Читать книгу No Child Left Alone - Abby W. Schachter - Страница 9

Introduction

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

—C. S. LEWIS¹

DO YOU WANT TO SEE government operating as if it can and should raise your kids for you? Try enrolling your child in state-licensed daycare. When our eldest daughter was 18 months old and started at the local preschool, the intrusion into our family’s decisions started almost immediately with strict rules about which foods I could send from home and how I should prepare and portion fruits and vegetables. My husband and I would joke by singing “Peel Me a Grape”!

I used to inquire about the reasons behind each of these policies. The answer was always the same, whether it was an issue of safety or hygiene, cleanliness or health: The state says so.

As the years passed, the rules piled up. No plastic bags. We had to provide multiple sippy cups because once a cup is proffered it cannot be used again. Requirements for daily sunscreen slathering, and a state mandate that all uneaten food be thrown out lest anything become “hazardous” over the course of the day—these are just a few of Pennsylvania’s daycare decrees. We got used to all that. It was annoying but tolerable, until I had my fourth kid.

When my son’s caregiver inquired what she should know about him, I asked for exactly one thing: Please swaddle him for every nap. Swaddling means snugly or tightly wrapping baby in a blanket. It keeps them feeling safe and secure, and it is the only baby advice we followed. Harvey Karp, author of Happiest Baby on the Block, is a genius! It had worked for our three daughters, so we were sticking to it with our baby boy. No can do, the daycare lady said apologetically. The state doesn’t allow us to swaddle.

I was shocked. In the three years since my third child began daycare, Pennsylvania, along with several other states, had changed the regulations to include a ban on swaddling. The reason is safety, because there have been cases of babies suffocating when covered by thick, loose blankets, and the overarching threat of SIDS. This is less common now that we’re all taught to sleep babies on their backs, but it is still a danger, though there are no reported cases of babies suffocating due to loose blankets at daycare, certainly not in Pennsylvania (I checked). But I wasn’t thinking about any of that when I learned about the new rules. As a mother, I want to do what works, and what worked for my other three kids—whether sleeping at daycare or at home—was wrapping them tightly in a blanket, like a burrito. Around the same time, Dr. Karp took up the cause as well, telling the Washington Post that banning swaddling in daycare was misguided. “We know it increases sleep and reduces crying,” Karp said. “Those are extremely important goals.”² Amen, brother.

I demanded to know what I could do and was told that a doctor’s waiver would allow the daycare workers to wrap my son. I tried one pediatrician at my kids’ practice, and she refused because the American Academy of Pediatrics doesn’t recommend swaddling after two months. I eventually found a pediatrician who signed the waiver and became my instant hero. With the waiver, my boy was wrapped for naps. I was happier, my son slept more, and the daycare workers had an easier time caring for my baby.

After four kids you’d think I would be used to this sort of bureaucratic intrusion into my personal decision-making. And up to a point I was. But more and more government-mandated parenting started getting under my skin.

I was fed up. And when push came to shove, I fought for my rights. But how many other parents would do the same?

Lots, it turns out. Mine was only the most personal instance what turns out to be a much more widespread phenomenon of the authorities getting between parents and their kids. I had joined the ranks of the Captain Mommy Squad, protectors of parental rights, defenders of personal family authority.

I’m a journalist, along with being a parent, so, as part of my job blogging and writing, I started paying attention to similar stories. What I found was that I didn’t know the half of it. Too many parents have had run-ins with government nannies just for exercising their own judgment. These parents are facing far more dramatic situations than my own. Indeed, they make up a whole subpopulation of persecuted moms and dads who are willing to stand up for their right to raise their own kids. These are the Captain Mommies and Daddies.

There have been banner headlines about a rash of “criminal” moms and dads. Danielle and Alexander Meitiv got in trouble with police and child protective services for allowing their two kids to walk home alone. Nicole Gainey, a 34-year-old mother of two, was arrested on a charge of felony child neglect for allowing her seven-year-old son, Dominic, to walk alone to the playground less than a half-mile from her home in Port Lucie, Florida. South Carolina single-mom Debra Harrell was arrested for letting her nine-year-old daughter, Regina, play unattended in a nearby park while she worked. And a mom from Scottsdale, Arizona, was arrested and her kids taken into state custody after leaving two of them alone in a car while she interviewed for a job. Nothing happened to any of these children, and yet the state decided to punish the parents.

