Yes, we are smothering our children

 In negative reviews of books on so-called "attachment parenting" like The Continuum Concept people often harp on about how it's "smothering" and emphasis the children at the expense of other social relationships. I suspect those people haven't read the book. The foraging horticulturalists in that book, for example, do breastfeed their children, sleep with them, and carry them around close to their bodies. But overall, these women are not "smothering." The book describes an incident where a toddler is carrying around a rather sharp knife and banging it around. The mother ignores him and chats with another mother. That is, until the toddler drops the knife. Then the mother picks the knife up and gives it back to the kid. Their culture is one where children are biologically fulfilled, but socially the children are not the center of the social life. 

Contrast that with our culture, where children are biologically unfulfilled, but our social culture is obsessed with them. We have to endow them with "good self esteem" and make sure they don't get hurt on "dangerous" playgrounds. Our time with our children has increased, but not through passive activities like having dinner with them, but through taking them to extracurricular activities and helping them with homework. 

There is an interesting article in The Atlantic asking whether this has been a good thing. The author is a therapist quite surprised to see so many patients who had attentive "good" parents:

Until, one day, another question occurred to me: Was it possible these parents had done too much?

Here I was, seeing the flesh-and-blood results of the kind of parenting that my peers and I were trying to practice with our own kids, precisely so that they wouldn’t end up on a therapist’s couch one day. We were running ourselves ragged in a herculean effort to do right by our kids—yet what seemed like grown-up versions of them were sitting in our offices, saying they felt empty, confused, and anxious. Back in graduate school, the clinical focus had always been on how the lack of parental attunement affects the child. It never occurred to any of us to ask, what if the parents are too attuned? What happens to those kids?

I became seriously worried about raising my own children when I was a camp counselor in a wealthy suburban area and found out the games that were "banned", which included:

- Star Wars (and anything else with wars)

- Cowboys and Indians (and anything else politically incorrect)

- Police and Robbers (and anything else with "weapons" even if you used your hand and went "bang bang".)

- Good old fashioned Tag and Hide and Go Seek... too "dangerous"

Meanwhile, everyone was unconcerned with the massive amounts of sugar we fed those kids. I was also quite alarmed by the large "food allergy" table we maintained and heavily policed. I don't remember having such things when I was a kid. Seemed like every child was allergic to something. 

When I was a kid we ate junk food, but we played Star Wars and often our version of Dagobah was a seriously gross insect and snake infested creek...completely unsupervised. I'm sure it was probiotic and tons of exercise :) I'm hoping my kids can have a childhood like that, but seems like it's bucking the trend enough that it means public school and whatnot just aren't options, despite some backlash such as Free Range Kids. I'd love to find a private school that has a good philosophy, but since I was homeschooled myself, I know it doesn't kill you or anything :P Increasingly, members of the ancestral health community seem interested in this approach, given that most public and private schools

- feed kids sugar and fried crap, among other poisonous foods

- force them to sit for hours and hours a day when they should be playing outside 

- structure them into a social strata alien to our evolutionary context. I wouldn't be surprised if putting children of all the same age together all day instead of mixing children by ages and with elders is the cause of much social stresses like bullying. 

- socialize them into a homogenous worldview, causing the loss of unique cultures