How much is too much supervision
Are children supervised too much?
In a world where children can be delighted in, given ways to contribute, and where older children would have safe guarded the younger ones, it is a strange concept.
Hand in hand
My son loves to wander through the garden and harvest any bounty he can find. In the winter we often don’t have much more than rosemary to make tea with, and huge cabbage leaves, simply for being as exotically huge as banana leaves. And spring we’re often restricted to lettuce, mint and parsley. But now in the summer we have strawberries, loganberries and green beans. We are watching cucumbers form, along with tomatoes and an aubergine. I love to spend time there, discovering the new developments, and he shares anything he finds with great excitement. I show him plants to avoid – the parsley like poison hemlock that we might find, casually mingling with the celery.
This is such a time of delight. Sometimes he enters into his own little world, digging up worms, and collecting ladybird larvae. Other times we walk together, hand in hand, or with him dashing ahead down the twisting wood chip garden path.
Helicopter parenting?
And here, am I helicopter parenting? Or am I not adequately supervising? I might be accused of either by any two people.
“Too much supervision in the real world, not enough supervision online.”
“You can’t bubble wrap them”. Are other phrases I often hear.
“Feral children” I often joke about my children, so adept are they to climb anything they come across. But what is too much supervision? Where will we do we draw the line?
Care or supervision?
When did we start using this term anyway? When only a few centuries ago, families would care for and utilise their children, requiring them to contribute the cottage industry.
Today, we require supervision for our children in our time deprived life style, in our overwhelmed culture, where we particularly prefer our children when they are quiet and non disruptive.
With children from all sorts of backgrounds and conditions, an ideal ‘supervision’ would take into account the background story of each sovereign child, to care and nurture them as they grow. Did the state intend to raise our children as they need when they took on this responsibility?
From our ancestors to a chaotic free for all
Children need down time. Time to find eternity in a flower. But surely this freedom is a staged progression from infancy. Have we lost our intuitive sense of nurture and care for our children, in a culture that farms out children to state care from infancy? Toddlers would crawl and explore their surroundings, never venturing far from their parents’ gaze. And this progression naturally continued as children became older, and were often watched by their older siblings.
Now, however, children are regularly on their own, from a young age, forming social structures made only from other children their own age, and often left unsupervised on screen time.
There is no standard approach to caring for children anymore – every generation defies the last, entirely constructing a new approach.
The real world versus online world – these 2 worlds are colliding. Children bring the online world into their lives.
With an infinitely varied approach to supervision, how can we safely look after our children as they play with other unsupervised, internet addicted children? How much supervision is too much in this chaotic free for all?
Supervision schoolchild style, and supervision home ed style
School style
I notice a real difference between the kind of supervision that happens for school families, and those that have a home ed set up.
Perhaps it has something to do with providence – schools provide a safe, enclosed (health and safety credited) space where children can play for 2 short breaks. Risks have already been assessed, and here children may ‘run off their steam’ in any appropriate way they choose. This is where a taster of autonomy begins – here they may set their own standards and find their own ways to begin to build their own (child only) social empires. Here they may expend energy in a way that will be least noticed by supervisors (often also whilst causing the greatest drama, moment of autonomy, or impact). This all starts at 1015 (on the bell), and finishes 15 minutes later (also on the whistle). Once again there is another opportunity for half an hour at lunch time.
Home ed style
I can’t speak for all home educators, but this is profoundly different to our day to day experience. Their time spent outside could be measured in hours, rather than minutes. Their play grounds are forests, fields, rivers, parks and the garden, where they must largely perform their own risk assessment.
Scraped knees are common place, calloused hands from tree climbing, and wet trousers from paddling. I relish the time spent with them as they make discoveries, and very much prefer my position as mentor there, rather than an authoritarian. My role is usually accepting pinecones, stones and other gems that they find, and perhaps pointing out a bees nest or ant eggs. Today it was putting hoods up in the rain, and checking that none of the slug collection had found their way into a jacket pocket! These interactions, building trust and connection, encourage children as they walk their path of exploring.
I wouldn’t even consider it supervision, though I sometimes ask them to check their precarious position on a rock and consider it, and more rarely still have to ask them to leave a rotten branch up a tree or not walk on an iced over pond. They hit the ground running, and it’s such a privilege to see their engagement, following such disconnect of my then school children only a year ago. Where once walks involved the children running away from us, their ‘supervisors’, it is now a group activity.
Especially now, with teenage years striking, I cannot imagine how life would be if they couldn’t move around as much as they do. The sheer cathartic outlet of testosterone is clearly not suited to 6 hours at a desk (never mind in front of the internet).
Finally, especially with neurodiverse children, or those experiencing trauma, we can facilitate for their needs, providing a safe, holistic time out space, rather than a digital babysitter.
The irony of too much supervision in an attention deficit generation
It is interesting though, in a generation of over supervised children, that children are ever more craving attention. Diagnoses of attention deficit disorder have gone up exponentially in the last decade. It seems that one kind of presence, and another kind of presence are so vitally different.
Stress and lack of time are a huge part of today’s society. Still, children will go out of their way to act up and grab connection and reassurance.