There are kids who have been threatened with suspension for contravening the school zero-tolerance policy for bringing parent-packed herbal drinks to school because the beverage may contain trace amounts of alcohol. And since I make my kids’ lunch every day I was especially upset to read about a four-year-old in North Carolina who had her home-packed lunch confiscated. It seems her turkey and cheese sandwich, banana, potato chips, and apple juice didn’t meet the standards set by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, as understood by the school’s government-empowered food inspector. “What got me so mad is, number one, don’t tell my kid I’m not packing her lunch box properly,” mom Heather Parker railed to the newspapers.³

Parents have begun to feel disrespected by their kids’ schools. In Cumberland County, Tennessee, Jim Howe was arrested at his kids’ school when he complained about the policy banning walking into the building to pick up his children, instead of driving up. One principal threatened a visit from child protective services if a mom continued to allow her daughter to ride the city bus to school. Other parents have gotten intrusive letters telling them their kids are getting fat.

One dad was given a citation from police for disorderly conduct because he argued with officers who reprimanded him for taking his kids to frolic on the banks of a local frozen river.

ALARMED BY THIS EVIDENCE of a growing society-wide campaign to preempt individual parenting choices and criminalize choices that do not conform to state standards, I started following up with phone calls. I spoke to a mom in Atlanta who described how at her kids’ private school, the board had just been forced to accept a new rule that all parent volunteers henceforth be “mandated reporters.” Parents were now supposed to be on the lookout for any “inappropriate” behavior among staff and students and report it to the authorities. The mom and I both wondered why any parent would want to become an unpaid agent of child protective services? Shouldn’t mandated reporters be trained and if so, why would parents do that simply to chaperone a trip to the zoo? Why should they be forced to? Then the hysteria over mandated reporters hit even closer to home when Pennsylvania passed new rules requiring more people to serve as mandated reporters in response to the Jerry Sandusky child-abuse scandal, and my college-professor husband was himself forced to become one, an unpaid—but legally liable—agent of the government (with no special training for what he should be looking for, mind you).

I spoke to a mom who was insulted and yelled at by a New York City police officer after her daughter and a friend’s son almost stepped into an intersection when the light was red. Now, if the kids had been blocks ahead of their mothers, and, God forbid, they’d gotten hurt, I would have expected the verbal lashing they received. But the children didn’t even get a full step off the curb before an idling driver blasted his horn and the moms themselves lunged for their kids, yelling at them to step back and wait for the light to turn. The kids were so scared by the ruckus they were clutching at their moms even as the officer made a beeline for the parents and began berating them. The officer accused them of neglecting their kids and threatened them as if a terrible accident had taken place. But, again, nothing had actually happened.

I wrote a column for the Pittsburgh Tribune Review about a monkey-shaped teething toy that was recalled by the Consumer Product Safety Commission because a few babies had gagged on the tail. But here again no one was injured. Come over to my house any night of the week, and you can see my baby gag on teething toys, spoons, and his fingers. Will the CPSC be issuing a recall for those as well?

In each of these cases, the state is intervening in choices and decisions that used to be up to parents. Whether to allow children to go unchaperoned to the local pizza shop or what drinks or food to send to school were choices that used to be left to mom and dad. Not anymore. Now the state’s safety, hygiene, and health standards dictate, and their judgment might or might not coincide with yours. Indeed, when it comes to childhood, there is hardly any area of life that is left entirely up to individual parents.

But wait, as the TV infomercial says, there’s more! As No Child Left Alone will chronicle, the nanny state is

• taking kids from their parents (and in some cases parents have been charged) for the crime of the children being obese;

• criminalizing parents for allowing their kids some unsupervised time outside;

• pressuring all women to breastfeed and mandating that every employer encourage breastfeeding at work;

• putting every public-school kid on a diet;

• collecting health data on students, and, in certain states, harassing parents about their children’s weight;

• banning running at playgrounds;

• banning certain games and some types of play at public school;

• driving up the cost of daycare with burdensome regulations and certification rules, which puts safe, clean daycare out of the reach of low- and middle-income families.

