Читать книгу No Child Left Alone - Abby W. Schachter - Страница 11
ОглавлениеCriminalizing parents for raising independent, self-assured children
THOUGH IT WAS WRITTEN in the 1930s, this poem by Yiddish poet Itsik Manger perfectly presents the helicopter parent of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Manger’s description of a stereotypical overprotective Jewish mother easily fits the mold of a generation’s worth of American parents who “protect” their kids so well the children have been prevented from enduring any minimal risks or responsibility that would also surely broaden their lives.
As I complete this manuscript, Manger’s poem provokes a very different image and in some ways a more discouraging one. Individuals can change their individual parenting styles or techniques. But when a larger entity intrudes, change can become more difficult to effectuate. In the 2015 version of the poem, the parent replaces the son and the mother becomes the nanny state, issuing rules, conditions, and definitions for the proper care of children that supersede parental authority and squash children’s independence and self-reliance. And while there has been some backlash from moms and dads against helicopter parenting—the no failure, no risk, no independence variety—along with many parents who never would or could ascribe to that philosophy in the first place, the police, child protective service workers, school administrators, and others in authority assert the state’s right to punish parents for breaking its norms and laws.
The irony is that whether you are a helicopter parent, like the mother in this poem, or if you ignore, reject, or want to break out of this mold, too often some representative of our intrusive, overprotective government comes along to impose a whole separate legal standard of safety and care. As we’ll see in this chapter, the results are punishment for parents and a variety of negative consequences for children.
THE GODMOTHER OF ALL CAPTAIN MOMMIES
Lenore Skenazy decided to let her nine-year-old son Izzy ride the New York City subway alone. She wanted to allow her son a small taste of freedom and independence, while managing her own worry that something terrible might happen to him. A simple act of parental discretion turned into a movement, and Skenazy was reborn as the godmother of all Captain Mommies. What Skenazy uncovered goes beyond the single phenomenon—now all too common—of parents harassed by authorities for deciding to let kids be out in the world alone. Her decision regarding her son exposes the real conflict that exists between families and the nanny state and the harm that it causes the kids, their parents, and society at large.
The number of stories detailing mothers, fathers and guardians who have been harassed, threatened, humiliated, and arrested for allowing their kids to be alone and do for themselves is nearly endless. The adults affected by the overreach of police, judges, medical, educational, and social-service personnel come from the lower, middle, and upper classes. They are married and single. They are men and women. In other words, this is happening everywhere and to everyone.
The consequences for an adult range from the inconvenience of having to explain to a child why police were threatening and scary, to spending thousands on bail and lawyers’ fees, to being removed from your home and family. The psychological impact on adults is important, but the emotional and psychological impact on kids creates a problem for society when those same children mature into adulthood.
The adults and the kids lose trust in the people who are charged with keeping us safe and healthy, and the kids are kept from developing necessary life skills like self-reliance, creativity, intuition, and grit. The overreaction of the nanny state to young people who are allowed to operate independently feeds the already overly developed anxiety of too many parents regarding their kids’ freedom. Moreover, look at any bookstore’s shelf of current titles on education, child development, sociology, and public policy, and you’ll see one analysis after another of why deficiencies of these characteristics in our children is hurtful to us all.
Consider the best-seller How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, in which author Paul Tough shows that character matters more than intelligence when it comes to kids’ academic and life success. He focuses on what the research shows regarding teaching children self-reliance and self-control and what some schools are doing to try to incorporate those ideas into their curricula. But what about what happens beyond these few schools (Tough profiles two), when everyone else—the vast majority of schools, not to mention police departments and legislators—are actually working against parents who might want to promote these characteristics in their kids?
Tough is a fan of psychologist Angela Duckworth, who argues that grit is what educators should be teaching.
So far, the best idea I’ve heard about building grit in kids is something called growth mindset. This is an idea developed at Stanford University by Carol Dweck, and it is the belief that the ability to learn is not fixed. That it can change with your effort. Dr. Dweck has shown that when kids read and learn about the brain and how it changes and grows in response to challenge, they’re much more likely to persevere when they fail because they don’t believe that failure is a permanent condition.1
Parents who offer their kids some freedoms may not be doing so due to any understanding of such direct developmental effects. Certainly Skenazy wasn’t trying to teach her boy anything like Dr. Dweck’s lessons on perseverance and its importance to future success. Skenazy was giving her son the opportunity that she’d had when she was a kid, namely the chance to rely on oneself for limited periods of time and learn about how the world works. Yet in 2007 Skenazy caused an uproar when she wrote a newspaper column about allowing Izzy to ride the subway by himself. After her initial decision to let Izzy off his previously tight parental leash, she endured numerous phone conversations with the police to defend her choice. And as she explained it to me, she now believes that society is “criminalizing things that used to be perfectly OK, such as punishing parents for trying to raise independent children, [something that] used to be a value and now is worth a hefty fine or a stint in lock-up.”
After Izzy got home without incident the first time, Skenazy allowed him to ride alone again, this time on the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR). The security officers on his train weren’t happy. As she described it, the conductor wouldn’t listen to her son and radioed ahead to the next station, where the conductor held up the train until the cops came—the very stop where Izzy was getting off and his friend’s family was waiting on the platform to pick him up. The officer wouldn’t allow Izzy or the family to leave until he’d spoken to Skenazy.
Fluke, you say? No, because a couple of months later, when Izzy again rode the LIRR, Skenazy got another call requiring her to vouch for her son again. This time, the officer complained bitterly about the dangers of children riding alone, even though, as Skenazy pointed out, the LIRR rules state that any child over eight is allowed to ride the train unsupervised. “That doesn’t matter ma’am, what if someone tried to take him,” moaned the officer. To which Skenazy replied, “This is 5pm on a Thursday and I think that if anything bad was happening to [my son] the police would try to help him.” The officer only replied argumentatively, “What if two people were trying to abduct him?”
