Unless I overlooked copies of Hillary Clinton’s Hard Choices—or Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal—No Child Left Alone has surely been the most anxiety-producing read at the beach this summer. While my fellow vacationers splashed through the mass-market fiction list, I dove beneath the deep waves of bureaucratic overreach and regulatory aggression. My choice, alas, was not without its costs: As my children ran and played, I found myself keeping an eye out for the police. After all, my 3- and 5-year-olds had wandered 30 feet away from me—then 50, then 70. Would Child Protective Services swoop down like a seagull and snatch them up?
Such are the thoughts any reader might have while enjoying Abby W. Schachter’s timely exposé of public intrusion into private childrearing. Like David Harsanyi’s Nanny State and Philip K. Howard’s The Rule of Nobody—two predecessors credited by Schachter in her bibliography—No Child Left Alone combines a readable tone with moral outrage at the absurd-ities of overbearing governance. Whereas Harsanyi and Howard aim broadly, however, Schachter examines the specific interplay of family and state: of children, parents, and the “village” doing its damnedest to get between them.
Schachter’s genius is for—and this book is propelled by—the perfectly chosen example, from the Florida mother of two arrested after allowing her 7-year-old to walk half a mile to a playground, to a North Carolina 4-year-old whose home-packed turkey and cheese sandwich was confiscated by a “food inspector” and replaced with cafeteria-grade chicken nuggets. On page after page, readers are left with the same frustrating question: How did we, an ostensibly free people, get here?
For Schachter, the answer is clear. At every level of enforcement—from the cop on his beat to the social worker hamstrung by mandated-reporting laws—public officials have become bound by standardized procedural regiments that crowd out individual judgment in the name of lawsuit-avoidance and worst-case-scenario-ism. If Johnny swallows a toy, the argument goes, the toy must be banned; if Susie is at risk of obesity, every schoolchild must count her calories.
The consequence of such thinking, Schachter argues, is that Americans have begun to be governed according to “the shocking exception” rather than “the norm.” And because “the one-size-fits-all solution is the only one that government can handle”—a point repeatedly demonstrated here —rules crafted in response to those exceptions are inevitably applied wherever government reaches, from daycare operations to the public school system to kids’ toys to children’s very weight. In the most provocative section—a startlingly confrontational look at pro-breastfeeding policies (Schachter might say propaganda)—the author shows that even nursing now falls within the state’s line of vision.
Of course, standardization is only partly to blame for the circumstances in which we now find ourselves. Borrowing a concept from Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe’s Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing, Schachter suggests that American society needs to reclaim its “moral will,” the common sense with which we used to balance the likelihood of harm against our children’s need to take charge, to learn from failure—even failure accompanied by suffering—and to practice real independence.
This last point, it must be said, can take some getting used to at its farthest edges, even among parents who (like me) have a theoretical desire to give our children the freedom of movement and the responsibility that we once enjoyed. Reading Schachter’s celebrations of tween subway riding and underage babysitting, I felt my heart beating a little faster, whatever my beliefs. What I hadn’t yet considered, and what Schachter ultimately makes clear, is that my response was part of a vicious circle, in which “the overreaction of the nanny state to young people who are allowed to operate independently feeds the already overly developed anxiety of parents regarding their kids’ freedom.” Because the state has so narrowed the range of acceptable, even possible behavior, to strain against those limits even a little feels far more dangerous than it should.
Furthermore, the probabilities and “norms” held up here as an answer to the “shocking exception” are, in many cases, understood too pessimistically. A 2014 Gallup poll found, for example, that 63 percent of Americans said that crime was up despite its long and steady decline since the 1990s. It is in the shadows cast by such mischaracterizations of reality that the regulators of contemporary childhood accrue power with virtually no opposition.
What opposition exists provides Abby Schachter with some heroes: the “Captain Mommies and Daddies” who push back, speak up, and, in extreme cases, risk criminalization rather than ceding their parenting responsibilities to the state. We should read their stories, steel ourselves, and join them.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
