Parenting: Are We Teaching Our Children to be Slaves to the Expectations of Others?

Parenting: Are we teaching our children to be slaves to the expectations of others?

Here are some seemingly controversial excerpts from an interview with Daniel Kish on PBS this morning:

By protecting our children or projecting our fears of them getting hurt, we are creating slaves to others' expectations... When we lighten their load, we limit expansion... Rescuing robs children of the learning mode...Not wanting your child to suffer can hold your child back.

Daniel, 100% blind from infancy can ‘see’ with no eyes. Brain scans show the visual centers of his brain light up as he ‘sees’ three dimensional images while he rides a bicycle in traffic, hikes long distances in the wilderness alone, rock climbs, cooks for himself and more. All of this, he says is because his mother never limited his activity by trying to protect him from things most of us would say a blind child cannot do: climbing trees,  riding  bicycles, etc. She raised him not as a 'blind child' but as "a child who happened to be bind." 

Add to this, research on the effects of our expectations on animals and even inanimate objects such as the studies with rats running mazes more quickly when their human handlers believed they were smarter than the rats in the other test group and the HeartMath studies of  the measurable effect of  negative thoughts on dishes of yogurt; and you begin to grasp the value of an accepting, allowing, appreciative childhood, not just for blind children, but for all of us. Not just in childhood, but at all times, in all our relationships.