zenana jaysyn navadya

[Marthe Bernskoetter]

Editor's note: This story discusses the practice of giving children the freedom to go out on their own. In some places, parents who allow young children to run errands or go places without adult supervision may violate local laws. Parents interested in this topic should be sure to familiarize themselves with the law and rules in their community.

A few years ago, my husband and I had a bit of a situation on our hands. Our 4-year-old daughter had figured out how to climb onto the roof of our home. After breakfast in the mornings, we would find her perched, like a pigeon, three stories above a busy city sidewalk. (It makes me a bit nauseous to think about it).

The first morning, I tried to coax her down by asking her nicely ("Rosy, please come down. That is dangerous."), nagging a bit ("Rosy, I'm serious. You have to come down. Please. Please") and eventually issuing a flimsy threat ("Ok. If you don't come down, we won't get ice cream on Friday.")

Then the fourth time she went up there, I was a bit fed up and decided to try and fix the root of the problem, instead of just the symptoms. I was in the middle of writing a book about parenting around the world, and I had heard the same advice over and over again: When a kid misbehaves they need more autonomy; they need more responsibility.

In particular, Maria de los Angeles Tun Burgos, a mother in Yucatan, Mexico, put it quite succinctly: "Can Rosy go to the store and run an errand for you," she suggested after I told her about Rosy's escapades.

So, looking up at the little daredevil hovering over the gutters, I decided she was finally ready to do just that. So I said to her: "We're out of milk. Can you run up to the market and buy us some milk?" The market is two blocks away.

The show, called Old Enough!, has aired in Japan for more than three decades, but it's new to an American audience. On the show, children ages 2 to 4 are charged with running an errand for their parents. Camera people follow the kids. A narrator comments on their progress.

It's not clear how much assistance the production crew gives the little boy. And with a laugh track behind the commentary, the show feels a bit silly. Sometimes the commenter even seems to mock the child's actions.

Indeed, Old Enough! shines a fresh light on the American attitude toward giving kids autonomy and responsibility: Our society, as a whole, has somehow forgotten that running errands has massive benefits for kids. As a result, many parents have forgotten how to teach kids to do it.

All around the world, little kids, even as young as ages 3 or 4, run errands for their parents. In fact, if you look across cultures, not running errands is an oddity, anthropologist David Lancy explains in his book Child Helpers.

For example, kids in many parts of Europe walk to school and make trips to the grocery store alone. "Kids in primary school go shopping at the bakery and the supermarket by themselves, proud of their independence," a reader named Katrin from Germany wrote to the New York Times in 2018.

Same goes for kids in many parts of Mexico. "Of course she can go shopping," Tun Burgos told me about her 4-year-old daughter, Alexa, in 2018. "She can buy some eggs or tomatoes for us. She knows the way and how to stay out of traffic."

As the child becomes more capable, the tasks become more complicated. "Adults match their assignments to the child's level of skill and size and each new assignment ratifies (and motivates) the child's growing competence," Lancy writes in a 2012 paper, called The Chore Curriculum.

"Autonomous play has been a really important part of child development throughout human evolutionary history," says behavioral scientist Dorsa Amir at the University of California, Berkeley. "And actually, it was a feature of American society until relatively recently as well."

Autonomy has oodles of benefits for kids of all ages. Studies have linked autonomy to long-term motivation, independence, confidence and better executive function. As a child gets older, autonomy is associated with better performance in school and a decreased risk of drug and alcohol abuse. "Like exercise and sleep, it appears to be good for virtually everything," neuropsychologist William Stixrud and educator Ned Johnson write in their book The Self-Driven Child.

And when children don't have enough autonomy, they can feel powerless over their lives, the pair write. "Many kids feel that way all the time." Over time, that feeling can cause stress and anxiety. In fact, Stixrud and Johnson argue, lack of autonomy is likely a major reason for the high rates of anxiety and depression among American children and teenagers. Autonomy provides the "antidote to this stress," they write.

"The biggest gift parents can give their children is the opportunity to make their own decisions," psychologist Holly Schiffrin wrote in the Journal of Child and Family Studies. "Parents who 'help' their children too much stress themselves out and leave their kids ill-prepared to be adults."