Such experiences reveal that the current default standard is that nothing is safe enough, says Skenazy, and police “are often in agreement that anything could happen.” Skenazy started a blog called Free-Range Kids, wrote a book, and became an advocate for changing the parental culture around allowing kids some freedom. She did a TV show and has appeared as a guest on dozens of interview programs and talk shows. At first she was talking mostly about changing the parenting culture. But now she spends a lot of time talking about reforming the law. What changed is that her experience with the police has been repeated over and over and over again by parents across the country and with far worse results.
Too often, authorities such as the local police or security officers impose rules of safety divorced from any real danger, by following what they perceive to be rules written so broadly as to be applicable to entirely innocent situations. In many cases, the police seem more worried about “what could happen” than even the most helicoptering parent, often overreacting in situations where nothing—nothing—has happened.
Such conflicts have visited injustice on some parents and have turned others into parental-rights vigilantes—a.k.a. Captain Mommies.
In July 2014, Debra Harrell of North Augusta, South Carolina, was booked for “unlawful conduct” toward a child for allowing her nine-year-old daughter to play at the playground near her home and her mother’s job. The cause of the complaint was another mother at the playground, who upon hearing from the girl that she’d been dropped off while her mother worked, decided it was best to call police to protect the girl. Did she need protection? According to other parents, indeed, she did. Lesa Lamback, who enjoys the park with her family, told a reporter that “you cannot just leave your child alone at a public place, especially. This day and time, you never know who’s around. Good, bad, it’s just not safe.”2
Skenazy has actually done the research, however. Given today’s crime statistics on abduction, as she explained to the New Yorker, it would take some effort to get your kid snatched away. “If you actually wanted your child to be kidnapped, how long would you have to keep him outside for him to be abducted by a stranger?” she asked Lizzie Widdicombe, her interviewer. “Seven hundred and fifty thousand years,” Skenazy said.3
The day of the alleged infraction regarding Harrell’s daughter, the playground was full of people; it was fine weather; and the girl could have walked the short distance home, where she had a key. Or she could have gone (and did go) to her mother’s job at McDonald’s to check in and have lunch. No matter. According to a lot of people, that isn’t good enough—children have to be watched every second, because you can’t know what might happen. What did happen as a result of alerting the police was bad enough, however. The girl was put into state custody because of her mother’s arrest. The mother was fired from her job for being in trouble with the law. (Her job was subsequently reinstated because of all the publicity.) Then the mother had to fight the charges, and a fund to help her was established. A lot of time and effort was taken up by the local criminal-justice and social-services authorities in order to find a solution to a nonproblem. Nothing had happened to the girl, which is a recurring theme in these cases.
PUNISHMENT WITHOUT A CRIME
Distance often doesn’t matter, as was evident with the arrest of 33-year-old Nicole Gainey. She was charged with child neglect in July 2014 after letting her seven-year-old son walk 800 meters from home to the local park. “I’m totally dumbfounded by this whole situation,” Gainey told a local TV station.4 “I honestly didn’t think I was doing anything wrong. I was letting him go play.” Gainey added that she planned to fight the felony charge. And fight she should, given that, at the time he was approached by police, Gainey’s son had a cell phone to call his mother, and he was playing with other kids whom he knew and who knew him.
Even when a parent is right on top of her kids, the law sees something out of the ordinary. A 2011 news item out of Houston, Texas, reported that one Tammy Cooper “was arrested and charged with child endangerment and child abandonment after her neighbor told police Cooper’s children, ages 6 and 9, had been abandoned.”5 In reality, the children were playing on the front lawn.
“After police arrived, Cooper told authorities that she had been sitting outside in a lawn chair watching her children the entire time.” No matter. She was handcuffed in front of her kids, even as the children pleaded with the police officer not to take their mom away. Cooper’s husband was away serving in the military at the time. Cooper was charged with “abandoning a child” even though she was with her children the whole time.
Cooper was reborn a Captain Mommy as she sued the LaPorte police department. According to her complaint, she “spent 18 hours in custody” and spent “over $7,000 in court and legal fees” before the unsubstantiated felony charges against her were dismissed. “The incident also led to an investigation by Child Protective Services, requiring Cooper to take her children to the CPS office in Houston,” where her children “were separated from her and interrogated by child abuse investigators. CPS found no cause for concern regarding the well-being of Cooper’s children and dropped the investigation.”6 As of December 2014, Cooper was still waiting for her case to go to trial so she could get her day in court. “I was hoping for some good news for Christmas but no!” she wrote on her Facebook page. “So I continue to be strong and pray for trial!! It must be nice to be all powerful and above the law to continue to keep this case from going to trial.”
A mom in Connecticut was charged with “risk of injury to a minor” and “failure to appear” after, according to Manchester’s police blotter, “she allowed her seven-year and 11-year old children to walk down to Spruce Street to buy pizza unsupervised.”
From the Johnson City, Tennessee, police blotter of June 7, 2012: “April L Lawson . . . 27 . . . was arrested by officers of the Johnson City Police Department and charged with child neglect. The arrest stems from a 911 call in reference to a missing child. During the investigation, officers discovered that Lawson had allowed her two children, ages 8 and 5, to walk to the playground.”7 Lawson had allowed her kids to walk to a nearby playground, but she became worried when she couldn’t find them later on (it appears they had gone to a neighbor’s house without telling her). When she called the police to help her find them, she became the focus of the investigation. Lawson was furious. “So I walked them across the street, watched them walk up the block to the park and went back inside. When the kids didn’t come home I sent somebody up here to bring them home,” Lawson explained. “I had no idea that I could get in this much trouble for just walking them up to a playground and play.”8 But how could she have known that she wasn’t allowed to let her kids be unsupervised, ever, at all, even for a minute? And was it really a valid use of police resources and good for the family for Lawson to spend the night in jail?
