Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Risking your children by protecting your children
When I was 15 years old and living in Iowa City, my parents dispatched me to boarding school in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. Come Thanksgiving, with air tickets to Cedar Rapids costing around 500 1977 dollars, I was to make my way to my grandparents in Bronxville, New York, which is in Westchester County north of New York City. I asked people at the school how to do this, and they told me to catch the Suburban Transit bus from the front of the school, ride it the 55 miles to New York's Port Authority terminal, walk across town to Grand Center Station (I chose 42nd Street), buy a ticket to Bronxville, find the platform, and ride the "Harlem line" to that isolated square mile of paradise. I executed those instructions perfectly, and arrived at my grandparents about three hours after I left the school. Neither my grandparents nor my parents, all of whom were perfectly aware that the Port Authority of 1977 was a teeming hive of scum and villainy, thought there was anything wrong with this, and my experience was hardly unusual. Most kids that age growing up in the suburbs of New York during the 1970s were allowed to take the train or bus into Manhattan on their own, even though mid-town was vastly more dangerous and corrupting thirty years ago than it is today. All across the country, the parents of our generation knew that we had to take risks to learn, and we are better adults because of it.
So, why do the suburban parents of today -- the independent kids of the 1970s -- forbid their teenagers to do what they did growing up, especially in light of today's far lower crime rate? Megan McArdle wonders the same thing, and is hosting a lively discussion of the subject in her comments section.
I have no rational explanation for this, and my informal surveys of fellow suburban parents reveal no deep thinking on the subject. If you ask parents you meet -- say, at a pot luck dinner -- why they do not let their children do what they were allowed to do growing up notwithstanding the much lower crime rate, you rarely get a cogent answer and often get a surprised response along the lines of "I never thought about it that way." Most parents impose the rules that other parents impose, and many of us (especially the mothers) do not want to be more permissive than the mean or the friends of our children will cite our rules as evidence in an argument with their parents, and that's not a way to stay popular.
I agree, however, with the view of some of Megan's commenters, that overprotection is not making it any easier for our children to become competent adults. My biggest worry is that our children -- meaning not only my own children but the children of our generation -- have just not learned to function effectively. No wonder so many of them end up living at home after college.
My take is that today's aggressive parental protectiveness arises from the related phenomena of our elevated safety consciousness and our culture of liability. Our safety consciousness grows from constant instruction that we receive to be more safe in everything we do, whether at work, at home, at play, or just wandering around in the world. That instruction is driven in part by our society's decision to redirect any injury according to "fault." The liability culture, however, has not only deluged us with safety instruction, it has changed our willingess to act and decide. Not only are we actually afraid, even as parents, of incurring liability, but, I believe, our social "learning" about mechanisms of accusation and liability has made us all more generally concerned about errors of commission than errors of omission. We have seen that we can be called to account for things we do or decide, but much less so for not doing or not deciding. Every day in every newspaper and every corporate compliance program and every Congressional hearing we see that it is so much safer to avoid action or decision than to take action or decision. This makes us eager to pass the buck at work and reluctant to act without the approval of others, and it has taught us to make decisions in the rearing of our children that cannot be faulted -- by our spouses, our friends, the "helping professions" or even the law -- even if the result is that we omit to teach them to be competent.
Who is going to blame us for that?
15 Comments:
By 
, at
Tue Apr 15, 11:16:00 PM:
Great post TH, and I agree completely. It's very disheartening how infantilized the children of the Baby Boomers are, and there can be no question that it's unhealthy.
I think a good portion of the blame has to fall on the media, and to an extent the self-congratulatory behavior of lazy parents. We're constantly pumped full of fear about things that pose essentially 0 risk to our children: razor blades in Hallowween candy, the apocryphal "raped, murdered and tossed in the dumpster" story inherent to any big-city, the horrors of household bacteria and a million other things that should be of no real concern to anyone. And parents feel like they're doing the right thing by telling the kid they [i]can't[/i] do something, which more than makes up for all the things they don't do that require some effort or activity on their part.