One assumption driving this government intervention is that the only way to serve the so-called best interests of the child is to rely on state control. As the author of Paranoid Parenting, University of Kent sociology professor emeritus Frank Furedi, puts it, “[United Kingdom government] initiatives are underpinned by the assumption that parents cannot be trusted and must be subject to constant surveillance.”⁴ But this is not the way the United States Supreme Court has defined the rights of parents.

In Meyer v. Nebraska (1923), the court held that parents have a right to raise their children free from interference and that the right to raise a child as a parent sees fit is a liberty granted by the Fourteenth Amendment. This right is not unlimited, however. A parent has the right to “bring up children . . . according to the dictates of his own conscience,” the Court said, but it is within the power of the state to obligate a parent to educate his or her child.

It is not as if there’s been no tension between parents’ rights and government dictates since that court decision nearly a century ago. But this is the first time government has ever taken such an interventionist, prescriptive approach to imposing its own standards for childrearing.

Politicians at all levels of government talk about what they will do to “protect,” to “shelter,” to “improve the lives of,” and “support” “our” children. But does this really improve kids’ lives, or does it just assert control? It is also true that regulation raises costs. For every legislative act of “child protection” there is a financial cost to parents and taxpayers. My problem is that a reasonable balance between the interests of necessary regulation and government oversight on the one hand and the rights of families and the effect on the marketplace on the other doesn’t seem to be part of the state’s calculations when it comes to children. It is also difficult to justify government’s one-size-fits-all solutions when most problems affect only a tiny fraction of the population. This is public policy that serves only the interests of those who are exceptions to the rule.

These realizations changed the way I thought about raising my kids. Before, I was Mama. Now I am Captain Mommy, on guard against overprotective, overbearing, nannying authorities trying to take my choices away. And I’ve discovered that many other parents feel the same. Moreover, parents aren’t the only ones who have noticed this problem.

Dana Mack’s sociological study The Assault on Parenthood⁵ seems to have been the first popular book to assert that a combination of psychologists, public servants, and public-school educators have been working against and getting between parents and their kids. “The African proverb ‘It takes a whole village to raise a child,’” Mack complains, “seems to serve as a rallying call for the establishment of a communal authority to set new standards and methods of child-rearing.” Government has only gotten more involved in the business of parenting since Mack’s book was first published in 1997.

From the academy, too, comes a condemnation of dictating behavior to parents. In their book Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing, evolutionary psychologist Barry Schwartz and political scientist Kenneth Sharpe write, “Anybody who has raised a child . . . knows the limits of rules and principles.” They explain:

We can’t live without them, but not a day goes by when we don’t have to bend one, or make an exception, or balance them when they conflict. We’re always solving the ethical puzzles or quandaries that are embedded in our practices because most of our choices involve interpreting rules, or balancing clashing principles or aims, or choosing between better and worse.⁶

As the authors show, the problems arise when these rules are written and administered by government, which does not allow for individual discretion in balancing competing principles or applying the consequences and punishments associated with breaking the rules.

And from the legal realm there’s Harvey Silverglate’s Three Felonies a Day, in which the lawyer and civil-liberties crusader argues that the rules have become so complex and cumbersome that just about everyone breaks the law every day. “Wrongful prosecution of innocent conduct that is twisted into a felony charge has wrecked many an innocent life and career. Whole families have been devastated,” Silverglate says.⁷

Philip K. Howard, corporate lawyer, Common Good⁸ crusader, and author of such titles as The Rule of Nobody and Death of Common Sense, couldn’t agree more. “Instead of defining the edges of wrongful conduct, protecting a broad zone of individual empowerment, modern law sees its role as telling people what to do and how to do it.”⁹

Silverglate does have an optimistic view of the possibilities for reform, however, because the problem is so common, as we’ll see throughout this book. “Vague laws threaten Americans from all walks of life and all points on the political spectrum,” Silverglate contends. “Yet that depressing fact is actually encouraging, because it suggests the possibility of a broad coalition in support of much needed legal reforms, beginning with the basic principle that, absent a clearly stated prohibition, people must not be punished for conduct that is not intuitively criminal, evil, or antisocial.”¹⁰ To this argument I would add that parents must be allowed to raise their children by their lights, especially when there is no public impact on their private childrearing choices.