In August 2011, Richard Masoner reported on the Cyclelicious blog that police in Elizabethton, Tennessee, threatened to make an arrest and even bring in child services when a 10-year-old girl was observed biking home from Harold McCormick Elementary School. “A driver complained about a girl biking from school on a narrow residential road. The officer ‘observed that vehicles had to slow and negotiate around the cyclist’ on Cedar Avenue south of the school.”
Masoner explained, “To me, this seems like normal and expected traffic movement. The unnamed officer, however, [said that] ‘this section of the roadway is not a safe place for a child of her [age] to be riding unsupervised,’ so he loaded her and her bike up in the police cruiser, drove her home, and had a chat with the child’s mother, Teresa Tryon.”
When Tryon disagreed with the officer’s assessment, he informed her that he was going to report the incident and that it would be filed with the Department of Child Services. He also lectured Tryon that her daughter would have been safer riding on a sidewalk, given the heavy school traffic on Cedar Avenue, even though there was no sidewalk available.
For Lori Levar Pierce, sidewalks have become her main focus as a Captain Mommy, after her son got in trouble with the police for walking alone.
Pierce lives in a Mississippi town of 25,000. She’s a high-school teacher, and she admits that before the incident, she was your average, nervous, overprotective mom. One day her 10-year-old son was ready for soccer practice an hour early, while she was in the middle of cooking dinner. He asked if he could just walk the mile to the field on his own, and even though she was worried about it, she allowed him to go by himself. When Lori got to the practice a little later, she was accosted by a police officer who had picked up her son halfway to the field because (as he absurdly claimed) the station had received “over 100 calls” about a boy walking alone. The officer had stopped Pierce’s son, driven him to practice, then circled back to look for Pierce at her home, and, not finding her there, gone back to the field to berate and threaten to arrest her for “reckless endangerment.”9
Pierce was indignant. There aren’t 100 homes between her house and the field, so she remembers wondering to herself what the officer was talking about. She ended up complaining to the police chief, who apologized for his overzealous officer. Meanwhile Pierce became an activist citizen, and another newly minted Captain Mommy, advocating for safer streets and better sidewalks so that kids can walk or bike without fear of being hit by cars—or being hassled by police.
It isn’t only mothers who are harassed by police and CPS, either. Fathers feel the weight of the overbearing nanny state as well. A dad in suburban Pittsburgh was charged with two counts of reckless endangerment for leaving his kids playing at the playground while he ran errands. In this case, he had been at the park with them, and it was another “concerned” parent, who actually knew one of the children, who called the police.10
In Connecticut, Charles Eisenstein took to his blog, which otherwise concerns his activism on behalf of what he calls “degrowth,” to discuss a run-in with police when he was actually with his children. “Last weekend I decided I would get the kids outdoors for a little time in nature. The Susquehanna River was frozen over, with the most remarkable ice formations,” he wrote on his blog.11 Innocent enough, until four police cars and two fire trucks showed up. Eisenstein was yelled at by the police in front of his teenagers, threatened with arrest and cited for disorderly conduct. “This small incident reveals a lot about our society. First is the presumption that legally constituted authority should decide what an acceptable level of safety is for oneself and one’s family. I suppose going out onto the ice was more dangerous than staying indoors or on the sidewalk, but I deemed it in my children’s best interest to be outdoors in this amazing ice world.” Eisenstein writes that what bothered the officers was that he and his sons were engaged in behavior that was a violation of normality. But his point about who should decide the acceptable level of safety or risk in any behavior—the state or the family—is an important one.
It has become standard procedure to apply laws that were once used in child-custody disputes and abandonment cases to parents who want to let their kids do the same things they were allowed to do when they were kids. Is this really the proper use of the penal code? According to one Connecticut law firm, the charges of child endangerment, child neglect, or risk of injury to a minor are usually applied when a child has been put in harm’s way by adults. Lawyers explain that examples include outright child abuse, domestic disputes when a child is present in the room, and a drunk-driving accident when a minor is in the vehicle. Apparently, we’ve all silently and nearly completely acquiesced to fear in the wake of sensational child-abduction and murder cases like those of Etan Patz, Adam Walsh, and Noah Pozner. But the norm, not the shocking exception, should be the basis for governing our lives. When statistics clearly show that our country is safer than it used to be, should parents need to fear the trouble they might reap for letting their kids do things by themselves?
Danielle and Alexander Meitiv were bucking the trend of helicoptering and mindfully allowing their kids some freedom, while the state mindlessly accused them of neglect and put them through the child protective services ringer.12 “I was kind of horrified,” Danielle Meitiv told the Washington Post. “You try as a parent to do what’s right. Parents try so hard. Even though I know [the State is] wrong, it’s a painful judgment.”13
Meitiv was referring to a finding of “unsubstantiated” child neglect stemming from their decision to allow their 10-year-old son, Rafi, and six-year-old daughter, Dvora, to walk home alone. Someone called 911, and police responded to seeing the children unaccompanied. And even after the kids explained that nothing was wrong, they were still hauled home, where police and child protective services confronted the parents for allowing their kids some freedom of movement.
Slate’s Hanna Rosin, who has written about the problems with overprotective parenting, like many others who commented on the case, was upset with the decision by Maryland’s Child Protective Services. Rosin has become something of an advocate for letting kids gain experience and deal with risk, and she argues these decisions should be up to parents. Here, the child-welfare authorities had a different idea.
