Saturday, March 7, 2015

On fear-mongering vs. raising independent children

I feel like I have so much to say on this subject that I'm not sure where to begin.  I hope it comes out as at least semi-coherent babbling and not gibberish.  Here we go.

I've been very concerned by recent news stories talking about the police being called on parents who let their children walk home alone from a park.  Really.  There have been a thousand news stories about the Meitiv family in the past month.  The parents practice the Free-Range parenting movement, AKA common sense, which comes down to letting children take calculated risks in order to learn independence skills.  A really basic example of this is the Meitivs letting their 10 and 6 year old children walk home from a park together.  After their parents let them practice by first going around the block, then to a near-by library they went on the full mile walk to the park.  The idea is that by practicing being independent in small stages, the kids would then be able to walk to the park together and assess risks etc. while being self-confident in the world.  Or at least, that was the idea.  Someone saw the kids walking alone, called the cops and the cops picked up the kids.  Then things proceeded to get ugly.  The cops bring the kids home and demand to see the father's ID.  After explaining his parenting philosophy and refusing to show his identification, the cop then called six patrol cars for backup. Six.  It all goes downhill culminating in the parents now having a charge of "unsubstantiated child neglect" on their records.

Child neglect.  For letting their children walk to a park.  In most states, 11 is the legal age when children can attend babysitting courses and receive basic child-care certificates.  This kid could be just a few months away from being able to "legally" watch younger children on their own.  But their parents can't take the step to say "Hey, in order to prepare our child to be more responsible, let's teach him/her walk to a park alone."  Insanity.

Single mothers have had CPS called for letting their kids play outside.  What is with all of this fear-mongering?  I know that in the age of the Internet we have instant access to all of the salacious news stories.  Serial killers are running rampant in the streets!  All teenage girls who unexpectedly get pregnant are convincing all of their friends to do it too.  Every kid you've ever met has done drugs- probably even more than once.  And of course, every strange adult who approaches your child must mean them grievous harm. But that's just it- the things we see on the news are all sensationalism.  They were chosen and put on our screens because the stories are so attention-grabbing.  That's not to say that horrible things don't happen, but most things that happen are not, in fact, horrible.  

I want my child to be safe.  If I didn't, I wouldn't have bothered to buy a baby gate or outlet covers when my kid became mobile.  But I'm not about to rid my house of every item that isn't padded (but wait, couldn't they suffocate themselves with that sofa cushion???) because I would like the chance to teach my child "not to climb on that toy box because you could fall and hurt yourself."  Would I feel absolutely terrible if my child died in some kind of freak accident in my home?  Of course.  And I would probably never forgive myself.  But it's still a freak accident.  A child could die in a terrible accident anywhere with any number of adults supervising them.  That doesn't mean I won't let my child live out in the world.  That doesn't mean I won't try to teach my child to be a responsible, independent person.  That doesn't mean I won't encourage them to learn things on their own and test the boundaries of their comfort zone in a (hopefully) safe manner.

Why is everyone constantly trying to scare us into not letting our kids do things on their own?  Why are we buying into this garbage and constantly calling the police on people?  Society has conditioned us to think that this is the ultimate contradiction: we know that danger isn't lurking around every corner, but we still act as if it does.  What if that kid we saw alone at the park gets snatched up by a child molester?  What if a kid who takes the bus alone somehow gets run over by a drunk driver while trying to cross the street?  What if these things happened and we did nothing? What if, what if, what if.  Everyone has the right to weigh these moral decisions and act on them as they see appropriate. I, for one, do not want to call the cops only to find out later that some poor parent (and more than likely a good parent) now has CPS on their back for months or years to come.  I know the argument is for the safety of children, but how does our constant supervision really help these kids in the long run?  Since I can't definitively measure the positive outcome in "kidnappers thwarted" I'd rather swap constant vigilance for the ability to measure growth by the things my child has learned to do on his own.  I don't need to be part of a parenting movement to do this, but I think that society as a whole needs to learn to balance the extremes of living an everyday life.

Well?  What do YOU think?



Further reading:

Free-Range Kids

To call, or not to call?

Unsubstantiated Child Neglect