I think also our culture has largely forgotten that the job of parents is not just to
care for children but to
raise adults. Kids are not given opportunities to practice adulthood in small, low-stakes doses. The result is college students who flame out with too much alcohol and no decision-making skills. (Which I see on a regular basis.)
I'm sure many will be horrified to hear that I gave my child a hot-glue gun at age 5 1/2.
Umm,yes horrified. DH is wary when he uses stuff like that - though as an industrial engineer, he has seen the horrible outcomes (including one that involved him).
This is a really interesting discussion. Bringing up children is difficult and involves hard choices - let's acknowledge up front that there's no perfect answer.
I think part of what goes on is that there's no essential connection between the physical (for example) level of skill needed to do something, and the cognitive, emotional and societal skills needed to understand and manage the level of risk that results. One parenting philosophy (A) says that we don't let children do things until they are capable of understanding and managing the associated risks. Another (B) says that we let them do things when they can do them, and temporarily, we manage the risks for them. There is a theoretical other (C) which says that we just let them do things, and if they can't manage the risks then oh well - but I'm not sure anyone here is actually espousing that one!
Let's try not to react to (B) as though it were (C). I'm willing to bet MegMeg's child had no idea how dangerous the hot glue gun could be, at 5.5, and also that MegMeg supervised closely enough that the risk of anything bad happening was nevertheless very low.
I can certainly say that I let my 3yo use a sharp kitchen knife to cut cucumber with, as soon as he was willing, but, although he probably didn't realise it, I was right there - not so much ready to pull the knife away if he misguided it, because that would have required superhuman reaction speed and in any case wasn't the important risk, but rather, ready to redirect or stop him if he showed any sign of using the knife in any way other than the way required to cut cucumber.
I did this - and generally, I espouse (B) parenting - because waiting till children completely understand and manage risks before you let them do anything that invokes those risks seems impractical; when I look at DS's 10yo friends who have never used a sharp knife and never cooked over a flame and never been outside without an adult watching them, it seems to me that I see people who (a) have too much to learn all at once and (b) have built up an image of themselves as people who need to be looked after.
Sometimes it's not possible to let children acquire skills and simultaneously shield them from all associated risks. Then one has to choose. I worry, and analyse and reanalyse risks, and come down on one side or the other, in such cases. But there's no perfect answer in such cases: there's a cost either way. I too see 18yos arrive at university lacking skills they
need at that point, and struggling to learn them too late. And I know that I as an 18yo still lacked full understanding of and ability to manage the risks I was running - to some extent I just
had to learn them alone.
It's not entirely clear how this relates to the above, but something that shook me badly recently was hearing that the 16/17yo son of an acquaintance of mine had been killed in a car accident. The shocking part was that he had written off his own car the day before, in an accident which was known to be his own fault. His mother had tweeted about her relief that he and the other driver were OK, and that he wasn't going to be driving again for a while. But the next day, in fact, he drove the family car to school - and was killed. (Those are the bald facts. I don't know anything about the decision making process that lies behind them. For me the lesson comes from imagining it, and it doesn't really matter whether what I imagine is or isn't true.)
I think perhaps that why this comes to mind is something like this. One advantage of bringing your children up to be relatively self-reliant is that it's convenient. It's nice when your kids can get their own lunch, don't mind being left for an evening, and doubtless in due course, can drive themselves to school.
But to get to that point as a parent doing (B) often requires more investment of effort than is required for either (A) or (C). It was harder for me to watch with alertness while my 3yo cut his own cucumber slices than it would have been either to do it myself (A) or leave him to it (C). And it was crucial that I was prepared to step in if it turned out that I'd misjudged and he wasn't ready to do it sensibly himself. Of course I now reap the benefit of being able to say "Help yourself to lunch" while I do something else! But there is an ever-present danger of complacency: one can get too used to things being easy, and a child who takes risks they don't understand does require someone to be conscious of that, because they may not be.
