5 Worries Parents Should Drop, And 5 They Shouldn't : Shots - Health News Blog. Hide captionWorry less about the problems that are rare and more about the commonplace risks that can lead to real harm. iStockphoto Shoomp shoomp shoomp. Hear that? That’s the sound of helicopter parents hovering over their children, worrying every second of the day that terrorists could strike Johnny's school or a stranger will snatch Jane from the bus stop. Scary stuff. "These worries that we have are so rare," says Christie Barnes, mother of four and author of The Paranoid Parents Guide. Based on surveys Barnes collected, the top five worries of parents are, in order: Kidnapping School snipers Terrorists Dangerous strangers Drugs But how do children really get hurt or killed?
Car accidents Homicide (usually committed by a person who knows the child, not a stranger) Abuse Suicide Drowning Why such a big discrepancy between worries and reality? This unnecessary worrying, she argues, is detrimental to parents. So, what’s a worried parent to do? Small Basic. Role Models. My 16 year old daughter (in the orange sweater with a player on her lap in the photo) and her friend got up at 9:15am this morning, about three hours earlier than they'd ordinarily get up on a saturday morning, and headed over to the local public school to be assistant coaches in the Greenwich Village girls basketball league. Both of my girls played in this league in their middle school years and then assistant coached in it during their high school years. The skills and experience they developed playing in this league allowed them to be leaders and top players on their high school team.
Earlier this week, when I showed up at my daughter's high school game, I saw one of the younger girls on her Greenwich Village team in the stands cheering her on. As I sat there this morning watching these little girls play basketball, I was thinking about role models. I talked a bit about role models in the Fast Company interview I did last month. Role models are so important. The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids. What do we make of a boy like Thomas? Thomas (his middle name) is a fifth-grader at the highly competitive P.S. 334, the Anderson School on West 84th. Slim as they get, Thomas recently had his long sandy-blond hair cut short to look like the new James Bond (he took a photo of Daniel Craig to the barber). Unlike Bond, he prefers a uniform of cargo pants and a T-shirt emblazoned with a photo of one of his heroes: Frank Zappa.
Thomas hangs out with five friends from the Anderson School. They are “the smart kids.” Thomas’s one of them, and he likes belonging. Since Thomas could walk, he has heard constantly that he’s smart. But as Thomas has progressed through school, this self-awareness that he’s smart hasn’t always translated into fearless confidence when attacking his schoolwork. For instance, in the early grades, Thomas wasn’t very good at spelling, so he simply demurred from spelling out loud. Thomas is not alone. Why just a single line of praise? Why did this happen? That sold me. TED | Talks | Gever Tulley: 5 dangerous things you should let your kids do (video)