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When we control children according to "guidelines," we train them to lose a sense of their internal compass.

When teachers prize obedience and punish kids when it is not achieved, there is no space for individuality.

There is something beautiful about holding space for children to recognize who they are and what they want.

It is a scary and confusing time to be a parent. We hear that kids' mental health has been declining in the past few decades, with many pointing fingers at screens, video games, and social media. There are guidelines for "healthy" amounts of screentime, outdoor time, reading time, and more. I don't know about you, but I feel the pressure to adhere to these guidelines acutely. As in, if I'm not, then I am doing my child a disservice.

I think culturally we do our children a far greater disservice—in the form of control. Think of all the ways we associate control with good parenting (consider this concept in the frame of teaching as well). We believe our job is to force our kids to eat vegetables. And limit screentime. And participate in youth sports. And read books.

But control isn't safety. When you make a child eat another bite of broccoli that they don't want, it suggests that their internal readings of fullness and craving aren't important. When you tell a child they can't play the game they love, you indicate that their interests should be quashed. We think of it as training our children to lead a good life, when in reality, it is training them to lose a sense of their own internal compass. We teach them to override their signals. Perhaps we even teach those signals out of them.

This leaves our children without a strong sense of self. When children show low self-esteem, anhedonia, frustration intolerance, or emotional dysregulation, we then talk about those symptoms as characteristics of the child. It becomes part of their self-concept when, in reality, those symptoms are a reaction to their environment.

These are two sides of the same coin of control. Either we are regimenting our........

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