The most dangerous place for any child? In the car, with Mom yakking on the cell phone, drinking her coffee and doing her nails simultaneously. I propose we ban anyone under 16 from riding in cars. Think of all the lives we could save!
By 
Khaki Elephant, at
Tue Apr 15, 11:21:00 PM:
By Sara (Pal2Pal), at
Wed Apr 16, 12:20:00 AM:
Have you turned on a TV lately? All parents are bombarded with is stories about pedophiles, predators, rapists, and beatings/shootings among teenagers. It makes it seem like it is more dangerous out there than less, even with a lower crime rate. When you see the same story over and over for days on 24 hour news, you begin to think of huge numbers of incidents, rather than the one isolated incident being reported.
I had more freedom, even in elementary school, in the '50s and '60s, than my son and daughter were allowed in the '70s or that they allow their children compared to themselves.
By , at
Wed Apr 16, 12:20:00 AM:
You went to Lawrenceville, then you went to Princeton and now you live in South Jersey? Other than Iowa origins, that's a rather impressive geographic concentration.
By , at
Wed Apr 16, 12:42:00 AM:
We lived in an apartment in Sunnyside (Long Island, NYC) in 1950ish. I was about 10 years old. I walked alone up to Queens Boulevard and got on a double decker bus and rode into New York. I got off the bus at the corner where the old FAO Schwartz was located and then walked north to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Central Park West. It was an adventure that I undertook several times before we moved out to the Island.
I still remember the NYC cops with white gloves and tunics with double rows of brass buttons who were always eager to point the way.
We never lived in a city when my children were growing up so I never had to decide on the level of independent action that they would enjoy. They did, however, both get a new small and modest car when they turned sixteen.
My young grand daughter in San Francisco will face the same adventures that I did. But, her parents know about the deviants and perverts and, while they won't admit it to me, know that their left wing politicians would rather opt to not offend a criminal than protect a child. There are no more cops with white gloves and the people on the public payroll don't want to get involved.
No one would want to let a kid, alone, get near the Port Authority Terminal today.
By , at
Wed Apr 16, 12:43:00 AM:
remember that feeling, the first time you couldn't find your child? that's why.
By , at
Wed Apr 16, 01:30:00 AM:
I think you have to factor in fertility rate and age of mothers as well.
Here in NZ the fertility rate in 1960 was well over four children per woman, and she was 26 years old (median) at time of first child. Today she has 2.1 children and she's well over 30 at median age of first child.
Add in she's had much more education and the rural population is down under 14% of the total, and you have a picture of mums and dads being more protective of their (reduced number)of kids, have higher expectations of them (social pressure and economics) and are vastly more concerned with risk created by the media.
There's also a higher tolerance of mothers and fathers to have their kids hanging around into their twenties. Thats quite different to 40 years ago when both parties breathed a sigh of relief as the kids buggered off to work and flatting and just came home for the Sunday roast if they were close by.
Our kids are growing up in a more specialised world where education is the key to retaining the prosperity of an earlier age. And take a look at your local girls school (remembering the pervert police are watching!)where there's much more tarmac to accommodate the increase of cars driven by the 16 and 18 year olds.. many an artful girl has persuaded her parents that it's "safer" to drive to school than walk or travel in the bus.
JC
By TigerHawk, at
Wed Apr 16, 06:27:00 AM:
Anonymous 12:20 - "geographic concentration": Yeah, I've lived in New Jersey a total of 20 of my 46 years. It has its pros and its cons.
I was born in New York, actually, but spent basically my whole sentient upbringing in Iowa City, so I think of it as the place I grew up. I also lived in Ann Arbor for three years (law school) and Chicago for eight years. Pre-school through second grade I lived in Dundas, Ontario, actually, since my father taught at McMaster University in Hamilton.
JC, those are very good comments.
cjm, I would think that your reason would transcend generations.
By , at
Wed Apr 16, 08:29:00 AM:
TH, You can trace the evolution in popular films. The giant nuclear ants and carrot men from the 50's slowly changed into Jason and Freddie in the 80's and eventually you have the idiotic Jodie Foster Safe Room movie and the Home Alone movies. Hollywood has been pushing the subliminal buttons of America for a long time. Societal fears have either kept pace, reflected, or inspired the sh_t, as you prefer. It is interesting to speculate about what the next wave might be.