And yet, in America, parents aren't only discouraged from giving kids autonomy, they can get in legal trouble. As NPR has reported, parents in several states have been arrested for leaving kids unattended, for letting them walk to the park on their own or even allowing them to walk to school. This can happen even when the child is clearly not in danger but rather quite capable of handling the autonomy.

"We now live in a country where it is seen as abnormal, or even criminal, to allow children to be away from direct adult supervision, even for a second," the nonfiction author Kim Brooks wrote in a 2018 essay for The New York Times about fear in American parenting.

Yet across the country, towns and cities are safer for kids than they've been for decades. Since 1995, the number of children reported missing each year has dropped by 50%, the Federal Bureau of Investigation finds. The vast majority of those cases involved kids running away from home or a parent taking the child without informing the other parent. Despite the drumbeat of fear about kidnappings, only about 100 kids are abducted by strangers each year according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

"We do not think about the statistical probabilities or compare the likelihood of such events with far more present dangers, like increasing rates of childhood diabetes or depression,' Brooks writes in the Times.

I believe that Rosy feels stressed by the physical boundaries imposed on her. That stress causes her to push against these boundaries and misbehave. At age 2, she figured out how to unlock three doors so she could sneak out in the morning and run to a park. Then at age 4, she would climb onto the roof.

And when it was finally time for Rosy to go to the market, the first time, she actually didn't go alone. Instead, I did something that Tun Burgos in the Yucatan suggested: I followed her, stealthily, from a distance. "When I let Alexa go [at first] ... I would send one of her sisters to follow," she explained.

For the first few trips to market, I kept an eye on Rosy the whole time. I stayed about 40 feet behind her, hiding behind trash cans and bushes, so she thought she was alone. I watched her cross the street carefully, hitch the dog up to a post outside the market and then buy everything on the grocery list. Seeing her accomplish all these tasks, with thought and skill, gave me the same feeling that I had at the end of "Old Enough!": I thought, Wow, kids are so much more capable than we think! And Wow, American society is really holding them back.

If your kid is anything like Rosy, they will cherish and love these moments of responsibility and autonomy. I just asked Rosy, now age 6, if she remembers the first time she went to the market "alone." She not only remembered it, she knew exactly how old she was.

Share a personal example. Why did you decide to do it? What were the challenges? Was your community supportive? Send your thoughts in an email to goatsa...@npr.org with the subject line "Kids and errands." Please include your name and location. We may feature it in a story on NPR.org. The deadline is Monday, April 25. UPDATE: This call out is now closed. Read responses from some of our readers here.

However, every now and then, a documentary just seems to speak to me. This was the case with the documentary, The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, and it was also the case for The Man With 1000 Kids, which I found one night while I was scrolling through Netflix.

But then, the story hits some low-lows, and you can see the parents seething, and crying over what Jonathan has inadvertently (Or possibly on purpose) done to hundreds of families. I was quite shocked at how this documentary was able to walk on both ends of the spectrum of comedy and seriousness.

However, all of the parents seem wronged, but also acknowledge that maybe they should have done a bit more research when acquiring a donor. And Jonathan Jacob Meijer, while often displayed as being selfish and a narcisist, also has a backstory where you can sort of understand why he wants to have so many kids.

I am on the kids and family acquisition team where we license TV shows and movies for kids of all ages and backgrounds. Kids and family content is a happy vibe, and I find myself smiling when I watch it.

I chose economics because it seemed like a good stepping stone for many different avenues, from entrepreneurship to economic public policy. I chose consulting in a similar way: I was not sure exactly what it was, but I knew I would learn a heck of a lot. There was so much challenge and variety in consulting. I originally focused on government clients in Washington, DC then switched to financial services when I transferred to New York. When I could not see myself sticking with it forever, I started looking into entertainment.

But parents may not want the kids to watch episodes of "Clifford the Big Red Dog," though I don't know why because he's adorable, or "Happy Birthday Barney," which I totally get can grind on a parent's last nerve.

90f70e40cf