The Price of Over-Protective Parenting

Watch the child closely to recognize when you are really needed to step in to lend support verbally or physically, but give the child enough freedom to discover his safe limits for himself.
Raising children well involves a careful balance of providing the child with independence and intervention.
Avoid physically dominating your child in an over-protective manner.
Instead, alertly SPOT your child, whatever her age, when she is, say, attempting to climb up a tree.
As your child struggles to maintain his balance and his grip, he is developing his or her:
Muscular strengthr
Hand-eye coordinationr
Alert perceptivenessr
Over-all physical self-controlr
Healthy habit of surveying his situation to sense his safe limitsr
Responsible self-direction is the goal for effectively raising kids.
Child behavior management becomes easier as the child develops his capacity to skillfully manage his own behavior.
Giving children freedom to learn from a sufficient amount of experience means raising children toward alert sensitivity to their environment in all situations.
The child’s development of a keen sense of appropriate physical boundaries translates into a sense of his emotional boundaries as well.
For instance, his heightened awareness of his surroundings will alert him to the sense that you really don’t want him to open all the drawers in your dresser while you are trying to make the bed, and that sense will guide his choices.
Over-protective parents take too much control of child behavior.

They expect the child to display a poor sense of boundaries and step in too soon, before giving the child the chance to “read” the situation and make a responsible choice on her own.
The over-protective parent holds onto his child so much that he holds his child back.
He holds his child back by not giving the child a chance to develop his balance, his muscular strength and coordination, his physical self-control, his awareness of his environment.
Over-protective parents teach their children to rely too much on the parent and not enough on themselves.
Every parent wants his child to develop a healthy sense of responsible physical boundaries.
You don’t want your child, for instance, to carelessly walk off the upper landing of a flight of stairs, so that he falls and injures himself.
To teach the child more responsible behavior, be careful in how you intervene.
Certainly do not permit a child to injure herself as a lesson. But if you intervene incorrectly you are actually endangering your child all the more.
If you must stop the child from doing something, pause to point out the dangers of the action. You might say to your toddler, “Look at how far you can fall if you are not careful. Notice where the edge of this step is.” Have the toddler touch the edge to feel it.
You want to make your interventions instructive, not just protective.
After you intervene, though, don’t presume that one lesson is all it takes to keep your child safe. Continue to observe your child closely to recognize when he is heading too near the edge of a dangerous action.
You don’t want have to endless control your child to prevent him from hurting himself or others or wreaking havoc in his environments through mindless, uncontained child behavior, but being overly protective sets you up to have to do just that.