In her new book, “Drive,” Janine Walker Caffrey outlines nine steps to help parents encourage their children to be resourceful and ambitious, starting at a young age. In this excerpt, she writes about why sheltering kids too much can keep them from pursuing goals.

The plastic bubble
Have you ever watched a coming-of-age movie like "Stand by Me," "Now and Then" or "The Sandlot"? These movies include groups of children playing and having adventures together. The characters are presented with great challenges and work together to resolve the matter at hand. They are without adult supervision for much of the time. They don’t have cell phones or any contact with adults who can help, so they must rely on themselves and their own instincts to solve problems. These children take great risks as they navigate through the dangers and end up growing tremendously through their experiences.

While problems in these movies are more extreme than most children will ever experience, they illustrate beautifully how adversity, challenge, and risk help us grow. It is no accident that these movies are usually set in the early 1980s or before. During those times, children were expected to roam free. When I was growing up in the ’60s and ’70s, we were not allowed to come into the house until dinnertime! We had to play with our friends and invent our own fun. Some of my fondest memories of my preteen and early-adolescent years involve riding bikes through our neighborhood, climbing trees, walking along creeks, and even finding dinosaur bones in the park down the street. We chased dogs, watched the neighbors who we believed were in the mob, invented stories, and imagined vivid scenarios that involved heroes and villains. Yes, there were some bumps and bruises along the way; we made some mistakes and did get into trouble occasionally. But I credit these experiences with helping me become more self-reliant and independent.

In contrast, many of my students spend their afternoons differently. Steven, age thirteen, comes home every day after school at about three thirty. He gets off the bus and uses his key to get into the house and locks the door securely behind him. The first thing he does is call his mom to let her know that he is home safe. Then he turns on the TV and either plays video games or watches cartoons while he munches on snacks until his mom gets home, at about five thirty. Steven has been engaged in this after-school latchkey ritual since he was about ten years old. He knows how to keep himself safe by not answering the door or letting anyone know that he is home alone. Steven likes this schedule, and Steven’s mom feels confident that he can handle being alone in this way. She thinks it is helping him learn to be self-sufficient. But is it?

While it is important for kids to check in with parents, so their parents know where they are at all times, they still need the freedom to do things outside and explore within a set of boundaries. Steven’s house acts like a plastic bubble, keeping him from the potential dangers of the outside world. If he were outside, he would be in great peril from strangers and the physical injuries that can come from skateboarding, bike riding, tree climbing, and all the other things that boys tend to do when left to their own devices. He may get into arguments with other boys or, even worse, his mother fears, engage in very dangerous behavior such as smoking or drinking. And what if he were to get abducted?

Parents today are fearful of allowing their children small moments of unsupervised time and even more fearful of allowing them to roam free with a roving gang of kids. We want to do all we can to keep them safe. Why, there are perverts and drug dealers out there, outside the plastic bubble of home. I often hear things like “The world is so dangerous today. So many things can happen.” Well, the truth is that the world has never been safer. Children growing up in typical neighborhoods in the United States enjoy an incredible level of safety. Studies show they are not more likely to be abducted today than they were in previous generations. The truth is that the rate of stranger abductions has not increased, and it is possible that it has declined. However, due to the advent of global twenty-four-hour cable news networks, we see images of missing children near and far replayed over and over again each time it happens.

According to the 2005 NISMART report from the U.S. Department of Justice, there are only about 115 cases of child abduction in our entire country each year. Although this is 115 too many, it is certainly not the epidemic that many of us believe it is. Keeping our children indoors for fear of abduction by strangers is very much akin to keeping our children off airplanes for fear of a crash — which is very rare indeed — or out of cars for fear of an accident. Parents who really want to protect their children from harm should in theory keep them out of automobiles, right? That is where many, many children die each year. But of course, we would never do that. Our kids wouldn’t be able to get to school or soccer practice or any of the other activities that teach them so much and help them grow.

The parents’ challenge today is to recognize the many dangers of the world and to equip their children to do the same while instilling the confidence and self-reliance that are necessary to become independent, productive adults who live away from home. We can think of children, adolescents, and young adults as developing butterflies and take some cues from the metamorphosis that occurs from egg to caterpillar to flight.

MORE FROM

4 Day Diet: Tame temptations, lose weight

4 Day Diet: Tame temptations, lose weight To find happiness, turn losses into wins Robin McGraw: Feel young at any age Venus envy: Recognizing your hottest week Rabbi: Facing cancer and finding faith Diet sabotage! 4 obstacles to fat loss   Strength training for kids Does life suck? Go from crappy to happy Women: For best workout, add weights Make small changes for a big eco-impact   Add headlines to your news reader: