I follow several friends' blogs, partly because they're my friends and I want to see what they're up to, and partly because they're all genuinely wonderful writers. One of them has featured, for the past several days, different posts about allowing children freedom in a perhaps overly safety-obsessed parental culture, and musing about "free-range parenting" vs. "helicopter parenting." That particularly sparked my interest. I've thought about the subject a lot and even written a little about it myself. Although I think of myself as more toward the "free-range" end of things (OK, in my case, it's more like being Slacker Mom), I freely acknowledge that I have some helicopter parent tendencies. I try to fight them but it's hard. One of the reasons for that is that, frankly, we in this country are so judgmental about everybody else's parenting that we're in some cases perfectly willing to criminalize it if it doesn't measure up to our standards. I find that profoundly disturbing.
As one example, I'm currently representing a woman charged with endangering her children. I'm still hopeful that the case can be settled in such a manner that it will allow her to avoid having a criminal conviction, but I'm not at the moment optimistic. The short version of her story is that she is married to an over-the-road truck driver who is frequently gone for weeks at a time, so she's often in effect a single parent. She is, as of this writing, in the late stages of pregnancy with her eleventh child. Earlier in the summer, she one day thought her older kids were watching the younger ones (which they usually do) and she fell asleep on the couch. She was wrong, and the two preschoolers got out of the house and began walking down a busy street thinking they'd walk to a park where they'd walked with their mother the day before. For this, she's charged as a criminal, despite the fact that she was appalled that this had happened and despite the fact that when the police searched her house they found it otherwise perfectly safe and up to code. I also remember a case from my former home, where a man was facing felony charges in the death of his 3-year-old son in a car accident. The accident itself was determined to be entirely the fault of the other driver who blew through a stop sign and crashed into the defendant's car. But according to the defendant, a short time earlier the boy had freed himself from his car seat and was unrestrained. That was over ten years ago and I'm still furious at the prosecutor for even thinking of pursuing charges in that one (don't worry, former Janesville peeps, it was in Walworth County).
And I would recommend this fascinating book, as well, about an incident that happened in Oberlin, Ohio, where I went to college. It tells the harrowing and true story of what happened when a somewhat unconventional woman took some nude photos of her young daughter. Even the prosecutor eventually conceded that the photos were not themselves pornographic under the law nor were they made with any proscribed intent, but he eventually rationalized things by saying more or less that pedophiles might find them arousing. Um, well, OK. This family had to spend almost all their money defending this woman against criminal charges and fighting child services just to have their daughter returned to them. All because some people disapproved of some photographs, and some prosecutor felt that the community standard ought to be making sure we're cognizant of the urges of pedophiles.
Author Lenore Skenazy made something of a splash a couple of years ago when she admitted that she allowed her then-9-year-old son to ride the New York City subway alone. He was fine and safe, and she was proud that he navigated it well. But she got incredible backlash from many readers about that, mostly because they wouldn't personally have allowed that. She also writes a blog called Free-Range Kids wherein she discusses the tendency today not only to disapprove of parenting practices that were perfectly normal 20 or 30 years ago, but actually to criminalize them. It's definitely worth a read--she relayed one recent story about a Tennessee mother who was warned by police that she would be actually arrested if she allowed her 10-year-old daughter to ride her bicycle to school by herself again. Holy cow, really? Are we that determined to make certain our kids are never able to function on their own?
I have to say that of late I've been feeling very disenchanted with criminal law and the practice of it, so maybe that's what's prompting my excursion into this somewhat depressing subject matter. And I'm certainly not saying that criminal prosecutions of parents have absolutely no place in our society. There are obviously people who engage in clear-cut physical or sexual abuse of their children, and also people who neglect them so badly that their parenting quite clearly falls below any reasonable objective standard of minimum care, and I'm not saying that the law doesn't need to step in and protect the kids in those situations. But whether we as a society have become more judgmental of other parents or simply more unreasonably frightened for our own kids, I think that either way we're not doing those kids any favors by not allowing them to take risks, take some lumps, get hurt once in a while, and learn from that. After all, a large part of life is learning how to recover from the lumps that you're inevitably going to receive. If the only lesson that you ever learn from your childhood is that Mom and Dad are going to make sure you never have to deal with it, what kind of a person are you going to become?
6 comments:
So well said, Brenna! That judgementalism is rampant, and I dare say it's not any more rampant than it was years ago, however nowdays there are so many forums to speak out on and it's all fairly easily accessable. I agree that kids are being smothered in the name of "safety' all too often. And free range can be code for slacker! Finding balance shifts from day to day. And I hate that normal parenting has become criminalized. Is it the fear of being sued, or the fear of being ostracized that keeps our hands tied? One parent I know used to say frequently, "Being a parent is not a popularity contest." She said that about her kids, but i think it applies to other parents and folks involved with kids. Don't even get me started on parents at tiny tots' games and recitals who get beligerant.Ok, no organization to my response at all. I think this hit a nerve!
As a teacher, I see this all the time. Here we are, four weeks into the school year and I've received six emails from one mom about her kid. I also just filled out a form for a student whose parents are asking for special services for their daughter who is making a B in my AP class. Apparently since she is not making an A they have decided that intervention must take place. Sometimes I wish I taught orphans.
Thanks for the compliments, P! I will say, just to defend my kind for a second (heh) that fear of being sued is not a complete curse. In certain respects it really is genuinely safer to be a child now than it was when we were growing up. Childhood accidental deaths are significantly lower now than 30 or 40 years ago, and that's largely due to fear of being sued (safety triggers on garage door openers, car seats, wood shavings instead of concrete under playground equipment, etc.) and I think that's fine. I think we go overboard on, oh, I don't know, safety covers for toilet seats for example, or cushions for table corners.
I don't know that most parents spend as much time thinking about adverse consequences of the legal process as maybe I do (occupational hazard--again, maybe a reason why I'm awfully disenchanted with my occupation these days). But we do spend a lot of energy being afraid of things like child abduction, for example. Not that that doesn't happen, and not that we shouldn't teach kids that the stranger who wants you to help him find his puppy really *doesn't* want you to help him find his puppy. But if your standard is that your child has to be directly supervised by an adult at all times until he's old enough never to be abducted, then he's going to be directly supervised until the day he dies. At some point you have to exhale, and not be afraid that your neighbors are going to judge you (or have you arrested) if you do.
To the teacher who commented, I confess I've sent a few emails too, heh. But they've all been pretty boring, mundane questions.
Way to go Brenna! Living in fear is so bad for us for so many reasons on so many levels! Let's speak to our kids' senses of competence and self-efficacy.
Great points, all around. Thanks.
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