THE MORE I LEARNED, the more outraged and curious I became. I am convinced that parents who feel the same way have to hear about each other. In every chapter, you’ll learn all the ways government is interfering in the private lives of families, and you’ll meet the many other Captain Mommies and Captain Daddies who have been shocked by the invasion of the nanny state and who are fighting hard to get the government out of parenting. The reason they are so passionate is that we’ve all been mugged by the reality of the nanny state stepping between us and our kids.

My friend Lenore Skenazy, the godmother of all Captain Mommies, is highlighted in Chapter 1, “Arresting Captain Mommy.” She was attacked as the worst mother in America for allowing her nine-year-old son to ride the New York City subway by himself. And from that one act of unwitting defiance, she became the mommy of a movement. In her book, Free-Range Kids: How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry), Skenazy argues that children have to be left to do things on their own, and she focuses much of her work these days blogging, writing, and speaking on changing parents’ behavior. But she also recognizes that overbearing government and health and safety regulatory roadblocks do more harm than good.

One of Skenazy’s crusades is the defense of parents who are criminalized for leaving kids unattended in cars for reasonably short periods of time. She calls this type of worry—when the authorities react as if the worst-case scenario has actually occurred—“worst-first” thinking. For parents, the result is often trouble with the police, thousands of dollars in legal fees, and perhaps even jail. Just like Nicole Gainey.

What has changed about our notions of safety on the one hand and of allowing parents authority over their own children on the other? Why is the state choosing to criminalize behavior that was so recently commonplace, and when no harm has come to the child? Do we really demand that law enforcement prevent any bad thing from happening to anyone ever? Or that police punish those who make bad decisions that could have led to bad outcomes?

After a New Jersey mom was arrested for leaving her toddler in the car unattended for no more than 10 minutes,¹¹ attorney Scott Greenfield explained the extent of the problem at his criminal defense blog called Simple Justice, and he explained why this is an issue for the justice system.

This isn’t to argue that parents should not do what they can to avoid risks to their children’s welfare. . . . Not leaving a kid in the car alone just isn’t that hard to do, and for the most part, parents aren’t inclined to do it. . . . This isn’t a matter of parenting “best practices,” but whether the failure to adhere to a bubble-wrapped vision of child-rearing forms the basis for criminal prosecution, for inclusion on the child-abuse registry, for loss of civil rights, perhaps career, home and even the right to remain parent to a child.¹²

For the “crime” of doing things that most of our parents did without incident at one time or another, and in cases when nothing happened to the child, more and more of today’s moms and dads are prosecuted every year.

This type of overreaction by authorities to potential dangers that haven’t produced harm is one of several themes running through No Child Left Alone.

There is a difference, after all, between parental anxiety about risks and dangers to our children and government safety policies. The latter, at least, are meant to be based on larger-scale, more objective calculations of risks versus costs.

The motivating force behind government intervention is an ambiguous and unworkable definition of what it means to keep children safe, healthy, and protected. Current definitions of hygiene and safety assume that private decisions, preferences, and behavior can and should be government mandated, all in the name of the public “good.” In extreme cases, parents have been criminalized and penalized for perfectly lawful, commonsense behavior.

In the 2014 best-seller All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood, Jennifer Senior chronicled the insecurity, anxiety, and stress among some of today’s parents beleaguered by chronic overscheduling, obsessing about the future, having too many expectations. But she failed to diagnose one major influence working against them: the anxieties of the nanny state. Parents have been harassed, threatened, and arrested for attempting to give their kids some level of freedom and independence.

The good news is that when some parents find themselves on the receiving end of a nanny-state lashing, they start fighting to change the status quo. After being threatened with arrest for allowing her kid to walk to soccer practice alone, a Mississippi mom I interviewed explained how she’d since become an advocate for safer streets and more sidewalks.

GOVERNMENTAL OVERREACTIONS to potential dangers and unreasonable standards for children’s health and safety will be discussed at length in Chapter 2, “Breast Is Best, or Else”; Chapter 3, “Daycare Nannies”; and Chapter 4, “School Statists.”

Government has become so convinced it knows the best way to feed a baby that employers are now mandated to encourage breastfeeding among their employees; government welfare benefits are enhanced and extended to low-income women who exclusively breastfeed; and formula is under lock and key at some public hospitals. Meanwhile, family traditions aren’t good enough in a world that requires an authoritative standard.