“What they learned from the latest CPS decision,” Rosin writes of her discussion with Meitiv, “is that ‘teaching independence clearly IS a crime.’” As Meitiv explained it, “the charge means ‘something happened but kids were not at substantial risk.’ Why then, she reasonably asks, ‘find us responsible for neglect?’” Rosin correctly points out that “a charge of ‘unsubstantiated’ is not quite as definitively closed as ‘ruled out.’ (The third option is ‘indicated,’ the equivalent of guilty.)” And leaving that door open is going to put the Meitivs in a difficult position. Rosin rightly demands,
CPS officials did not say they would keep an eye on the Meitivs. But now they have a charge of child neglect in their file. . . . They believe strongly that children should be able to roam the neighborhood unsupervised. But they no doubt believe even more strongly that they don’t want to be at any risk of having their children taken away from them for a second charge of neglect. Why on earth should the state have any right to put them in that predicament?14
Rosin was clearly reading the tea leaves, because there was a second incident in April 2015, when the Meitivs’ two children were lured into a police cruiser just a third of a mile from home with promises of returning them to their parents. Instead, the kids were kept in the police car for hours and delivered to CPS while they were denied all requests to call their mother and father. When the Meitivs were finally notified that CPS had their kids and they went to pick them up, officials offered no explanation for why they’d been picked up or why the parents hadn’t been informed for five hours. Seems the nanny state doesn’t like dissent or challenges to its authority. (We’ll see another case of this type of vindictiveness in Chapter 5, “The War on Fun.”)
A group called Empower Kids Maryland was formed in response. The idea: To raise awareness among parents about encouraging “children to become independent, confident young adults with sound, non-fear-based judgment about the level of risk that will surround them in today’s world,” according to their website. Initially the group was focused on changing the laws in Maryland that were used to punish parents like the Meitivs. As cofounder Russell Max Simon explained it to me when we spoke in 2015, his kids play at the same playground as the Meitiv children, and he wants to raise independent children without government oversight or intervention. “Enough is enough,” Simon told me. “Our focus is going to be working through the legislative process” to change the rules about children outside unsupervised. “This [issue] should cross political lines. It is a parental-rights issue not a right-left issue. I would think that parents would have more control over their kids. And I would hope that the politicians would agree” that the response to the Meitivs was “a waste of resources.”
The case exemplifies the extent of the problem because Maryland authorities felt unrestrained enough to interpret the Meitiv’s “crime” from words that aren’t part of the applicable law. The rule had stated that children under 8 are prohibited from being unattended in a dwelling or car and that a person must be at least 13 years old to supervise a child under 8. There is no reference to being outside, and in this case there was no “supervising” going on. The 10-year-old was walking with his 6-year-old sister, not babysitting her.
On the bright side, the attention paid to the Meitiv case has been positive for the family; they’ve heard from CPS that they’ve been cleared of charges from the initial intervention. But any relief has to be tempered by the realization that it was only through very public and hard-fought resistance of the state authorities that CPS was pushed into doing the right thing. How many parents are going to have the self-confidence to reject state intervention? It is important to recognize that the Meitivs’ got more attention than most of these cases. More often than not, CPS isn’t forced to defend itself in the media, so reform is often slow or nonexistent. It is also good news that the advocacy group cofounded by Simon has now been renamed Empower Kids America and has broadened its mandate to include the rest of the country. The growth of groups and grass-roots activists in favor of parental discretion is all to the good. And there is other important work being done as well.
In Illinois, an organization called the Family Defense Center researched the issue of “inadequate supervision” child-neglect claims—similar to the charges against the Meitivs—and concluded that the Maryland case was both unique and typical. Unique because of all the media attention, which most families caught in an unnecessary CPS investigation don’t receive. And typical because there are so many of this same type of accusation. The Family Defense Center report effectively stated the problem:
The range of cases that may come to the attention of child welfare authorities is so broad that child abuse reporters, parents, and their advocates, as well as judges and policy makers are unable to clearly and consistently use existing law and policy to distinguish reasonable parenting from child neglect. . . . [P]arents are swept into the system and labeled at fault when they have made reasonable parenting decisions. Child welfare system resources are currently being devoted to the investigations of neglect allegations, such as inadequate supervision, where children are not at risk. This means fewer resources to investigate and indicate the serious cases of neglect or abuse.15
When definitions of a problem get too vague, more and more cases will occur; and when the laws are badly written or misapplied, innocent families are the ones who suffer. (We’ll discuss problems with CPS lack of transparency more in Chapter 6.)
Back in Maryland, criminalizing parents for using their own discretion seems like something of a sport. A woman named Anna from Rockville wrote to Skenazy about being threatened by her daughter’s school principal for letting the 10-year-old ride the city bus to school.16 As the mom asserted to the busybody administrator, hers was a thoughtful decision. “We did a lot of planning and preparation before we allowed L. to ride the bus. As a parent I feel that it is my job to advocate for her right to practice this new skill, for as long as she wants to do it and for as long as we her parents continue to feel it is safe.” But that wasn’t good enough for the school, and the principal threatened to consult with local Child Protective Services to decide if allowing the girl to ride the bus was approved by those authorities.
As this mother pointed out, the saddest part of this whole affair was questioning a decision that was important for their daughter’s development and growth. As a result of riding the bus each day, she’d developed a whole new set of relationships with adults who rode with her. As the girl explained to her mom, the adults she was referring to as friends weren’t “kid friends.” Instead, she defined them as “people friends.” The mom learned about the Chinese lady, the lady with a baby that cried a lot, and the grandma who got on at the next stop. “In a few short weeks,” the mom reported, “my daughter had surrounded herself with a community of people who recognized her, who were happy to see her, and who surely would step in if someone tried to hurt her.” Isn’t this exactly the type of safety that we hope our kids achieve when they leave our care? And shouldn’t we embrace this girl’s independence rather than make her parent feel as if she’s done something wrong to allow it?
