Danielle and Alexander Meitiv of Maryland want to raise their children as "free-range kids," giving them the kind of range of movement that those of us over 30 recall as a normal part of childhood.
A walk home from a playground caused Montgomery County's Child Protective Services to investigate the Meitivs last year after someone called police to report the alarming sight of ... children walking down the street alone. On April 12, after another "good Samaritan" called the cops, Child Protective Services seized the children, leaving the parents frantic with worry for hours.
One could argue that this is a good lesson for the parents. One could also argue that it would be bracing to have the police periodically break into our homes to educate us about weak points in our security systems.
Why has America gone lunatic on the subject of unattended children? Parents hover over their kids as if every step might be their last. If they don't hover, strangers do, calling the police to report any parent who leaves their child to run into the store for a few minutes. What's truly strange is that the parents who are doing this were themselves left to their own devices in cars, allowed to ride their bikes and walk to the store unsupervised, and otherwise given the (limited) freedom that they are now determined to deny their own kids. The police are making arrests that would have branded their own parents as criminals.
So how can we explain it?
1. Cable news. When you listen to parents talk about why they hover, you'll frequently hear that the world is more dangerous than it used to be. This is the exact opposite of the truth. But it may feel more dangerous because the media landscape has shifted.
There were always stranger abductions, but they were extremely rare, perhaps 2 or 3 per 1 million children under 12 annually. In the 1970s, you most likely heard only about local cases, and because these were rare, you would hear about one every few years in a moderately large metropolitan area. Very occasionally, a case would catch the imagination and make national news, like the Lindbergh baby. These almost always happened in big cities like New York or to rich people, so people didn't imagine this risk faced them.
Then came cable news, which needed to fill 24 hours a day with content, and these sorts of cases started to make national news. We did not register this as "I'm hearing more about these cases because they are drawn from a much larger population." Instead, it seems like stranger abductions had increased.
With the Internet we have thousands at the tips of our fingers, and the same failures of statistical intuition make it feel like terrible things are happening constantly.
2. Economic insecurity. As college degrees have become more valuable, parents feel as if they must micromanage their children's lives to make a good showing on college applications. The result is vastly more supervised activities. This has shrunk the pool of kids who are around to play with, making free-range childhood less rewarding.
3. Working mothers. In suburbs and small towns, stay-at-home moms formed "eyes on the street" so that even if your kid was roaming the neighborhood, there was a gentle adult eye periodically watching. But I don't think we can lean on this too much, because kids in cities also had a lot more independence back then.
There's another reason this matters. More mothers are paying others to take care of their children. It's easy to impose severe limits on the mobility of your children when you are not personally expected to provide 24-hour supervision.
4. Collective-action problems. Overprotective parents are in effect taking out a sort of regret insurance. Every community has what you might call "generally accepted child-rearing practices," the parenting equivalent of "generally accepted accounting principles." These principles define what is good parenting and provide a sort of mental safe harbor in the event of an accident. If you do those things and your kid gets hurt--well, you'll still wish that you'd asked them to stay home and help bake cookies, or lingered a little longer at the drugstore, or something so that they weren't around when the Bad Thing happened. But if you break them and your kid gets hurt, you--and a lot of other people--will feel that it happened because you were a bad parent. So you follow the GACP.
Over time, these rules get set by the most risk-averse parent in your social group, because if anything happens, you'll wish you had acted like them.
5. Lawsuits. The liability revolution of the 1970s has made every institution, from parks departments to schools, much more sensitive about even tiny risks, because when you go before the jury in a case about a hurt child, arguing that what happened was less likely than getting hit by a bolt of lightning is going to have much less impact than the evidence of a hurt child.
6. Mobile phones. All these strangers calling 911 to report a 6-year-old left in a car outside a store for a few minutes are probably doing so because it's easy. If that person had to dig for paper and pen to write down the license plate, then find a pay phone and stand around talking to the 911 operator, most would probably think, "You know, I bet his mom is going to come out of the store in a minute, and I really need to get home to start dinner." Now you can just take a picture of the license plate and call from the comfort of your car.
7. We're richer. Richer countries can afford more safety. That's good, but there are major downsides to this form of parenting, as many authors have laid out: It's hard on the parents, may result in the kids developing more phobias, and stunts the creativity and self-reliance that we want to develop in children.
Many forces are pushing in this direction. But that doesn't mean we can't resist. A good start would be for the public to make clear that giving kids room to roam is not child abuse, and that when taxpayer money is wasted punishing families like the Meitivs, it is the government that is the abuser.
Editorial on 04/19/2015