Then their supervisors must put up higher boundaries, and even more authority in place. And with all this looming, ruling presence, it is still no secret that children are searching for engagement, interaction, an opportunity to express themselves, an opportunity to prove themselves.
There are two opposing kinds of attention. One is a scrutinising, fragmenting, alienating kind of attention that doesn’t consider past experiences or surrounding circumstances. The other is a doting, cherishing, relatable type of attention that engages in warm attention and hopes to build a repore.
The irony is not lost that, for all the efforts made to supervise, something is so clearly missing.
https://thereisnoshouldbe.com/attention-in-home-education/
Supervision and an axiomatic framework
So engagement seems to be the key here, connection – schools were previously built on an axiomatic framework, with many children looking up to their few teachers as the model to aim towards, and one to impress.
This entire framework has turned upside down, with this small, ruling proportion at the bottom (still dishing out anything in the name of authority), and the vast spread of children at the top. Children looking up to children. They look to one another for affirmation and to set the standards. Children mentor children. The phrase ‘teacher’s pet’ became a raging insult. Wrought with tension, in this structure, supervising authority figures still provide resistance, and set expectations that are often in direct contrast to any of the creative ideas that the mentoring figures (the other children) provide.
https://thereisnoshouldbe.com/belonging/
On the other hand there are so many relationship errors that can occur in this exhausted, tuned out, mistrusting, over supervised, under supervised compound. From niggling and silencing, to downright catastrophic. Learning behaviours, relationship skills, and self respect starts with the play time that happens in children’s lives. This axiomatic system has children at the top – after all, they’re the ones with the time and engagement with one another – and the damage and stress doesn’t just unable learning, it also causes disengagement in children from themselves, from their families and from their sovereignty.
Supervision and providence
Here now, supervision is providence – but who is doing the providing? Who is providing a set of standards that is generally agreed upon (it’s not the adults anymore)? Who provides attention, engagement, affirmation, skills, opportunities.
Skateboarding, graffiti art, RandB, are all skills that evolved from more ‘rebellious’ circles. And they show, children can’t be kept still, or they will something else.
https://thereisnoshouldbe.com/growth-will-happen/
Proper supervision does not count on an all seeing eye, rotating in the middle of a playground. It counts on provision – provision of belonging, and opportunities for contribution. It counts on time spent eating and relaxing. It counts on time, out of the machine.
The home ed plight is not to replicate school and require them to be stationary, regurgitating google. It is an opportunity to let them eat, play and discover together, with likeminded children.
https://thereisnoshouldbe.com/they-all-bake-bread/
Perception in the educative system
When the state took on the role of education from the church, they did not aim to raise our children – their apparent endeavour was to educate them. So who is raising them, these long hours?
My children’s report cards would tell me how well (or not) my children were doing. They would sing praises of compliance, and warn me of disruption. They were often in direct contrast to my experience with them at home. My most well behaved child in school was showing the many symptoms of high stress. My most disruptive child was a experiencing challenging social dynamic in school. But the lack of engagement and connection does also equate to lack of supervision.
https://thereisnoshouldbe.com/when-the-truth-comes-out/
Digital supervision
In this time deprived generation, supervision is often an effort to keep our children as quiet and still as possible. Where possible, almost like pressing pause on them for days at a time. And indeed, in our making cuts, streamlining, administrative led schools, they do literally press pause. Often in the name of education, students often have multiple devices, all connected to the internet. This is a different kind of providence for children that need supervising. No longer fostering belonging in the school, this ‘providence’ isn’t mentoring or even authority.
https://thereisnoshouldbe.com/balancing-internet-in-education/
Indeed this input is now often described as ‘ungovernable’. Social media is often described with words like ‘innumerable’, ‘infinite’, ‘unseen’, ‘all knowing’ … a higher power – a virtual world – manifesting a replica of an unreachable, ungovernable space. These are words that would have been used to describe heaven and hell. Now this creation has unreachable depths, that our young children are building their lives in. It is development has long outgrown our own ability to govern it, or to maintain any standards.
Too much supervision in the real world, not enough in the online world?
Where will we draw the line – at what age will we throw our children to the wolves? Would we let our children be raised by convicts? And when we farm out education, and care giving to the online world, can we truly say that our children are not being raised by convicts?
Conclusion
This accusation of over supervising our children seems to me a relatively new age concept, compared with how our ancestors have lived over the past millennia. Not unlike our new age independence ideas, where for millennia before, cultures would have thrived in interdependence. The bigger question seem to me to be around the subjects of contribution, engagement and belonging. Like puppies, children run and play. They fall over. They pick up again, and when they need to draw near to their mothers again. We don’t guide them near cliff edges. We don’t bring them near riptides. But we provide opportunities to try new things, again and again, for hours and hours. This isn’t mollycoddling – they are gauging spacial awareness, and learning to risk assess.
Education is important, but children learn, physically and academically, within a sense of belonging. As well as honest interaction by parents, family, mentors, our children can learn without the factory principle of establishing unrelatable authority. Instead they learn true life skills – relationship boundaries.
https://thehappyhomeschool.com/helicopter-parenting-versus-supervision/