CRIMINALIZING PARENTS FOR TEACHING RESPONSIBILITY
In other states, parents have run afoul of the babysitting rules. One mother in New Canaan, Connecticut, was arrested and charged with “risk of injury to a minor” for allowing her older children to babysit for younger ones.17 Consider that a basic aspect of families is that members are supposed to care for one another. Is the law designed to contradict what are natural bonds? And why is the decision of who is responsible enough to babysit one that the government makes?
But arrest isn’t as bad a losing custody of your kids. The Atlantic’s Colin Friedersdorf reported in July 2014 on a mother who had lost custody of her four children because she left them home alone together while taking a class at the local university.18 She fought for four years—four years—to get her kids back, and as she told Friedersdorf, her whole attitude has changed.
An unexpected knock at the door still makes my heart beat rapidly. I’m more conscious of strangers’ stares and comments when I go out with my children. Ultimately, I found this ostensibly well-meaning system of child protection to be an exercise in often baseless finger-pointing, pitting neighbor against neighbor, family member against family member. As people vie for power and victory, it all becomes so much less about kids’ best interests and more about adults’ selfish interests. In criminalizing previously culturally normal activities, such as an unaccompanied child playing at a public park, we open the door for any unorthodox parental decision to be subjected to similar unfavorable scrutiny.
The Washington Post’s Radley Balko notes that from his perch as a chronicler of “the increasing criminalization of just about everything and the use of the criminal justice system to address problems that were once (and better) handled by families, friends, communities and other institutions,” he has noticed a growing list of stories highlighting “those themes intersecting with parenthood.”19 Balko was upset by the Harrell case in South Carolina, as well as the arrest of Jeffrey Williamson of Blanchester, Ohio, for “child endangerment” because his son skipped church and went to play with friends instead. As with so many of these cases, nothing had happened to the boy.
Balko’s criticism of these types of nanny-state interventions is right on; these problems used to be solved without police or child protective services, whereas today’s overreaction is going to cause both parents and their children undue harm.
You needn’t approve of the parents’ actions in any of these cases to understand that dumping them into the criminal justice system is a terribly counterproductive way of addressing their mistakes. (And I’m not at all convinced that three of the four stories were even mistakes.) The mere fact that state officials were essentially micromanaging these parents’ decisions is creepy enough. That the consequences for the “wrong” decision are criminal is downright scary. It doesn’t benefit these kids in the least to give their parents a criminal record, smear their parents’ names in their neighborhoods and communities and make it more difficult for their parents to find a job.20
In their book Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing, Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe raise a similar question about who should decide when a risk is too great and who—if anyone—actually has the power to use their independent judgment to override the system, which has inserted itself into decisions that used to be made by parents and guardians without outside interference.
Schwartz and Sharpe tell the story of a father who took his son to a Detroit Tigers game. The seven-year-old boy asked for lemonade, and the father bought him a Mike’s Hard Lemonade because that was all the concession stand had and he didn’t know it was an alcoholic beverage (he’s an archeology professor at the University of Michigan). A security guard saw the boy sipping the hard lemonade and called the police, who in turn called an ambulance. The boy was rushed to hospital where they found no trace of alcohol in his bloodstream. The story should have ended there as an example of overzealous concern on the part of police and ballpark security. But no. Instead, “police put the child in a Wayne County Child Protective Services foster home,” where he stayed for three days. “Next, a judge ruled that the child could go home to his mother, but only if his dad left the house and checked into a hotel. . . . After two weeks the family was finally reunited,” Schwartz and Sharpe explain.21
The authors note that at every stage the authority figures—the police, the judge, social workers—spoke of how they hated having to follow the rules but insisted that they had no choice; it was procedure. Shouldn’t these people have the independent discretion to decide whether in each individual case the rules are actually being applied to protect kids or whether, as with the hard lemonade example, a parent made a mistake that should not be punished by breaking up his family? But commonsense judgments aren’t allowed, argue Schwartz and Sharpe. “The policemen, the social workers, and the judge who took [the boy] away from his family, and then forbade his father to see him, were following rigid procedures that assumed that the judgment of these officials could not be trusted. As institutional practices like these become calcified, we lose our bead on the real aims and purposes of our work and fail to develop the moral skills we need to achieve them.”22
NANNY STATE VS HEALTHY COMMUNITIES
Threatening parents for letting their kids learn independence is not just a waste of precious resources that police and social-service agents really don’t have to spare. It harms our understanding of what it means to be part of a healthy and helpful community.
Children’s book author Kari Anne Roy was visited by police and child services personnel in Austin, Texas, after her neighbor “returned” Roy’s son to his house and informed police about her having allowed her six-year-old son Isaac to be outside unsupervised down the block from his house.23 If a visit from a policewoman, who didn’t file any report, it should be noted, wasn’t bad enough, Roy then had to deal with a Child Protective Services agent who came to her house, interviewed her kids, and did file a report. When writing about this experience for the Dallas Morning News, Roy stipulated that she understood why child services workers have a hard job and even why some of the procedures the agent followed were necessary. But even with that understanding, the impact of this experience is not without a serious cost to her and her children.
My kids reported that she asked questions about drugs and alcohol, about pornography, about how often they bathe, about fighting in the home. And again, I understand the need for these questions. I understand CPS investigators have an incredibly difficult job. But the conflict I feel is immense. My children were playing outside, within sight of the house, and now my 6-year-old and 8 -year-old and 12 -year-old have seen their mother spoken to—multiple times—as if she, herself, was a child being reprimanded. They have all been questioned, by a stranger, about whether they’ve ever been shown movies of other people’s private parts. And no matter what I say, I can tell that they think they’ve done something wrong.24
Roy was also bothered, and rightly so, that the woman who originally called police cannot be held responsible for causing trouble. “The neighbor can call CPS as many times as she wants. If she truly feels there’s neglect, she can’t be prosecuted for making false allegations. We could try to sue her for harassment. We could try to press charges for kidnapping if she approaches our son again and tries to get him to move from where he’s playing. But in all reality, when children are involved, the person who makes the complaint gets the benefit of the doubt. For parents, it is guilty until proven innocent.”25
Tracy Cutchlow, a mom and journalist, wrote for the Washington Post identifying the reason there are more and more stories like this one of adults calling the police because they see a child alone—either in a car, at the playground, or walking.26 “We can’t rely on our neighbors to help look out for our kids, and that’s why our neighborhoods don’t feel safe enough. When you let a 10- and 6-year-old walk home on their own, it feels scary because they’re fully responsible for their own safety. What’s missing is the sense that we’re all responsible for everyone’s children,” she explained. Everyone has heard the African proverb about bringing up our kids. But the conditions that underlay that folk wisdom are not always readily present. According to Cutchlow, “to reclaim any sense of the village it takes to raise a child, we need to start with knowing our neighbors. I don’t know half of the people living in my condo building, let alone on my street. How about you?”
ANOTHER TYPE OF STORY that has become too common is about parents who choose to leave their children in a car unattended in order to run a quick errand and are found guilty of a crime by the nanny state.
Kim Brooks wrote in Salon of her ordeal (100 hours of community service, lawyer bills, conviction for contributing to the delinquency of a minor) because police were given a recording of her son sitting alone in a car.27 Brooks had to run into the store, and her four-year-old son didn’t want to tag along. She decided to let him wait for her in the car. How did the police get involved in the first place? Why didn’t they tell the busybody recording this nonincident to mind her own business because they have other things to do?
New Yorker Alina Adams made sure that the law couldn’t come after her before she admitted in print that she lets her six-year-old daughter stay home alone for short stretches of time. And just like every other time she’s loosened the parental leash on her three children, this change came about by necessity. But as a matter of principle, Adams rejects the need for laws defining when children can be on their own. As she explained it to me, “I’m not a fan of arbitrary guidelines. I’m against mandatory minimums for kindergarten or retirement. [I’m] against government making that decision because it is an arbitrary rule without seeing what’s going on.”
Adams believes that every child is different, making each situation different as well. But that’s not good enough for nanny-statists who are convinced they are “saving the kids” by pushing for these laws. The one-size-fits-all solution is the only one government can handle, and so we get rules and regulations that interfere with parents’ choices rather than supporting them.
How did we get here? Skenazy is right that raising independent children used to be a value that society embraced. Indeed, television used to depict this independence as part of normal life. Take a look at the first few episodes of Leave It to Beaver, for example. The narrative is repeated in several episodes. The Beav goes off alone to walk to school, or into town to get a haircut, and some innocent trouble ensues. The first episode aired in 1957, when the Beav was supposed to be eight years old, and at that time the show’s writers took it for granted that a kid that age could and would go places alone. Now, you may be thinking, well, that was the time before crime rates exploded and the cities became dangerous. But standards of childhood independence were normative in the late 1970s as well. As Petula Dvorak pointed out in the Washington Post, the 1979 standards of readiness for first grade (six-year-olds!) included answering the following questions in the affirmative:
• Can your child tell, in such a way that his speech is understood by a school crossing guard or police, where he lives?
• Can he travel alone in the neighborhood (four to eight blocks) to store, school, playground, or to a friend’s home?
• Can he be away from you all day without being upset?28
Such a checklist would be deemed completely inappropriate today, except for the last one, maybe. But why should standards of self-reliance have changed so dramatically? There are various answers.
For Schwartz and Sharpe, the biggest issue is our society’s lost moral will, which they prefer to call practical wisdom, otherwise known as common sense. We need an “antidote to a society gone mad with bureaucracy” they argue, but that kind of personal judgment is simply not something our current culture will tolerate. We have decided we need rules, standards, and regulations to make our children safer, and we are not allowed to ignore those standards and regulations for the sake of our children’s development or in favor of our own judgment. Police, judges, and child-welfare workers, meanwhile—those who are supposed to be enforcing the rules—aren’t allowed the discretion to decide whether the rules are being correctly applied.
As Scott Simon remarked on NPR in regard to the “hard lemonade” case, “[T]he public officials involved . . . needed practical wisdom and the discretion to exercise it.”29 Schwartz and Sharpe believe practical wisdom is a skill that can be nurtured and taught if we were to develop the “institutions to nurture it.” But they see our society moving in the opposite direction. “In our ever more corporate, and bureaucratic culture, constant demands for efficiency, accountability and profit have led to an increasing reliance on rules and incentives to control behavior,” they argue.30
LACK OF FREEDOM COSTS OUR KIDS AND OUR COMMUNITIES
Philippe Petit, tightrope artist and author of Creativity: The Perfect Crime, says there is no intuition or creativity without practice, and that requires that parents trust their kids. “[M]y proposal is to not open a door and, you know, propel the kids forward, but to open the door a tiny bit and have the kid use it, moving the door that was ajar. Now it’s full. And then they’re going to discover; they’re going to explore with their own way of thinking, their own intuition and improvisation. And then, yes, the adult is there to make sure there’s no accident.”31
Petit is describing a commonsense approach and the willingness to allow for failure. Trial and error is a basic method of learning, and it demands both halves of that pairing. Without stumbles, failures, and risks (horrifying as the latter word may be to our ears), we cannot inculcate skills important to kids’ development and character.
