Losing our collective nerve
by Tom Sullivan
Besides suffering Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, the decade saw (IIRC) parents bringing the kiddies to the mall on Saturday to be photographed and fingerprinted. Maybe bringing dental impressions to help identify their bodies. We called these “child safe” programs. In the 1950s, it was commies hiding in the woodpile. By the 1980s, it was child abducters hiding behind every tree. Heaven forfend that little Johnny or Janie should walk or ride a bike to school or to the playground without a hypervigilant parent for a bodyguard. Well, somebody is finally trying to beak the spell:
On a recent Saturday afternoon, a 10-year old Maryland boy named Rafi and his 6-year old sister, Dvora, walked home by themselves from a playground about a mile away from their suburban house. They made it about halfway home when the police picked them up. You’ve heard these stories before, about what happens when kids in paranoid, hyperprotective America go to and from playgrounds alone. I bet you can guess the sequence of events preceding and after: Someone saw the kids walking without an adult and called the police. The police tracked down the kids and drove them home. The hitch this time is, when the police got there, they discovered that they were meddling with the wrong family.
Danielle and Alexander Meitiv explicitly ally themselves with the “free range” parenting movement, which believes that children have to take calculated risks in order to learn to be self-reliant. Their kids usually even carry a card that says: “I am not lost. I am a free-range kid,” although they didn’t happen to have it that day. They had carefully prepared their kids for that walk, letting them go first just around the block, then to a library a little farther away, and then the full mile. When the police came to the door, they did not present as hassled overworked parents who leave their children alone at a playground by necessity, or laissez-faire parents who let their children roam wherever, but as an ideological counterpoint to all that’s wrong with child-rearing in America today. If we are lucky, the Meitivs will end up on every morning talk show and help convince American parents that it’s perfectly OK to let children walk without an adult to the neighborhood playground.
There’s video here.
For a culture that once boasted of rugged individualism and John Wayne, we’ve become awfully skittish in the last half century. Nothing like defeating the Axis, staring down the Russians, and landing a man on the moon to build a nation’s confidence. Nothing like Vietnam, Watergate, the Iran hostage crisis, and the Beirut Marine barracks bombing to shake it. By the mid-1980s, Americans were in full moral panic mode over Satanic ritual abuse and alien abductions. After September 11, we’d become a nation of bedwetters convinced that bearded men with long, curved knives are coming to kill us all in our beds. We’re packing heat and opening fire on anything that goes bump in the night either at home or abroad.
Lenore Skenazy found herself declared “America’s worst mom” by multiple news outlets after writing about letting her 9-year-old ride the New York subway alone. America is having a “hysterical moment,” she writes:
That weekend I started my Free-Range Kids blog to explain my philosophy. Obviously, I love safety: My kid wears a helmet, got strapped into a car seats, always wears his seat belt. But I don’t believe kids need a security detail every time they leave the house. When society thinks they do — and turns that fear into law — loving, rational parents get arrested.
Just checking Mapquest, my parents would have been arrested in two states on either side of the Mason-Dixon line. As a child living in a major city in the early 1960s, I and my classmates walked to a grade school about half a mile away in sun, rain, and snow. (Few families had more than one car anyway.) In a smaller, southern city, I occasionally rode a bike to school 3.5 miles away. The horror.
We as a country would be lot less dangerous to ourselves and to the world if we actually accepted the risks we used to before losing our collective nerve.