The number of overprotective parents seems to be on the rise, a recent study suggests, with experts warning that watching a child's every move can lead to them not getting enough exercise. — JULIAN STRATENSCHULTE/dpa
PLAYGROUNDS highlight two parental extremes. At one end are parents who, so long as they’re undisturbed while engrossed in their smartphone, couldn’t care less if their offspring swipes other kids’ buckets and sand shovels or shoves them around on a climbing frame.
At the other are those who watch over their brood like a hawk, accompany their every move and always have a steadying hand on them when they’re climbing.
Most parents fall somewhere between these two extremes, of course, but experts say the number of overprotective parents seems to have grown in recent years, and that this may be adversely affecting how much exercise their children are getting – to the detriment of their health.
New evidence of this has come to light in a recent study in which 645 Australian parents/guardians of primary-school-age children were surveyed about their attitude towards risk and injury and their child’s daily adventurous play and moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA).
Seventy-eight percent of them expressed low risk tolerance in regard to play scenarios such as climbing trees, according to the study, published in the journal Psychology of Sport and Exercise. Their children’s daily MVPA was less likely to meet recommended minimums, and they had less adventurous play too.
Under World Health Organisation (WHO) guidelines, children and adolescents aged five to 17 years should do at least an average of 60 minutes per day of moderate-to-vigorous intensity physical activity – mostly aerobic – across the week.Few in Germany do, says Jakob Maske, spokesman for the Professional Association of Paediatricians (BVKJ).
“For most children, it’s not even 30 minutes per day,” he says, blaming their lifestyle – and partly their parents, who “chauffeur them around, an attitude towards exercise that rubs off on the children.”
Many parents drive their kids to school, football training or music lessons not only for the sake of convenience, but also out of worry that something bad could happen to them if they didn’t.
Some primary school children already even carry a smartphone or wear a smartwatch so that their parents can always reach them or know where they are thanks to geolocation services.
Hover over kids
Wanting to shield their children from all dangers and negative experiences, these overprotective, “helicopter” parents hover over them, as it were, by constantly monitoring them and overseeing their lives.
“We no longer live in times when parents raised their children with their eyes shut, so to speak, five or six at once,” says Claudia Neumann, a play and exercise expert for the German Children’s Fund. “Today’s parents often have a single child, whom they dote on and want to do everything right for.”
While she says this development has a positive side, as it puts special value on childhood, “in some areas it goes too far.”
And so on playgrounds you can see parents who won’t let their kids play in the bushes for fear of tick bites, or who come running as soon as the child gets too high on a climbing frame for their peace of mind. This, in Neumann’s view, is wrong.
“Parents should allow what their children feel capable of doing. They should keep an eye on them at first, certainly, but not forever stand by to serve as their safety net.”
What if they get hurt? Bumps, bruises, bloody noses and scraped knees are part of childhood, says Neumann, adding, “You only learn how to fall by falling.” Children have to learn the hard way how high they can climb, how fast they can run, and how to roll to break a fall.
“Accidents naturally happen on playgrounds,” says Maske. “But the most serious accidents happen in and around the home” – where kids are supposedly safe. They can fall from a bunk bed or unattended ladder, for example, he points out. Or be burned in the kitchen or at an outdoor grill, or poisoned by cleaning agents.
Parents as risk factor
Data gathered from 2009 to 2012 for the KiGGS study on the health of children in adolescents in Germany (by the Robert Koch Institute, the country’s public health agency) showed that 34.8% of all accidents occurred at home or in a private setting, 24.2% at school or a child care facility, and 17.4% on a playground or during sport.
Parents themselves can be a risk factor on playgrounds, for instance if they lift a young child onto a climbing frame that the child can’t climb on their own. Or if they go down a slide with a child on their lap.
The latter can increase the risk of a broken leg. A study by University of Iowa researchers, published in 2018 in the journal Injury Epidemiology, analysed nearly 12,700 playground slide-related injuries to young children from 2002 to 2015 and found that those under three were 12 times more likely to be sitting on another person’s lap at the time.
A child’s foot can catch on the slide when going down on someone’s lap, twist and bend backwards, the researchers write. Catching their foot while sliding alone is unlikely to result in a severe leg injury – due to the relatively low forces involved. The forward momentum generated by an adult is much greater though.
In the view of Elke Biesel, deputy spokeswoman for the DGUV (German Social Accident Insurance), the umbrella association of the accident insurance institutions for Germany’s industrial and public sectors, a key component of child safety is teaching them risk competence.
“In order to learn safe behaviour, children must learn how to handle risks. There’s no safety without risks,” she says, arguing that this competence should be part of their educational training and not lead to acceptability of injuries.
Constantly looking after and watching over your children only “makes them fearful and insecure” – and can also end up in them completely relying on you, says Neumann. “Then they don’t watch out for themselves very well and may even be unable to find their way home on their own.”
Maske has a positive observation. Overprotective parents tend to be well educated, he says. “They’re parents who read a lot on the internet and books” and are unsettled by horror stories of injured children and by all manner of how-to literature. But “they usually come round.” – dpa
