Broken Parenting
How did you spend your childhood? Sheltered, inside, at school-sponsored activities? And your parents? Independent, outside, left to their own devices? Why is there such a drastic difference in just two generations? In “The Overprotected Kid” from The Atlantic, Hanna Rosin attempts to answer this question, and explain why the change might have serious consequences. Many parents today are afraid of their children being hurt, when all the overprotectiveness cannot save children from the kind of freak accidents that caused the protection in the first place. Parents are refusing to allow their children the freedom and space to mature that defined childhood. Mental illness, obesity, and other serious problems are rising as children are more and more sheltered. Rosin’s main point is that the sheltering, the stifling, of childhood is negatively impacting children and their ability to function as adults.
Rosin begins her essay with a quote about adventure playgrounds: “A trio of boys tramps along the length of a wooden fence, back and forth, shouting like carnival barkers.” (1) This narrative continues for the next three paragraphs. Starting an essay with a narrative makes the point more memorable. A story sticks in the mind better than statistics and facts. Rosin tells of her time taking her son to an adventure playground in Scotland. This narrative shows why her essay is important, both to Rosin and to others. The narrative also sets up the future structure of the essay: bits of narrative followed by facts, examples, and statistics.
The narrative melds effortlessly into the next section of the essay, a description of what an adventure playground is, and why they are important. An adventure playground is a playground with “loose parts that kids could move around and manipulate.” (2) An adventure playground allows kids to “face what to them seem like ‘really dangerous risks’ and then conquer them alone.” (2) The description makes the narrative more effective by fully showing what use it has in the narrative. If any readers were unsure of what the narrative meant in the wider context of the piece, the description of how the playground helps children develop makes the narrative more important and useful to the essay as a whole. This is contrasted with the following section, in which Rosin shows what is happening to playgrounds in America. Parents sue the government for accidents, and playgrounds become homogenized, each one exactly the same, straight from a box.
Rosin uses the next section of her essay to explain why the playground safety movement is hurting child development with a reference to an expert in the field. Ellen Sandseter, a professor of early childhood education, says, “By engaging in risky play, children are effectively subjecting themselves to a form of exposure therapy, in which they force themselves to do the thing they’re afraid of in order to overcome their fear.” (5) This is a quote from a respected expert in the field that gives credibility to the essay, but it is also a logical appeal. The fact that facing one’s fears helps to make one less afraid of those things is common sense, and apparent to everyone. The insertion of this quote strengthens the argument by showing how it is logical, and not a random interpretation of a few facts.
The next large part of Rosin’s essay describes a study done in a rural New England town on the movements of children. Roger Hart, a geography student, tracked the movements of 86 elementary school children of various ages. The children spent most of their time away from home in places where their parents had no contact with them. The children played in their own way and made their own imaginary worlds in which their parents had no part. About thirty years after the study was completed, Hart went back to the rural New England town to see how the children he studied in the seventies were raising their own kids. He noticed that they were raising their kids completely differently than they had been raised: constant activity, small roaming area, continuous supervision. The contrast between the two studies helps to drive Rosin’s point home. Rosin organizes elements of both studies side by side, so the readers can see exactly how total and serious the change is. This is a logical appeal because the difference is apparent and logical in the reader’s mind.
Following the contrasting of the two studies, Rosin brings up the bigger issues surrounding the changing of childhood. She quotes Peter Gray, a Boston College psychologist: “…the fallout from the loss of the old childhood culture, and it’s a familiar list of the usual ills attributed to Millennials: depression, narcissism, and a decline in empathy” (9) Here Rosin brings up a theme repeated over and over again on the internet (the problems with Millennials) and shows where it came from. The fact that Rosin brings up something that is common in many people’s lives makes her point stronger. The explanation of this theme appeals to the reader’s logic and helps to further strengthen the essay.
At the end of her piece, Rosin brings back the narrative that began the essay. “Kids, unparented, take on pack habits, so as the youngest and newest player, he’d been taken care of by the veterans of the Land.” (10) The act of taking the essay back to where it started reminds the audience of all the points made within, and helps to tie everything into a narrative, something that a reader is more likely to remember. The narrative helps readers remember the essay long after they read it. The human mind is built for stories, and if an argument can be woven into a story, the brain is more likely to remember it.
As the narrative ties the essay up with a bow, readers are left to mull over Rosin’s main point: that a quest for safety and protection has gone overboard and ended up hurting a generation. This point is helped by the rhetorical devices used to make the argument. Logical appeal guides readers to the point. Narrative makes the essay memorable and personal. Exemplification shows Rosin’s point clearly. Metaphors, similes, and analogies emphasize the major points of the essay. Hanna Rosin utilizes her craft perfectly to make the reader remember what she wants them to, and to explain a large and complicated issue.
Works Cited
Rosin, Hanna. "The Overprotected Kid." Atlantic Apr. 2014. Print.