How Overprotective Parents Affect Children s Lives

Have you ever wondered if protecting your child might actually be limiting them? I mean, we all wanna keep our children safe, but can we go too far? I'm Nicoleen Peck, and I help parents learn how to be calm, how to create systems and structures in their home where their children can learn the adult skills and the lessons that they need to be successful without micromanaging everything. In the meantime, because that can be detrimental. So in this video, as we discuss how overprotective parents affect their children's lives, then I'm gonna show you the difference between protection and preparation. Why do we do it? Why do we suddenly start overprotecting our children? I think it's because we're afraid. You know, we're nervous. We care about our children. We don't want them to fail. We don't want them to have hardships, whether socially, physically. We don't want them to be in any danger. And so we absolutely want the very best for our children. And I think that's a given. We are living in a time, though, where we have now seen firsthand what has happened when you overprotect your children in certain ways. In fact, I've done it myself. So I am a Gen X parent, which means that I was underprotected as a child. My parents just kind of turned me loose and they, you know, let us play out in the field and, you know, run around the streets of the neighborhood and ride our bikes who knows where. And it was, you know what, for the most part, a really great life. It was so free and stuff. But also we got into some pretty bad things, sexual things, bad language. Kids got into substances that, you know, there was stuff that happened in that neighborhood culture. And we were navigating it without telling our parents because our parents weren't even having those types of conversations with us. They were just, you know, letting us play after school. And then we'd come inside and they'd turn on the TV and we'd watch that and see all kinds of stuff we probably shouldn't see on the love boat. Or Fantasy Island or whatever it was. I mean, that was what life was like. And so our generation of children, when they got exposed to so many sexual things and stuff like that and had so many bad things happen, we decided that we wanted to be really protective of our children. I mean, there were things, you know, that were on the rise. Homeschooling started to become a thing where parents were like, no, we're doing this. We've got to get them out of that environment. And I actually was one of those parents. So I took in therapeutic treatment care children. I did foster care for a lot of years for troubled teens. And I also raised my own four biological children. And my children, my four children, I actually homeschooled them. Some of it was because academically they were advanced and, you know, and plus I wanted to have time with them when I was also doing foster care at the same time. But then I can't deny that there was a part of it that I just kind of wanted to protect them from just all the stuff that they'd have to deal with at school that I knew what was there and I just didn't really like it. And I will say with my older children, I was probably a little bit more protective than with my younger children. So my older children were babies at the time I was doing this therapeutic treatment care in my home. And so I had to keep them really protected, really safe. I mean, there were people who had been perpetrated on and who had been perpetrators in my home. And I had to keep very strict boundaries in order to keep everybody safe. And you know what? I did. Nobody got abused. My children didn't develop bad behaviors or habits. Like it was really a foster care success story, you know, because there are bad things that can happen sometimes. And in our home, I was vigilant about keeping my children safe. And so I probably was slightly overprotective on some things though, you know, like, I mean, the word choices. It was like, we're not gonna say this word, this word, this word, this word, this word, you know, we're not gonna watch this, this, this, this, you know, and we're not gonna do computer games and we're not gonna do all these things. And it was a lot. And actually I think it was good for our culture to create that. But when my children got a little bit older, those two older ones, I think felt like they hadn't experienced a few things in life that they wished that they could in order to be able to identify with their peers a little bit better. So I probably overprotected on a couple of things. They experimented with a few things. They got a little bit too sucked in to their devices at first when they got them in college, you know, and then they would call me and say, I think I'm addicted to this. I gotta take time away from this phone, you know. And so there was a little bit of that, you know, that happened. But I think one of the biggest things, especially for my oldest, is I was just determined that he was gonna succeed. And so he didn't really have, I think, enough failures. So my oldest was just like the golden child. I mean, he was so smart. He still is, still so smart. So smart, so kind, so caring, so motivated. I mean, just, there was nothing he couldn't do. And I just helped that along even more, I would say. And so the one thing that really became limiting for him was that he did not get enough chances of failure. And when he went out into adulthood and he kind of failed at some things. He failed at some of the things he tried. There were some relationships that were more dramatic and he didn't quite know how to handle it because everything at home was just so great all the time. And he really probably needed to have a few moments of failure. Now, this doesn't mean that I wanted our family to be yelling at each other and having dysfunctional relationships because that would not have helped him too, right? That would have made him reactive on everybody, emotionally reactive. And in fact, I know he would have been because he really seems to adapt to what's happening around him. And he could definitely bring that in and start arguing with people. Now he's a calm person. He's self-regulated. He knows how to rein himself in. He learned all the self-government lessons but he had a hard time dealing with failure at first in his adult life. And it took him a little while. It was hard to see as a parent of an adult child this person who was stumbling through a few things. Now the younger children, because they saw his mistakes got to gain the benefit of like, oh, well, he had a hard time with this. Well, maybe I won't have that same hard time because now I've seen it. Or they got to try a little bit more because I already knew because of him what was okay to try and maybe not okay to try. So he had less experiences. They had a little bit more experiences with things. I probably had more conversations with them too about stuff. And so I feel like they were protected by the conversations instead of by the sheltering. I probably did shelter a little bit too much with my oldest and I regret that. At the same time, you don't wanna make the mistake of not doing any protection because that gives them the message that you don't care. And for some people, especially if they're pleasers or obligers, they could go down a track that would be self-destructive. So you have to have some standards that are high. You have to have a bar that's high enough. And in our family, I think we really finally hit that sweet spot on all of that. Okay, so yes, they need some protection, but don't take it too far. Hopefully that story wasn't too much to tell that. But I thought maybe that that would be useful to you to just understand where I'm coming from on this. But the one thing that all my children had, which I'm so glad, was really good preparation. And I think preparation is more important than overall protection, even though you do want to not throw your child into everything hard because then they're gonna think of that as normal. When I started homeschooling, I remember hearing a professor talk about homeschooling and saying that the idea was not to isolate the child, but to insulate the child when I was homeschooling them. And I loved that imagery of the insulation that really spoke to my desire to prepare them for success. So I then focused my efforts on giving them the preparation that they needed, teaching them the skills that they needed to be successful, teaching them the four basic skills of self-government, which can be learned in my four children's books, teaching them about calmness and what they needed to truly be calm in their moments where life seemed crazy. They needed to learn how their brain work, how to have a calm plan for themselves, what it takes to choose calm in the minute. Those things are talked about in my new set of children's books actually called The Calm Crew, three books related to preparing a person to learn calmness. So The Calm Crew, the four basic skills children's books, those are all gonna be really helpful for planning, but you also need to teach your children the skills that you are going to learn for success too. So parents need to learn skills of self-government in order to be predictable for their children. If you just make it up in the moment, the children will start to become emotionally reactive to your parenting methods. So it's good to have a plan for yourself, even if you're not normally a planned person, plan for your parenting. I'm a live-in-the-moment person, which means I'm just like a party waiting to happen and I can be totally spontaneous, but I also, when it comes to parenting, I stick to the plan because the plan is effective. It decreases the anxiety, it increases that predictability, it increases good communication and problem-solving when you need it most. So I'd like to help you with that plan. And there's a lot more that I can share with you that really takes more time than what we have in this video today. So there is a full-length class, it's a video called The Not-So-Known Secret for Parenting Success. And in that video, I talk about the skills and principles that you need for self-government so that you can help prepare yourself and your children so that you can both be successful after this parenting journey.