In some cases, people find themselves suddenly at odds with the nanny state. In response to a New York City breastfeeding mandate, a Chicago-area mother named Faten Abdallah said, “I would hate the government or hospital to mandate what I think is a freedom of choice.” Another Captain Mommy is born.

The health and safety stakes have become discouragingly high. Continuous monitoring is a hallmark of state-approved care for young children outside the home. High-level certification for daycare workers is becoming the norm. The result is that many parents who want to find a licensed daycare can’t afford the tuition.

Philip K. Howard has spent years decrying the rise of regulation and all the associated costs that come with those rules. His books chronicle the negative impact of all this bureaucracy and state micro-management: We have a system where even those in leadership positions do not have individual discretion to make decisions.

Daycare workers have little flexibility to set standards that work for the children in their care or their parents. Our tolerance for risk is so low that public policy is driven by exactly the wrong incentives. And the nanny-state way of mitigating risk at daycare means increasing the rules to eliminate any potential hazard and then falsely “guaranteeing” that the daycare can be made into a perfect utopia of safety and hygiene.

Often state rules have been adopted through federally funded groups meant to provide guidance and advice. But when local regulators need to write rules for local conditions, they often turn to what seems like an easy fix; they adopt wholesale guidelines with the federal government’s seal of approval. These then become the law of the land.

This disconnect between the rule-writers and the regulated has produced more and more precise, limiting, and proscriptive daycare rules, including banning plastic bags, mandating teeth brushing, and regulating how far apart coat hooks should be spaced. What, however, do any of these standards have to do with providing a safe, warm place for children while their parents work? Do these rules actually improve the quality of care?

Daycare workers are left with a series of checklists. Their primary task becomes to comply with state standards, rather than to care for small children. Not only does this hurt parental discretion and authority (Why can’t I ask my daycare to swaddle my baby? Why can’t I go down the street to find another daycare that will swaddle my boy?), it also has a negative consequence for those who are being regulated. “Rules are aides, allies, guides and checks,” argue Schwartz and Sharpe. “But too much reliance on rules can squeeze out the judgment that is necessary to do our work well.”¹³

Public school is another active battleground in the war between overbearing authorities and independent-minded parents. In 1996, a school allowed child protective services personnel to interview a boy without his parents’ presence or knowledge (this is still legal). The parents sued and lost. Judge Melinda Harmon summarized why with this chilling statement: “Parents give up their rights when they drop the children off at public school.” In the intervening years, there has been a growing awareness that perhaps this isn’t what parents want or expect for their kids.

This power struggle was the subject of a 2012 movie starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and Viola Davis called Won’t Back Down. The movie’s synopsis reads, “Two determined mothers, one a teacher, look to transform their children’s failing inner city school. Facing a powerful and entrenched bureaucracy, they risk everything to make a difference in the education and future of their children.”

The movie represents a shift in the perception of good guys and bad guys when it comes to school. Whereas decades of films portrayed teachers and administrators as the heroes of these movies, now movies like Won’t Back Down portray parents as the good guys fighting obstructive authority.

The film depicted a fight over curriculum and quality education, but meanwhile government do-gooders are forcing parents and schools to conform to rules and regulations that reach far beyond what happens in the classroom. Chapter 4 will relate recent fights over food and health standards at public schools.

New lunch menus have put every public-school kid on a restricted-calorie diet, while two dozen states collect students’ height and weight statistics in order to track potential health problems. In the most aggressive cases, states have required schools to send letters home to parents warning that children may be at risk of or already suffering from obesity. When, however, did it become the state’s responsibility to monitor students’ body mass indexes? And what are the broader implications of these policies? Do they even work? And should public schools really be diverting their time and energy from education to these concerns?

Parents have been especially upset to discover that schools are now required by law to collect weight and height information on their children. In some states the policy is to inform parents about potential problems, which has made for some angry Captain Mommies and Captain Daddies.

THE GOVERNMENT has access to students through public schools and argues that, for the good of all children, it must impose its standards. Obesity is the current obsession. The combination of access and the current orthodoxy of government as the sole authority for combatting obesity led to a rejiggering of what government deems a “balanced diet” (now a plate instead of a pyramid).

This “plate” reflects nutritional preferences that are highly debatable. Take fat, for example. Government guidelines proscribe fat across the board, while some nutritionists counter that fat is especially important for children. As for dairy, the federal food plate includes a portion that critics insist is a U.S. Department of Agriculture gift to dairy producers more than it is truly necessary for overall health. Notwithstanding these disagreements, federal dietary guidelines aren’t in themselves a bad idea. The trouble comes when advice morphs into law.

The USDA didn’t just revamp the National School Lunch Program; it came up with a variety of new rules and mandates about how the foods should be prepared (no frying in oil, for example) and how much of each food children should be allowed (severe portion control). It has put schools in the position of having to shoulder a heavier and heavier burden of the costs—both financial and bureaucratic—for managing and enforcing their rules. The folks who have to implement the new rules were especially upset about the cost of enforcement. Just as additional safety and health prescriptions make daycare more expensive, these types of regulations result in increased costs for schools.

At the same time, because this is a federal government program it has to be implemented without exception across all schools and populations, even though the problems the new menus are meant to combat may not be prevalent at every school. The nanny state doesn’t do nuance, you see. Not only is menu flexibility out of the question, but schools are discouraging parents from providing kids homemade lunches as well. The cost and complexity of compliance, meanwhile, means that taking the healthy step of cooking the food to order at school is just about impossible.

This isn’t the first time Washington has committed itself to the problem of children’s health. John F. Kennedy made it a priority even before he took office, penning a passionate affirmation of the need for physical health among the young and defending the necessity of government intervention. The difference between Kennedy in 1960 and the current crop of government do-gooders is that the solutions Kennedy supported were much simpler than those of today. He also, far more than is currently the case, placed the burden for success on individuals and families working together with government.

“A single look at the packed parking lot of the average high school will tell us what has happened to the traditional hike to school that helped to build young bodies,” Kennedy wrote.¹⁴ The solution he proposed required government help.

The physical fitness of our youth should be made a direct responsibility of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. This department should conduct—through its Office of Education and the National Institutes of Health—research into the development of a physical fitness program for the nation’s public schools. The results of this research shall be made freely available to all who are interested. In addition, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare should use all its existing facilities to attack the lack of youth fitness as a major health problem.¹⁵

Kennedy may have argued that government has an important role in teaching American children how to live a healthy life, but he was equally persuasive about the role of adults and parents.

No matter how vigorous the leadership of government, we can fully restore the physical soundness of our nation only if every American is willing to assume responsibility for his own fitness and the fitness of his children. . . . All of us must consider our own responsibilities for the physical vigor of our children and of the young men and women of our community. We do not want our children to become a generation of spectators. Rather, we want each of them to be a participant in the vigorous life.¹⁶

The vigorous life of children and all the roadblocks that the nanny state erects to prevent it is the focus of Chapter 5, “The War on Fun.” As a recent article by Hanna Rosin in The Atlantic argued, there is harm done to kids by overprotective parents and government management of playgrounds, games, and independent play. Her central thesis was that parents who bubble-wrap their kids hurt them by never letting them learn self-sufficiency, which requires skills like how to manage risk and deal with failure. As correct as she may be, however, it is nearly impossible for parents to fight the urge to be overprotective when the law says they should be doing just that. And what else are parents to understand from playground signs banning running and sledding?

In his book No Fear: Growing Up in a Risk-Averse Society, Tim Gill, who writes about these problems in Great Britain, has noticed that America’s litigation culture is making matters even worse here.

In America, the compensation culture is a reality, and a major cause of risk aversion. Fear of liability is grounded not just in misperception or misinformation, but in fundamental differences in the way the legal system handles litigation. . . . US liability cases are conducted in front of juries, and may involve class action and punitive damages, all of which raise the stakes for defendants.¹⁷

Gill is absolutely correct. There is a practical reason why municipal playgrounds have, in many places, made the jungle-gyms lower to the ground and replaced concrete with rubber matting. Using taxpayer funds to remove hazards from the local park is much cheaper than settling lawsuits.

Fear of litigation isn’t the only trend working against kids and parents. Frank Furedi and Gill both argue that freedom is being sacrificed on the altar of safety and health. Furedi chronicles the changes over the last decade.

Society as a whole does not take children’s freedom seriously . . . [b]ecause Western societies actually regard parents who allow their children to pursue an independent outdoor life as irresponsible. In 2001, when I published my book . . . I was genuinely surprised to discover that virtually all experiences associated with childhood came with a health warning. . . . But since the turn of the century, the regime of child protection has become steadily more pervasive and intrusive. The relentless erosion of children’s freedom has been paralleled by the constant tendency to politicise parenting.¹⁸

Gill says that state intervention to protect children from risk is actually limiting the experiences of all children. I got a terrific education on these issues when I spoke to Mike Lanza, a Captain Daddy in California who has been building a community devoted to the proposition that children need to be outside, enjoying free play as much as possible. His book Playborhood argues for parent-made outdoor shareable play spaces for local kids. Lanza has had his own run-ins with local authorities who question his parenting choices. But he remains steadfast in his commitment to the quality of life necessary for his kids to thrive.

It feels like there is a government agency uniquely focused on preventing parents from encouraging kids to have fun: the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Of course, the CPSC is supposed to help consumers uncover hidden dangers in consumer products. But like many regulators, the definitions have gotten much broader and the mandate much more expansive. Indeed, the CPSC isn’t even satisfied with recalling and banning toys and games anymore. Now the agency has decided that protecting children requires suing private business owners who don’t do what they want, even if their products aren’t for children! CPSC has also gotten into the business of hectoring parents about how precisely they ought to use some products, as if we who have children couldn’t get along without the anxiety-inducing warnings and advisories of Uncle Sam.

The list of CPSC “hasty responses” is long and varied—pajamas, baby baths, desk toys—and the list of consequences—killing business, worrying parents, wasting taxpayer money—is also impressive.

GETTING TO KNOW this community of subversive parents who don’t like the government telling them how to raise their kids, and who are fighting for their rights, has raised important questions for me: How did we get here? How did this kind of overbearing authority become part of our fabric? I read a piece that offered a possible explanation. In his 2006 Los Angeles Times op-ed, Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard University and the author of Stumbling on Happiness, describes how societal changes often happen slowly enough that most parents just aren’t paying attention.

The human brain is exquisitely sensitive to changes in light, sound, temperature, pressure, size, weight and just about everything else. But if the rate of change is slow enough, the change will go undetected. If the low hum of a refrigerator were to increase in pitch over the course of several weeks, the appliance could be singing soprano by the end of the month and no one would be the wiser. . . . Culturally, we haven’t noticed that laws, rules, bureaucracy was moving against parents’ authority because it was happening in small ways over a long period of time. But when it happens in Technicolor (i.e., banning sledding or arresting parents) then the outcry is immediate from some quarters because it is blatantly contra the cultural norm that no one noticed had changed.¹⁹

I find Gilbert’s explanation persuasive. I don’t think the effort to dictate and organize parents’ lives is coordinated or centrally controlled. This is a systemic change that has been going on for decades across the country, incrementally, and for a variety of intended purposes. The nanny state has blossomed because of real changes to our social culture. But though there may have been real problems, what seems clear by now is that government solutions just aren’t effective. Moreover, these remedies may do more harm than good.

I went looking to see how bad the problem is for parents. It can be pretty bad. In the worst case scenarios, parents can lose custody of their children. Chapter 6, “Obesity Police,” explores what happens when the government takes kids away from their parents—because the kids are considered obese.

In the name of combating obesity, doctors and legal experts assert that the state can do a better job than mom or dad. There are multiple problems with this proposed solution, however. First, should the category of neglect be expanded to include allowing your child to overeat? Second, should this be an appropriate area of concern for child welfare services? As happens so often with regulations, definitions are expanded to the point that they now include whole categories of behavior that never used to be considered legitimate targets of action. This is certainly what has happened with obesity. Perhaps we should include the other conditions for which parents can be accused of neglect: self-harm, anorexia, depression, drug abuse, drinking excessively, bullying.

There is a fundamental flaw in the fact that child-welfare bureaucrats see families as separate individuals in conflict rather than as a homogeneous unit deserving of help as a whole. So often, in cases of obese kids, the parents are also obese. Why don’t these parents deserve the same care and protection? Instead, the child-welfare system can seem almost predatory.

Expanding the mandate of child-welfare services has been a near constant trend since the inception of the first child-welfare program. Indeed, it is a common problem in the welfare state. As David Boaz, executive director of the libertarian CATO Institute, explains, “Bureaucracies are notoriously unwilling to become victims of their own success. So, true to form, the public health authorities broadened their mandate and kept on going. They launched informational and regulatory crusades against such health problems as smoking, venereal disease, AIDS, and obesity. Pick up any newspaper and you’re apt to find a story about these ‘public health crises.’ Those are all health problems, to be sure, but are they really public health problems?”²⁰

When it comes to obesity, the problem is astonishingly complex, and there is no proven remedy. I will review the history of child welfare with an eye toward understanding the pediatric obesity problem.