Psychologist Peter Grey talks a lot about creativity and skills that are lost because kids are not allowed to be alone, unsupervised, or spend unstructured time with other kids. When Grey interviewed Danielle Meitiv, he noted that her children appeared self-assured. “When we assume that children are irresponsible, they may behave irresponsibly (partly because they have so little opportunity to practice responsibility), which reinforces our initial assumption. It’s a vicious cycle. My own experience has been that children almost desperately want to take responsibility, for as much of their own lives as they can handle, and when allowed and trusted to do so they rise to the occasion and feel proud and happy.”32
Meitiv seconded Grey’s view, explaining that “given the opportunity, kids often prove to be much more capable than we expect. My own kids have done so numerous times.” But state institutions are not interested in this essential road to adulthood. Meitiv explained that not only did they have this terrible experience with the local police and child protective services, but that her children’s school personnel have also repeatedly undermined her choices to allow her kids their own independence. Their only basis for this interference, she claims, is that “anything can happen.” Meitiv told Grey how she’d turned this mania into a game with her elder son. We speculate “about the ‘anythings’ that could happen. Aliens could abduct him from the hallways! Rampaging wildebeests could trample him! An asteroid could flatten the one classroom where he is doing his homework. Sadly, one thing we don’t expect anytime soon is an outbreak of logic or common sense.” (We will further discuss stifling creativity by quelling independence and self-reliance in Chapter 5.)
A lack of grit and stick-to-itiveness among children has become a hot topic in education recently as well. As Tough explains in How Children Succeed, parents should want to engender traits like conscientiousness, self-control, curiosity, and perseverance in their kids since those are better indicators of success and satisfaction and the kind of future we want for our kids.33 But as these many examples of government interference show, the teaching of self-reliance and self-control to children is unacceptable to the nanny state when practiced by parents rather than as part of a school’s curriculum.
Grit was also the subject of the February 2013 Harvard Education Letter, discussing the importance of certain character traits for students’ academic success. “We have really good research showing the correlation between perseverance and grit and student success,” Boston University assistant professor of education Scott Seider was quoted as saying. “But there is very, very little research that demonstrates that we can take the level of grit or perseverance that a kid has and increase it.”34 This is crucial. Seider is right: Schools can’t find a way to increase grit and perseverance in kids because those are character traits, and character traits are effectively taught by parents, not teachers. Yet when parents naturally demand such characteristics from their children, as when Debra Harrell believed her child capable of minding herself while her mother worked, police and child services come along to punish and criminalize parental discretion. So not only aren’t we encouraging families to build up our children’s positive character traits, the state is actively denouncing and degrading those families that are providing their kids what professionals have decided is a significant advantage to their future success.
Kari Anne Roy knows that her kids and others are going to pay some kind of price for the society in which they are being raised. “What I want to talk about are children who don’t feel safe outside—not because of stranger-danger or threat of immediate injury, but because the police will be called if they’re just playing like we played when we were young. What will members of the Always on Screens Generation be like when they’re adults? When they weren’t afforded the ability to play and explore and test limits and problem-solve, when everything was sanitized and supervised, when the crimes committed against them were more likely to happen online than in the park across the street? What will this do? How will society be affected?”35
Captain Mommy Roy is coming at the problem of self-assurance from the other side. What will happen to the kids who have developed a fear of police (from being interviewed without their parents about their parents and their home life) and at the same time have been shoved inside their homes because their parents fear allowing them any freedom? Can such children grow up to be the self-assured, independent, entrepreneurial, and fearless adults we so often say we want to ensure that our economy grows and our society improves? And what of these future adults’ sense of responsibility for their neighbors and other residents of their communities? Will the experience of having a neighbor call the police on their parents really engender a sense of shared mission with those who live on the same block or in the same apartment complex?
As Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote in The Week, the fraying of our communal fabric is not a positive development.
The decline of neighborhood solidarity isn’t universal across America, and it seems far more advanced among upwardly mobile neighborhoods than in working class areas. But it’s one of the most obvious and profound changes I’ve noticed in my own day-to-day life. And it makes me suspect I won’t be able to give my children the independence that I know is best for them.36
Dougherty is right that he is going to face opposition should he try to give his children the gift of their independence. But there is another concern as well. In her book about resilient cities, president of the Rockefeller Foundation Judith Rodin argues that when neighborhoods lack solidarity, it is harder for neighbors to function effectively as first responders in the face of emergencies and crises. Neighbors who are strangers and who call the police on others’ kids, rather than concerning themselves with the fate of an unaccompanied child, are less ready to help out when the inevitable crisis hits the local community. And a crisis will come, says Rodin. She argues in The Resilience Dividend that since “crisis is the new normal,” it is ever more important to develop our resilience, which she defined in the Huffington Post as “the capacity for an entity—individual, business, community—to plan for a disaster and rebuild more effectively and adapt and grow in the face of disaster.”37
“Communities that know one another and trust one another are more resilient in times of disaster because often your neighbor is your first responder no matter how effective the official response network. If you don’t know your neighbor and they are not willing to act for you and you for them you are simply less resilient.” Even though her book is about responding to emergencies, Rodin has an important lesson to teach parents, police, administrators, and authorities about improving children’s lives. Neighbors who get to know one another, meet each other, and connect because of their physical proximity are much less likely to call the police, as one neighbor did to Kari Anne Roy. Instead of needlessly bringing in the authorities, children and parents can learn to trust their community a little more and, hopefully, if necessary, even help one another in an emergency.
TO CHANGE THE CULTURE, CHANGE THE LAW
After nearly a decade of fighting for parents’ rights to choose for themselves the level of freedom to allow their offspring, Skenazy believes it is time for laws to reflect that value as well. The current message to kids is harmful, she says. “The world is not perfect—it never was—but we used to trust our children in it, and they learned to be resourceful,” Skenazy told the New York Times. “The message these anxious parents are giving to their children is ‘I love you, but I don’t believe in you. I don’t believe you’re as competent as I am.’”38
She’s written a kids’ and parents’ bill of rights that she hopes to get legislated everywhere as soon as possible. The proposed legislation reads in part:
[T]his legislature decrees that children may walk, cycle, take public transportation and/or play outside by themselves, with the permission of a parent or guardian.
