My daughter can sit up and reach for things. Woot. Braggin’! When we spend time with other kids who are around her age, she sometimes gets complimented on her skills. Recently, a mom jokingly told me that she was jealous and asked how I “got” her to do these things. I responded jokingly, but truthfully, “Neglect.”

As we continue to swing from one side of the parenting pendulum to the other, I find myself (surprisingly?) championing the idea of letting kids be. I like the balance that Catherine Newman seems to have struck in her NY Times parenting blog post, Give Kids Your Undivided Attention- Or No Attention At All. She suggests that we fully attend or fully ignore our kids. And in these days of pushback to helicopter parenting (this didn’t used to be a bad word!), I think we all could use a little reassurance that letting go doesn’t result in a) our kids continuously getting hurt b) our kids never learning anything c) our kids not knowing that we love them- which were, perhaps, some of the worries that made us hover in the first place.

My daughter is sleeping now, so I can fully attend to my writing, but when she is awake, I often feel a guilty pull to be near her even while she entertains herself happily with her toys. Am I narrating her play enough? Will she hear those extra 30 million words when she’s young if I’m ignoring her? I work to watch and not intervene all the time. But it is often a conscious slow-down rather than my first instinct.

If we allow ourselves to name our computer time or reading time or phone time while our kids take care of themselves, maybe we’ll be more able to let ourselves off the hook. It’s not bad if I’m doing some computer work while she’s awake and around. It’s just better for both of us if I’m fully engaged in whatever it is I’m doing. That way she can get used to doing certain small things on her own, like reaching for her toys that have gotten away. When she knows that I’m not paying attention, she manages things for herself much better than when I’m present. When I sit down on the floor with her to play or watch her, she almost always needs rescuing from me when she didn’t before I got there. She “asks” to be picked up or repositioned. She whines for something she can’t reach. This is not to say that I am not going to spend time with her simply because she gets more needy when I’m around. But it does underline that her being on her own a bit is good for her, even at her young age.

My parents have often quoted the term “benign neglect” to me as the vague style of parenting that they used when my brother and I were young. So while I joke about my neglectful parenting, I think that there may be some merit to the idea.