Island Girl Power
‘Moana’ warns against helicopter parenting
STAY away from the water! At the beginning of “Moana,” the Disney film released over the weekend, the title character, at first a curious toddler, wanders away from her family and toward the beach. Every mother in the audience is thinking: “Someone get that kid! Where is the lifeguard?”
After what seems like an eternity of Moana coming dangerously close to being pulled away by the tide, her parents find her and carry her back to safety. Over the ensuing years, they do this again and again, to the point where Moana’s father is slinging a teenager over his shoulder, warning her never to go past the reef.
The film will be cheered as many things — an entertaining holiday film, a princess story without the slightest hint of romance, a multicultural addition to the Disney family — but best of all, it’s a sharp attack on helicopter parenting.
Unlike most of the young women we meet in fairy tales (both old and modern), Moana has a happy childhood and never wants for anything. Like many middle-class American kids today, she has two wonderful, caring parents who only want what’s best for her.
Unfortunately, their overprotectiveness makes her less prepared for the challenges she’ll face as she gets older. This becomes especially obvious as she sails off across the ocean on a small boat that she has no idea how to steer.
Both literally and figuratively, Moana is lost in the middle of an ocean. She doesn’t know how to use the stars to guide her. She doesn’t know she can’t fall asleep while steering or how to tie rope knots. Of course, there are forces on her side — the ocean is “her friend” — but our goal for our children shouldn’t be to leave them dependent on the kindness of strangers (or bodies of water).
It’s only Moana’s grandmother, who remembers a time when her people used to be able to go past the reef, who encourages Moana to leave. With the benefit of age, she knows it’s important for kids to take some risks and, in this case, if she doesn’t, the consequences will be dire.
In fact, the ability to navigate is one of the skills that fewer and fewer of our children have. Partly it’s because of technology — the GPS device is always with us — but partly it’s because we never let them wander anymore. Richard Louv, author of “Last Child in the Woods,” says that our children are actually losing their “spatial sense,” the ability to determine where we are, to imagine the scale of the area around us as a result of the limits we place on kids.
When my son was 6, I remember him pouring over an atlas on our family room floor. He asked me about finding Massachusetts on a map — that’s where his grandparents live. When I told him to look further north, he seemed puzzled. “Which direction is north?” I asked. Without hesitation, he answered, “Up.” It was a perfectly logical answer for someone who liked maps but was used to seeing them pinned to the front of a classroom rather than actually using them to get places.
Whether through scouting trips or family camping or simply navigating their way around the neighborhood, kids used to get a sense of direction. They mastered what Moana’s people called “way-finding.”
But now we never let the kids out of our sight. A friend who lives in Washington with two children under the age of 3 told me that when she gets home from work and has to prepare dinner for the kids by herself, she won’t put them in front of the TV or give them her phone to play with. Instead, she puts them inside a gated area in the kitchen with some toys. She calls it “the circle of neglect.”
As our kids get older and prepare themselves for life outside of our home, we want the “circle of neglect” to expand gradually. We want our boundaries to grow bigger and bigger, knowing that our kids have learned lessons from being confined to smaller boundaries and have proven themselves to be responsible adolescents and now young adults.
We may never feel they’re ready for the ocean. But if we’ve done our job right, they will be.