Have you ever watched a child learning to walk? They stumble left and right, forward and backward. They fall over often. We notice parents standing near their children, creating guard rails with their arms, catching them when they fall. Those parents are usually feeling some level of anxiety that their child will be hurt, and, unable to contain that anxiety, they act it out by protecting the child from falling.
Protecting anyone from the consequences of their mistakes prevents them from learning from those mistakes. When the parent prevents the child from falling, they are usually negatively impacting the process of them learning to walk. They are also modeling caretaking behavior, teaching the child implicitly that people who have learned to do something should prevent those who have not yet done so from making the very mistakes that enabled their mastery in the first place.
Of course, it’s important for a parent to create a safe space for their child, and by doing so, provide scaffolding for the learning process. When a child is learning to walk, we might not take them to a lava field, with its uneven surface, razor-sharp rock, and limb-melting lava. At least, we wouldn’t do that unless we wanted them to learn to be ultra-nimble and confident on their feet. There is usually a compromise that we can frame as reasonable, a balance point between our…