Boaz doesn’t even agree that obesity is a matter for public policy consideration. “Let’s start using honest language,” he advises. A “legitimate public health issue,” Boaz explains, involves “consumption of a collective good (air or water) and/or the communication of disease to parties who had not consented to put themselves at risk. . . . [O]besity [is a] health problem . . . [a] widespread health problem . . . [but] not [a] public health problem.”²¹

WHILE WRITING this book, I’ve been asked too many times to count whether my attitude about overbearing government includes favoring parental choice as it relates to vaccines. The answer is no.

My view on vaccines mirrors my attitude about government intervention in general. I believe strongly in reasonable, effective, limited government involvement in the lives of private citizens, and only for public problems and crises that are in fact amenable to government-implemented solutions.

I’m a mom of four children, all of whom were vaccinated. I want everyone else to vaccinate their kids as well. And when the government mandates vaccines, everyone’s kids are protected. What is called “herd immunity” only works against contagious diseases like measles and whooping cough when more than 92 percent of the population is vaccinated. Parents who refuse to vaccinate choose to endanger others’ kids as well as newborns and those who are immunocompromised, and I want the government to penalize them. And yet, as Jimmy Kimmel noted in March 2015, the culture in some places, like Los Angeles, where he lives, has become inverted. Kimmel quipped, “Parents here are more afraid of gluten than they are of smallpox, and as a result, we’ve got measles, measles are back.”²²

Kimmel was reacting to a health crisis triggered in December 2014 at Disneyland in Anaheim, California, when more than 100 people who were exposed to measles subsequently got sick. “The rate of growth [in measles cases] gives us a good idea about the percentage of people in the population who are immune,” explained Maimuna Majumder, a research fellow at Boston Children’s Hospital. A preliminary analysis “indicates that substandard vaccination compliance is likely to blame for the 2015 measles outbreak,” Majumder and her coauthors concluded in their research letter for JAMA Pediatrics.²³

Measles, mumps, whooping cough, and other preventable illnesses have returned to the United States because of concentrations of parents opting not to immunize their kids and a compliant government allowing them to get away with it. It took the crisis in 2015 to get politicians and the public at large to focus pressure on what had by then proven to be too-lenient rules for opting out of the medically recommended vaccination schedule. States like California are finally rewriting legislation to reduce the number of acceptable personal exemptions in the hopes of stemming the tide.

What I find hard to understand is why in such a clear case of necessary government intervention, so many states and localities choose to be hands-off and allow parents not to vaccinate their children. Even President Obama opted for a more laid-back approach in the response to the measles outbreak, with White House Spokesman Josh Earnest telling reporters, “People should evaluate this for themselves with a bias toward good science and toward the advice of our public health professionals.” This is exactly the wrong place for government to be lenient, and it is especially maddening given the opposite situation in just about every other area of childrearing.

Now contrast the laissez-faire attitude toward vaccines with the harsh regulations that govern cases of pediatric obesity. The people who are hurt by obesity are the ones who are obese. The people who are hurt from low vaccination rates also include everyone in the population who is at risk of getting sick.

President Kennedy got this distinction exactly right.

We do not live in a regimented society where men are forced to live their lives in the interest of the state. We are, all of us, as free to direct the activities of our bodies as we are to pursue the objects of our thought. But if we are to retain this freedom, for ourselves and for generations to come, then we must also be willing to work for the physical toughness on which the courage and intelligence and skill of man so largely depend.²⁴

How are parents to reconcile their own parenting values with those of an overbearing government? Many are fighting to remain independent, responsible parents, refusing to accept the yoke of an oppressive nanny state. We are living in a moment of great anxiety, but too often, in response, the state decides that personal decisions are better made by government fiat. I aim to celebrate the many Captain Mommies and Daddies out there who are working to reject government-issued parenting standards and are taking authority and responsibility for raising their own children. It will take a broad revolution to change the way we treat parents. No Child Left Alone will show that the change has already begun.