Helicopter Parents vs Free-range Kids

According to a recent article on Newsweek concerning children’s’ education, there is an increasing number of parents worrying their kids to an extreme extent, depriving them of independence and freedom by keeping them around parents all the time.
Some people applaud this phenomenon, suggesting that kids’ safety is the most important. Thus, they’d better not enter the hazardous society without supervision unless they become adults. From my point of view, some of their opinion is correct but keeping children away from independence is a completely erroneous decision. The reasons are as follows:

First and foremost, “locking kids” may hinder their healthy growth, both mentally and physically. The kids who are locked may have heavy reliance on their parents, as their comprehensive skills such as communication skills or cooperative spirit being prevented from developing.

Secondly, what these parents fail to see is the fact that the crime rate and accidents aren’t on a rapid rise. It is the abuse of mass media that make crimes and violence more scary. The parents, who love their kids so much, are completely forced to live under the illusion that our society is full of riots or threats of accidents. Thus, kids can be allowed to have more freedom such as walking to school by himself, for instance.

From what has been discussed above, we may safely draw a conclusion that kids should be given more freedom by parents’ effort. At the same time, parents should take many factors into consideration such as the time restriction for children and the evaluation to kids’ maturity and capability. Only then can they enjoy a safe and meaningful childhood.