early childhood education.  She provides some great points, and while I don't agree with all of her conclusions, it was a fun read and a good conversation starter!

One idea in the article that really interested me is the idea of "American" parenting concepts.  In each section when she presents the above concepts, she challenges the 6 counter "American" parenting concepts.

The idea that the counter concepts are "American" is interesting to me in light of my studies in early childhood education and child development.  Most of these issues have either been acceptable or have been debated hotly in the USA for decades (or centuries).  And many of these practices, for example, letting children use knives and climb trees, were acceptable and normal as recently as my young childhood.  Consider the following two examples:

I hung upside-down and flipped around the bars on my playground equipment at my elementary school for years, then around 4th grade (early 90s), suddenly we couldn't anymore.  Not only was it not ok, it was suddenly and dramatically not ok.  I seem to remember the ONLY time I had to "sit by the wall" outside was for flipping upside-down on the bars.  Not only was I completely unaware of the change in rules, but when I tried to explain that I didn't know, I was greeted with an attitude of "Of course you can't hang upside-down.  You'll land on your head and kill yourself!  That was never ok!"  As if every recess ever before that I had just "gotten away" with this behavior....

From the time my dad was a little kid up until about 2000, my Grandma who lives in Lakewood, CO had a rectangle gymnastics-style trampoline.  Then her home-owners insurance told her they wouldn't insure her with a trampoline on her property.  So away went the trampoline.  40 years of daily use with no, or nearly no injuries, and this fear of reasonable, calculated risks took it away.

Before reading this article, I would have said the American attitude towards this trend, is a frustration with poorly thought out regulations, rules for the sake of convenience and at the expense of real learning, and knee-jerk reactions to cases that are exceptions to the norm.  I would have said that the institutional or governmental attitude was that of eliminating all possible potential risk factors, regardless of the potential benefit.

In considering this discrepancy between what the author, Christine Gross-Loh, and my own general idea of "American," I started wondering about "American" child rearing in general.  I think the diversity of America rendered the idea of a homogenous "American" parenting style impossible.  But more on this later...