6 Ways to Help Empower Your Kids
Empowering children sometimes means doing things that make you as an adult or parent feel uncomfortable. As well-meaning individuals, we often err or on the side of perceived safety to limit our children’s experiences. Unfortunately, that can be detrimental, since we may be unnecessarily preventing their growth.
Speaker Gever Tulley, in this TED talk posits that the best way to help kids learn is to stop trying so hard to keep them safe. He makes the valid argument that sheltering and inordinate focus on perceived “safety” leads to cutting children off from valuable opportunities to interact with the world around them. Kids will find ways to do things of interest to them anyway, so ultimately to be safer and more empowering, we should give them the tools to do so. That way they can become more creative, confident, and in control of the world around them.
Below are brief summaries of his tips from the TED talk.
1. Let children play with fire
- learn to control elemental force of nature
- better than playing with Dora the Explorer dolls
2. Let kids own pocketknives
3. Throw a spear / throw stuff generally
- our brains are wired for throwing things
- need exercise to avoid atrophy
- stimulates frontal and parietal lobes to develop visualization skills and predictive ability; helps develop attention and concentration
4. Deconstruct appliances
- next time throwing out something, take it apart with your kids
- shows them that seemingly complex things can be understood
5. Break the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
- important to understand that laws sometimes get broken by accident
6. Drive a car with your child
- they can get a handle on world in a way they don’t often have access to