A friend just asked me how we got to this point — a point that she is miserably in the middle of, beside herself with guilt for missing an afternoon pick-up of her kid at school (someone else pitched in!), or whenever she has to, say, cut bath time short to take a work call.
The pressure to be perfect and ever-present and somehow control every aspect of our kids’ lives is INTENSE…and completely unnecessary. And new! The micromanagement of kids requires US to become mircomanagers, which was something not expected of parents till about 10 minutes ago! Because it’s an impossible ask and impossible TASK.
My friend asked HOW DID WE GET TO THIS POINT??? Here, in rant form, is my reply:
How we got to HELICOPTER PARENTING
1 – Excess fear and attention to extremely rare/high-profile kidnappings in late 70s/early 80s led to “milk carton kids.” Belief born that anytime a kid is unsupervised, they are in DANGER.
2 – “Stranger danger” became a constant drumbeat (even tho vast majority of crimes against kids are committed by people they KNOW). So constant supervision — and even PRIDE in distrusting others — became the norm.
3 – Meantime, smaller families and 2 incomes meant more money could be spent on each kid. Market responded with new programs (travel sports, tutoring, extracurriculars) that were sold as “better” than kids just “wasting” their time playing. Kids would supposedly be SAFER (constant supervision!) and “learn more.” (A fallacy that assumes kids only learn through direct instruction — contradicted by almost all of human history, when schooling did not EXIST.) Pretty soon the MORE activities you could put your in, the MORE you thought your kid could get ahead.
4 – Anyone who trusted their kids to just hang out was seen as lazy, or leaving child potential on the table, or actually endangering their kids!
5 – The norms shifted SO MUCH that some parents were accused of NEGLECT simply for letting their kids do what ALL kids did a generation earlier: playing outside or staying home alone or walking to the store.
6 – And once ELECTRONIC SURVEILLANCE became possible, the idea that you would EVER take your eyes off your kids became completely untenable. “Just put an Airtag in her shoe, mom! Or don’t you care if she gets trafficked to Thailand?”
7 – So: The ease of surveillance. The fact that extracurriculars swept almost all kids off the street leaving “no one to play with.” The fear of gov’t investigation for neglect. The worry that the other kids were getting ahead via tutors, etc. And the completely outta-whack perception of danger (Harris Poll: 50% of adults think if two 10-year-olds are playing at the park they are LIKELY to be abducted). All this meant we switched from trusting kids, and neighbors, and even the kids’ own innate smarts and resourcefulness to ONLY TRUSTING OURSELVES.
8 – That’s why parenting is so hard!!! We feel we somehow can and MUST exert control over everything our kids encounter. We trust only ourselves or a proxy that we (background check and) hire to watch/teach/entertain/interact with our kids. “The village” has boiled down to JUST US always watching, double-checking, distrusting, surveilling, and busy stuffing our kids with 2 million words by age 3, lest they grow up saying “good” instead of “exemplary” and tank their SATs.
5 Comments
So sez you and you sum it up perfectly. I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, and will likely not live to see kids again playing in their front yards, in parks, in vacant lots and fields and woods, in the street–all without adult supervision–as was normal for all children when I was young. I greatly admire what you are doing, but I doubt we’ll ever completely return to sane times. We’re too many generations into helicoptering, and most parents, having been raised that way themselves, have too difficult a time letting it go. Most of society, government, and policing are opposed to free-range childhood, and penalties on parents for attempting it are often draconian. One day, efforts like yours may result in a compromise between hysterical over-vigilance and the normality of the past. That’s at least something to hold onto. So sez me, a grumpy old man.
All dead on, of course! But I would add, as another huge factor, the rise of litigiousness in all areas of society. Schools, workplaces, parents, businesses, playgrounds…they’re all scared to death of a million dollar lawsuit if any kid gets hurt under any circumstance. I think that’s a huge factor in all this.
Is there a site online with data comparing childhood safety to the 90s, 70s, 50s?
I grew up in the 80s and 90s, and all this feels dead on. It really made me sad when I fully realized that kids who were born in the 80s and 90s were the last to have a childhood where they were free to leave their house without adult supervision and walk/cycle to meet up with friends and just have fun with the only expectation that they should be home by a certain time, usually before dinner or at least before it got dark. Kids these days have no freedom to learn how the outside world works and experience success and failure on their own terms. Add in the always online aspect of current childhood, and I really fear for the adults that will come of this generation.
You are quite correct, and let’s assign some of the blame to the “woke” media and their news policy of “if it bleeds it leads”. Much exaggeration and fear mongering. I’m so glad I’m a baby boomer and had a free range childhood. I had an odometer on my bicycle and loved to put lots of mileage on it by biking all over town. I couldn’t have been more than 10 years old. Kids playing outside were summoned home for dinner by their mothers yelling out their names from the apartment window (could be heard two blocks away!) This was Brooklyn in the 1950s. Might as well be another planet today.