JackHawk83
By , at
Wed Apr 16, 08:33:00 AM:
My friends and I talk about this subject all the time. The consensus view amongst this circle (we are all on the cusp of turning 50) is that the 24 hour news cycle was a turning point. How many hours/years of TV time was spent on Natalie Holloway, Elizabeth Smart, etc? The "take home" message was that NO ONE is safe and that we need to keep our kids under lock and key. As a lawyer, I also attribute the paranoia somewhat to liability issues, but not so much the fear of liability as the result of the nanny-staters constantly hammering away at and magnifying pinhole risks.
I'm glad I grew up in the 60s and came of age in the 70s, with parents who kicked us kids out of the house on a sunny day and told us to come home for meals but otherwise "got out and get dirty." Those were the days.
By varangianguard, at
Wed Apr 16, 10:04:00 AM:
Well, as a teen I wasn't allowed to do the same things my father had done (that I didn't know at the time he had done) because he remembered what he had done. And, he didn't want me doing whatever it was that he had done.
That was the early 70's and I still don't know exactly went on with him. All I know is that he and a couple of friends had piled into a car, drove to NYC, and ????? That was in 1944 under WW2 rationing, and I still don't know how they acquired enough gas coupons to get there and back.
But, I could I go to Florida with my friends over breaks from college? Oh no...
The point of my story is that for some parents, maybe their strictness derives more from personal experience, than from fear.
By , at
Wed Apr 16, 10:04:00 AM:
Thank you for brining this subject up. It is a hugely important problem.
We were strict with our children while they were young in what we considered "the essential principals to live by" , while always emphasizing the need for them to learn to make their own decisions based on the rules we established and enforced, and so as they grew older we made very few additional rules. Our goal was to have our children be deciding pretty much everything for themselves as early in life as possible.
It's been very hard, because they screw up and we always have to resist the urge to "save" them. That's been very difficult to resist, and sometimes we fail ourselves and our children and rescue them from the consequences of a bad decision (sometimes, we do even worse, and try to stop a bad decision from being made) when, truly, they could have either saved themselves or learned a valuable lesson. But our kids seemed to have survived their parents pretty well, so far.
By , at
Wed Apr 16, 10:11:00 AM:
I concur with Pal2Pal and Nancy; when there's a slow news day, the networks bring out crappy 'investigative reporting' stocks, like "Is Your Tap Water Safe? The Answer May Surprise You," and "Laura's Story: Profile of a Predator," and so forth. CNN was founded in 1980. We've had time (28 years) for an entire generation to grow up and spawn their own children in the 24 hr. news cycle. They've been completely inundated for their whole lives.
But I also think that child rearing practices have changed. Lots of people wait until their 30's or even 40's to have children, and then they only have 1, maybe 2. (I heard something on a Lifetime movie yesterday when I was surfing the channels, in isolation; "Getting married before grad school? What are they thinking?" Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with Hollywood?) It's a lot easier to smother a single precious little snowflake with constant policing and affection than 5 or 6 screaming brats (like my parents' generation). At that point, you just want them all to disappear outside for a few hours and leave you the hell alone.
By , at
Wed Apr 16, 10:40:00 AM:
Child rearing practices have changed among my contemporaries due to being older, true, but people are also far more tolerant of the government getting involved in child rearing too. It bugs the heck out of me that Princeton Borough wants to protect my children, even if we don't wlecome the intrusion.
Our kids work, for example, and to work underage in Princeton requires completing a bureaucratic process that turned my hair white with age. The borough and the school board have to issue them permits to work (even though my kids go to private school), and the process is agonizing. Another annoying thing the Borough is doing is trying hard to save kids from the evils of drinking, by seeking the legislatively approved right to enter a house where the Police believe underage people are drinking, without gaining a warrant first. I think kids should learn to drink at home, and I believe we should encourage children to learn to drink responsibly at home. Who the heck are they to tell us differently?
By , at
Wed Apr 16, 01:46:00 PM:
