Freedom, Responsibility, and the Art of Letting Go

Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body. - Elizabeth Stone
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One evening a few weeks ago, I was walking from South to North Campus on my way to the parking lot. When I reached the PAC, I saw a parent sitting quietly on the steps. Looking for context, I glanced over to the Jungle Dome. Near the building, a backpack lay on the ground. An elementary student was sitting on the swings. I quickly realized what was happening – some excellent parenting.

The child was refusing to carry her backpack, and instead of rescuing her and carrying it himself, or getting into a power struggle, he took a loving yet firm approach. To me, that is the best kind of parenting. Children need boundaries in order to feel safe; they also need space to own their choices and experience their consequences – good and bad. In Montessori, we call this the cycle of freedom and responsibility. As Montessorians, we believe it is our job to align the level of freedom we give the child with the level of responsibility they demonstrate. 

When my daughter was young, author Wendy Mogel published two excellent parenting books, Blessings of a Skinned Knee and Blessings of a B-. Our North Campus book club read The Anxious Generation last year, which conveys a similar message: children need to experience frustration and failure to become emotionally healthy and successful adults. At the same time, they also need to feel unconditional love.

I went to Parents’ Weekend at my daughter’s college last weekend and found myself reflecting deeply on my own parenting, asking what I would do the same and what I would change if I had the chance to do it all over again. The things I feel best about are when I didn’t step in and rescue my daughter, but instead let her learn from her decisions. Or when I enforced a boundary, especially when it was hard. The things I feel worst about are the times when I let her negotiate her way around something I should have held firm on.

It can be heart-wrenching to watch your child struggle. But what I know for sure is that if we let our children learn from their mistakes when they are young, they make fewer of them as they get older. This is important because the impact of mistakes when we are young is much less than the impact of mistakes when we are older. 

And so, kudos to the dad doing all the right things and letting his daughter come to the conclusion that carrying her backpack is her responsibility. Those are the small moments that turn into big lessons.