Allowing children to exercise these rights shall not be grounds for civil or criminal charges against their parents or guardians, nor shall it be grounds for investigation by child protective services, removal of the children from their family home, or termination of parental rights.39
Skenazy’s proposed law also deals with the epidemic of parents accused of neglect for choosing to have their kids wait in the car while they run a quick errand. This parental-rights legislation aims to increase common sense and lessen the regulatory burden as well. “More children die in parking lots than die waiting in parked cars while their caregivers run an errand,” it states. “The majority of children who die in parked cars were forgotten there for hours or got into the car unbeknownst to anyone and could not get out,” the legislation continues.
Punishing parents who let their children wait in the car for five minutes will not bring back the children forgotten there for five hours.
Therefore, parents should be allowed to make their own decisions, based on the location, temperature, and duration of their errand, as to whether or not they wish to let their child wait in the car.
Laws against children waiting unsupervised for a short amount of time in a parked car shall be repealed.
There is good reason to hope that Skenazy is successful, even apart from protecting the rights of parents to bring up their own children. Legal reform might ease the way for more of today’s children to be allowed to gain the skills necessary for adulthood. Several recent books and articles suggest that, especially among many young people who go to college, adulthood and responsibility are about the last thing they are capable of.
Some of this comes from overprotective parenting, to be sure. And indeed, former Stanford University dean Julie Lythcott-Haims writes in How to Raise an Adult about her firsthand experience dealing with college students over the past two decades and how often basic life skills are missing among what is otherwise an accomplished group. What once came naturally is now not happening within the process of maturation at all. Lythcott-Haims claims
[t]here’s a scarcity of information on how one acquires life skills, presumably because children who are otherwise healthy and developing normally used to develop these skills naturally in the normal course of childhood, and we’re only just beginning to recognize that these skills are missing in many children and must be affirmatively taught.40
In August 2015, well-known social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and noted civil-liberties and free-speech crusader Greg Lukianoff wrote a startling piece for The Atlantic chronicling the same desperate problem described by Lythcott-Haims, namely, the trouble with young people and their difficulty dealing with mature responsibilities. “The current movement [on college campuses],” they wrote, “is largely about emotional well-being. . . . [I]t presumes an extraordinary fragility of the collegiate psyche, and therefore elevates the goal of protecting students from psychological harm.”41 The authors then chronicle the impact this angry protectiveness—that is, punishing those who attempt to interfere with the goal—has on the students themselves.
“Vindictive protectiveness,” Haidt and Lukianoff declare, “teaches students to think in a very different way . . . [preparing] them poorly for professional life, which often demands intellectual engagement with people and ideas one might find uncongenial or wrong.” Having to engage with people who think and act differently than yourself is supposed to be a function of adult life, not just a job requirement. The authors argue there is a more immediate impact as well: “A campus culture devoted to policing speech and punishing speakers is likely to engender patterns of thought that are surprisingly similar to those long identified by cognitive behavioral therapists as causes of depression and anxiety.”42
And lo, depression, anxiety, and drug and alcohol abuse are now more prevalent on college campuses than ever before. No one is saying there is a straight-line correlation between how kids are raised and their inability to handle open debate and opinions with which they disagree. But as we’ve noted throughout this chapter, parents who embrace their role as guides to adulthood, including developing their children’s grit, self-reliance, and psychological and physical independence—what Lythcott-Haims calls “affirmatively” teaching life skills—run up against the nanny state.
Sociologist Frank Furedi argues that we are getting the wrong outcomes—the outcomes Haidt, Lukianoff, and Lythcott-Haims decry—because we are misunderstanding what children need to succeed and providing exactly the wrong tools.
The tragedy is that the best way to protect children is to cultivate their aspiration for independence and autonomy. It is through the experience gained from engaging with the world that children gain the resources to manage risks and develop strategies for dealing with threats to their personhood. Sadly, in the current climate of child protection, parents are discouraged from doing precisely what is likely to provide their kids with the existential security they need to make their way in the world.43
It may seem like a Sisyphean task to change these laws. But Skenazy is correctly pushing for legal reform at the local and state level because these decisions should be debated and decided locally, and a single federal standard is neither workable nor desirable.
It is useful to remember, too, that not long ago a group of parents had to fight tooth and nail to change the laws so that they could raise their own kids as they saw fit: what started as a trickle became a tidal wave of reform for homeschool education. As described by Dana Mack in her book The Assault on Parenthood, the Captain Mommies of the 1970s and ’80s were “home schooling families . . . [who] often ran afoul of compulsory school attendance laws, their children labeled ‘truants.’ Many of them were forced to battle criminal charges in court, and there were even cases of children being carted off to foster homes by welfare workers.”44
Why did parents in practically every state in the union have to fight local authorities and ordinances to be allowed to keep their kids home to learn? Mack quotes homeschooling advocate Stephen Arons for the answer. According to Arons, homeschooling “threatened the educational establishment by implicitly attacking its claims to professional status” (that you needed to have a teaching certificate in order to educate kids) “and by challenging the indispensability of school services to families and children.”45
Mack argues that the homeschooling fights were part of a bigger problem. She says the larger issue is “a contest over what have become two distinct political cultures in our nation: the political culture promoted by extra familial child-rearing institutions versus the political culture promoted by families.”46 It seems that, a generation after the homeschooling fights of the 1970s and ’80s, the new battleground between parental authority and the official authority is childhood independence.
