In my last post, I discussed the latest avatar of fashionable parent anxiety, the free-range kid. I got all worked up about the issue (well, I still am worked up, thus Part 2) after reading the report by Jan Hoffman in the New York Times Sunday Styles section ("Why Can't She Walk to School?" New York Times, 9/13/09) about the great anxiety parents feel when trying to decide whether to let their children go about in public without parental supervision. In this post, I address what I call the busybody option: how to resolve this great anxiety by punishing other parents.
I know these decisions are not easy, and as I said last time, I respect a wide range of parental choices about accompanying or not accompanying their kids while they go from place to place. But unfortunately, many parents seek to resolve their own anxiety, and reassure themselves about the rightness of their own choices, by trashing the choices made by other parents. In the Hoffman article in the Times, we were reminded of the nation-wide tide of opprobrium heaped upon Lenore Skenazy when she went public with her audacious choice of letting her 9-year-old son ride the subway alone. And Hoffman also quotes other, less famous, but equally obnoxious examples:
(speaking of Lori Pierce, a mother in Columbus, Georgia): "Last spring, her son, 10, announced he wanted to walk to soccer practice rather than be driven, a distance of about a mile. Several people who saw the boy walking alone called 911. A police officer stopped him, drove him the rest of the way and then reprimanded Mrs. Pierce. According to local news reports, the officer told Mrs. Pierce that if anything untoward had happened to the boy, she could have been charged with child endangerment. Many felt the officer had acted appropriately and that Mrs. Pierce had put her child at risk."
Oh, really? Yes, of course, if "something untoward" had happened to her child, like stranger abduction, which is a little more likely but not much more likely than alien abduction, Mrs. Pierce would have felt worse than terrible. One hopes that if her son really had been abducted, the authorities would not have wasted precious time and resources prosecuting Mrs. Pierce for child endangerment. But if the authorities were so inclined, one hopes they would also, in the interest of fairness, have prosecuted every parent whose child was injured on ski slopes, who got a concussion on the soccer field, or who got a life-changing injury at cheerleading practice. For example, the Consumer Product Safety Commission data for 2007, which estimates injuries nationwide based upon extrapolations from a sample of hospital data, estimated 111,018 ski injuries during that year, including 5,138 listed as "hospitalized or dead on arrival." (http://www.cpsc.gov/neiss/2007highlights.pdf) Of these estimated ski injuries, 27,660 were to children age 5 to 14. And don't even get me started on cheerleading.
Have we seen articles in the national press implying that citizens should intervene- call the authorities, including the police or child welfare authorities- when they see a child on the ski slopes? Nope. How come? Well, I guess people are pretty sure that skiing is a good thing, and if something untoward happens while a child is skiing, then it is bad luck or bad karma. It is a tragedy, to be sure, but a tragedy that invokes explanations on the order of "you never know how fragile life is until one is lost" rather than explanations like "that mommy should be thrown in jail." Jail is reserved for mommies who let their children walk to school.
One might observe here that ordinary citizens' assessment of what constitutes child endangerment is slightly out of whack. Mandatory child abuse reporting laws encourage ordinary citizens to drop a dime when they think kids are being abused, but have you ever talked to child welfare authorities about what they actually count as abuse? Believe me, letting a child walk to school is not on the list. Real child abuse is all too common, and investigators having to deal with such complaints are way too busy to drop everything and open a file on parents who allow their kids to take a bus. (I won't terrify you, gentle reader, with an account of the complaints I have had to make, or have heard about in the course of an ordinary clinical practice.)
What is going on here? Anxiety reduction, that's what. If you are not sure about a parenting decision, it always helps to have the uniform support of your community. Indeed, one of the ways parents know what to do in difficult situations is to ask their peers, an excellent idea in almost all circumstances. But the dark side of this parenting community is the busybody option: making sure your community is uniform in its opinion by punishing dissenters. After all, dissent makes your job harder, right? If you are preaching abstinence for your 16-year-old daughter while one of her friend's moms is giving her birth-control pills, you are going to have to answer some tough questions. You might even have to ask yourself some tough questions. Similarly, if your kid wants to walk to school but you have told him it is too dangerous, your job will be a lot harder when his friends start to walk to school unsupervised. Time to exercise the busybody option: threaten to call the cops on your neighbor to make your job easier.
Here's the deal, folks: we live in a multi-cultural, pluralistic society. If you think pluralism is a good thing, good for you- you are a real American after all. But pluralism means tolerating not just other people's skin colors, but also other people's values. You don't have to live by their values; you can still walk your kids to the bus stop or drive them to school as long as you want. But you do have to tolerate diversity in child-rearing values, within the limits of the law. The law doesn't let 8-year-olds drive a motor vehicle, no matter what. And the law doesn't allow parents to beat their kids. But the law does allow parents to let a 10-year-old boy walk a mile to soccer practice. If you think that is against the law, think again.
Next time: Free-range kids part 3: "She's so beautiful, who wouldn't want to steal her?"
