The Parent Trap
JULY 19, 2014
Ross Douthat
The way we live now: Be a helicopter parent or else you might get a knock on your door from Child Protective Services.
This is really getting crazy…
WHEN I was about 9 years old, I graduated to a Little League whose diamonds were a few miles from our house, in a neighborhood that got rougher after dark. After one practice finished early, I ended up as the last kid left with the coach, waiting in the gloaming while he grumbled, looked at his watch and finally left me — to wait or walk home, I’m not sure which.
I started walking. Halfway there, along a busy road, my father picked me up. He called my coach, as furious as you would expect a protective parent to be; the coach, who probably grew up having fistfights in that neighborhood, gave as good as he got; I finished the season in a different league.
Here are two things that didn’t happen. My (lawyer) father did not call the police and have the coach arrested for reckless endangerment of a minor. And nobody who saw me picking my way home alone thought to call the police on my parents, or to charge them with neglect for letting their child slip free of perfect safety for an hour.
Today they might not have been so lucky. For instance, they might have ended up like the Connecticut mother who earned a misdemeanor for letting her 11-year-old stay in the car while she ran into a store. Or the mother charged with “contributing to the delinquency of a minor” after a bystander snapped a photo of her leaving her 4-year-old in a locked, windows-cracked car for five minutes on a 50 degree day. Or the Ohio father arrested in front of his family for “child endangerment” because — unbeknown to him — his 8-year-old had slipped away from a church service and ended up in a nearby Family Dollar.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/opinion/sunday/ross-douthat-the-parent-trap.html?_r=1
World has gone crazy.
One of the reasons I moved to Ridgewood is that we are better at this than most communities. Kids still ride bikes around town together and you see kids hanging out in town unaccompanied. We need to be vigilant in protecting this culture in our community.
As is pointed out in the article, despite shows like Law and Order, the crime rate today is lower than anytime since the 1950s. Children should be free to roam as they did then. Just think of all the things you learned when no adults were around. Most of them are more important in life than anything learned under supervision.
Yet there are still problems which almost always start with a busybody. It is a tough line because children truly are raised by a village BUT that means talking to kids not calling the cops. It is not the cops’ fault but it is technically illegal to leave your kids at home alone at 12 even though that is an age when kids traditionally stated to babysit. Involving the cops in these issues creates problems it doesn’t solve them.
I encourage everyone to check out the blog http://www.freerangekids.com which delves into many of these issues.
I am very anti-helicopter parenting, but I’m well aware that there has been a considerable shift in the bahavior of kids compared to when I was a kid. There’s way more drug consumption in the form of marijuana and prescription medicines. It’s no longer the few stoner kids but a far wider group, who are also experimenting at a younger age. Kids are far more sexually active at a younger age, and STDs are being contracted at higher rates. I think a lot of these changes are due to the changes in TV quality and the incredible ease of how information is available online. Porn is no longer getting hold of a Playboy magazine. It’s graphic, unrealistic, and it’s free.
My attitude is give your kids freedom, but watch them like a hawk.
The overall culture is not the same as when I was a child. I too left the house in the morning and did not contact anyone till dinner. There did not seem to be as many ways to get in trouble. Or maybe we just did not think of them.
I think that kids need to be in contact and provide honest updates on their activities – where they are, what they are doing, who they are with and , most importantly, is there is there an adult present.
I am not as worried about strangers as I am about bad decisions.
I agree with you #3 with a couple of slight differences. I think today kids are not more sexually active or more into drugs than when I was in high school / college. (70’s / 80’s) So I do agree with; give them freedom and watch them closely. Be sure you know your kids well and know their friends well and who they are hanging with all the time. This is one of the reasons we all live here; because it is generally a better place for kids to have freedom and the kids they are hanging around are also generally better supervised than other towns (like Manhattan for example). I will say this one thing though; I thought open campus was great for me while I was at RHS because it was stupid to give us that kind of freedom to go do stuff off campus without our parents knowing what we were up to. As a parent, I know from personal experience, it is a stupid idea to let the high school kids off campus for free periods. That entire idea came out of necessity having to let kids walk back and forth to BF for what was supposed to be a temporary period of time. We took advantage of it when I was a kid and I have no reason to believe that has changed. Take that one freedom back.