Melissa Anderson on community
From If You Love Them Let Them Go | Melissa Anderson Sweazy | TEDxMemphis · · TEDxTalks
“We no longer raise children in villages. We raise them from behind computer screens. Neighbors have become strangers, and strangers on social media make us feel terrible about our choices.”
On , Melissa Anderson, Chief Business Transformation Officer at Albemarle Corporation, spoke about community during If You Love Them Let Them Go | Melissa Anderson Sweazy | TEDxMemphis on TEDxTalks.
About Melissa Anderson
In a 2015 TEDxMemphis talk, Melissa Anderson Sweazy, then a filmmaker and mother, discussed the trend of "helicopter parenting" and argued for giving children more independence. She cited a statistic that American children have less than 300 yards to roam unsupervised and noted that the United States ranked 15th on the World Happiness Report, below Mexico. Sweazy stated that "if you really love your children, you'll listen to the real experts who are telling us to give them some space, because their mental health just may depend on it." Sweazy described making a film called "John's Farm" about a nervous father, calling it a "parable about the very nervous dad." She acknowledged her own difficulty in allowing her eight-year-old daughter to walk home unsupervised, but recounted a specific instance where she agreed to let a neighbor's daughter walk her child home. She observed that the children's play "looked remarkably the same" as her own childhood. Sweazy attributed the loss of children's roaming freedom to a shift from raising children in villages to raising them "from behind computer screens," where "neighbors have become strangers."