Katie Arnold is a freelance journalist and editor who writes Raising Rippers for Outside online. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with her husband, two young daughters, and puppy Pete.

“This is what elk mothers do. When predators approach, they run away, leaving their babies, who aren’t strong enough to walk.” Photo by Nicole Mason / Stocksy.
In late May 2019, while visiting Vermejo Park Ranch in northern New Mexico, my family and I were out on a wildlife safari in a remote valley when we spotted a newborn elk calf wobbling across the road, trailed by its mother. It was the beginning of calving season, and the baby elk was minutes old, its fur still wet. When it saw us, it flopped to the ground, while the cow bolted in the opposite direction, running up a ridge until she was out of sight. Distressed, we watched the calf flatten itself into the dirt, all alone.
Our guide, Pete, explained, “This is what elk mothers do. When predators approach, they run away, leaving their babies, who aren’t strong enough to walk. Most of the time, the mothers come back for their calves but only after the danger has passed.” After a minute, we drove on, not wanting to scare the mother away for good, while Pete continued, “Bison mothers do the opposite. After their babies are born, they’ll stand their ground, snort, and charge to keep them safe.”
Afterward, I couldn’t stop thinking about the difference between elk mamas and bison mamas. Their two styles of parenting seemed to encapsulate everything I’d been wrestling with since becoming a mother—the fine line between giving kids too much independence and too little, overprotection and tough love, smothering and neglect.
My own approach to child-rearing has spanned the spectrum. When my girls were infants and toddlers, I was terrified that I’d forget them in a field while hiking and they’d be eaten by coyotes, or that left alone at home, they’d choke on a grape or get tangled in blind cords. Their vulnerability triggered something primal and bison-like in me, and their survival was paramount, the single most defining focus of my life. Deep down, though, my inner elk grieved the freedom I’d lost when they were born; I needed time to myself to run and think and write. I hired babysitters, enrolled them in part-time daycare, and tried to tend to my own needs while tending to theirs. The time apart was as essential as it was wrenching: I hated to leave, but I always came home happier, calmer, and more myself than when I’d left.
Now that my daughters are older, the bison in me has taken a back seat. At ages eight and ten, they’re responsible enough to walk to school and back alone. They can use public restrooms without me, ride the chairlift solo, and help paddle a pack raft down Class II rapids. They’re big enough to stay home alone and not have every minute scheduled and to be bored. None of this is by chance: we’ve practiced and prepped for this progression—my husband and I as much as them. It takes training to let go.
In today’s parenting culture, this isn’t always a popular position. Over the past generation, child-rearing has become a competitive sport, our kids’ performance a measure of our own worth, an approach that requires more intensive parental supervision than ever before. “Snowplow parents,” the latest incarnation of helicopter parents, strive to eliminate all obstacles and hardships in the way. Such hypervigilance isn’t always in the service of our kids, though. An essential part of growing up is learning to assess risk, develop grit and resilience, and hone problem-solving skills without parents always butting in.
As Jessica Lahey writes in her bestselling book The Gift of Failure, “In order to raise healthy, happy kids who can begin to build their own adulthood separate from us, we are going to have to extricate our egos from our children’s lives and allow them to feel the pride of their own accomplishments as well as the pain of their own failures.”

A baby elk. Photo by Katie Arnold.