“Parenting isn’t about minimizing risk to your children,” a mother in Arizona once wrote to me. “It’s about eliminating risk.”
This pernicious notion doesn’t only infect the minds of parents. It also drives school and government officials, including child protective services, to impose draconian rules that punish parents who make slight slip-ups or even those who do something completely safe but that violates the rules of safetyism.
The end result is parenting made much more difficult. Safetyism probably also drives down the birthrate both by terrifying parents and would-be parents and by making parenting so much more laborious and time-consuming than it should be.
Lenore Skenazy has spent years inveighing against this mindset and documenting the absurdities and atrocities committed in the name of “child safety.” Last week, she published her year-end worst-of list. Some highlights (lowlights).
- A Nevada mother let her 8- and 10-year-old sons play at the end of their dead-end street. That’s when “a neighbor called 911 to report two unsupervised children.” Firefighters arrived at the scene and thankfully didn’t take any action against the mother.
- An Ohio mother left her 10-year-old and 2-year-old in a motel room so she could work a shift at a pizza place. To “protect” those children, the police arrested her and locked her in jail.
Playing on the sidewalk without supervision is safe. Leaving your 2-year-old under a 10-year-old’s care in a motel room is probably to be avoided, but it’s not gross negligence, either.
What’s consistent across these two cases is that the more unneighborly neighbors and unsympathetic police or child protective services officials punish parents for taking their eyes off their children, the harder it becomes for parents or children to have lives.
This constant demand to helicopter your children is a major stressor for parents. It makes it impossible to have a big family, but it also makes it terrifying to have any children. This safetyism and helicopter-parenting is probably a cause of our record-low birthrates.
We need more parents to become familiar with the actual risks facing children, as opposed to the imaginary ones. We need more neighbors and passersby to help children or check in on children they think might be unsafe. This is what Skenazy calls “free-range parenting.” More of it would probably increase birthrates.
And as school districts and teachers unions around the country try to shut down schools again, here’s an important reminder from Skenazy’s list: “A study of over 400,000 American children ages 2-19 found ‘sharp increases in BMI rates occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic … and younger school-aged children experienced the largest increases.’ The CDC hypothesized that the reasons for this included increased stress and screen time, and decreased physical activity. Perhaps forcing kids to stay alone and inside for months might have some downsides.”
