At Once Undermannered And Overparented
That describes far too many kids today, and it isn't their fault, but that of the adults who are supposed to be teaching them both independence and how to be a civilized part of a world with a lot of other people in it.
My pal Lenore Skenazy -- called "the worst mother in the world" for letting her then-9-year-old son Izzy ride the subway home by himself after he begged to do so -- has company. I think I was the most hated women in Los Angeles this week for my op-ed on screaming children on planes and the people who "parent" them.
Not everybody hated me for it -- some people were grateful. And I made the #1 most-emailed story of the day not only in Los Angeles, but in Australian papers, too! The piece ran in Dallas, Philly, Atlantic City, and elsewhere, and was linked today by Denis Dutton on Arts & Letters Daily. If you want to take advantage of free shipping at Amazon (on orders of $25 or more), I suggest picking up all three of our books.
Denis' excellent book is The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution
But back to today's topic -- an article by Nancy Gibbs in TIME on helicopter parenting and the damage it seems to do to kids. Here's the bit where she quotes Lenore:
Once obsessing about kids' safety and success became the norm, a kind of orthodoxy took hold, and heaven help the heretics -- the ones who were brave enough to let their kids venture outside without Secret Service protection. Just ask Lenore Skenazy, who to this day, when you Google "America's Worst Mom," fills the first few pages of results -- all because one day last year she let her 9-year-old son ride the New York City subway alone. A newspaper column she wrote about it somehow ignited a global firestorm over what constitutes reasonable risk. She had reporters calling from China, Israel, Australia, Malta. ("Malta! An island!" she marvels. "Who's stalking the kids there? Pirates?") Skenazy decided to fight back, arguing that we have lost our ability to assess risk. By worrying about the wrong things, we do actual damage to our children, raising them to be anxious and unadventurous or, as she puts it, "hothouse, mama-tied, danger-hallucinating joy extinguishers."Skenazy, a Yale-educated mom who with her husband is raising two boys in New York City, had ingested all the same messages as the rest of us. Her sons' school once held a pre-field-trip assembly explaining exactly how close to a hospital the children would be at all times. She confesses to being "at least part Sikorsky," hiring a football coach for a son's birthday and handing out mouth guards as party favors. But when the Today show had her on the air to discuss her subway decision, interviewer Ann Curry turned to the camera and asked, "Is she an enlightened mom or a really bad one?" (See pictures of a diverse group of American teens.)
From that day and the food fight that followed, she launched her Free Range Kids blog, which eventually turned into her own Dangerous Book for Parents: Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry. There is no rational reason, she argues, that a generation of parents who grew up walking alone to school, riding mass transit, trick-or-treating, teeter-tottering and selling Girl Scout cookies door to door should be forbidding their kids to do the same. But somehow, she says, "10 is the new 2. We're infantilizing our kids into incompetence." She celebrates seat belts and car seats and bike helmets and all the rational advances in child safety. It's the irrational responses that make her crazy, like when Dear Abby endorses the idea, as she did in August, that each morning before their kids leave the house, parents take a picture of them. That way, if they are kidnapped, the police will have a fresh photo showing what clothes they were wearing. Once the kids make it home safe and sound, you can delete the picture and take a new one the next morning.
That advice may seem perfectly sensible to parents bombarded by heartbreaking news stories about missing little girls and the predator next door. But too many parents, says Skenazy, have the math all wrong. Refusing to vaccinate your children, as millions now threaten to do in the case of the swine flu, is statistically reckless; on the other hand, there are no reports of a child ever being poisoned by a stranger handing out tainted Halloween candy, and the odds of being kidnapped and killed by a stranger are about 1 in 1.5 million. When parents confront you with "How can you let him go to the store alone?," she suggests countering with "How can you let him visit your relatives?" (Some 80% of kids who are molested are victims of friends or relatives.) Or ride in the car with you? (More than 430,000 kids were injured in motor vehicles last year.) "I'm not saying that there is no danger in the world or that we shouldn't be prepared," she says. "But there is good and bad luck and fate and things beyond our ability to change. The way kids learn to be resourceful is by having to use their resources." Besides, she says with a smile, "a 100%-safe world is not only impossible. It's nowhere you'd want to be."
Assessing risk is difficult.
For example, since 9/11, more than 100,000 Americans have been shot dead--in plain-vanilla crimes, perped by non-terrorists. More than 400,000 have died in auto accidents.
3,000 died in 9/11. A minute number, relatively.
Yet today, we are spending more than $100 billion a year for items marked "Homeland Security" or "Civilian Defense" in the federal budget. These sums alone exceed Obama's proposed spending on national healthcare (which I am dubious about.)
Meanwhile, try getting through an airport. Try mailing a book.
Yet on the numbers, we could take a 9/11 every year, and it would be a mosquito on a rhino's butt.
I can assure you of one thing: The spending for homeland security and civilian defense (these are separate items, not in the Department of Defense) will go on every year forever, joining the Department of Agriculture, the VA and the Department of Defense as permanent features of our politico-economic landscape--features that absorb that majority of your federal income tax dollars. (The huge entitlement programs, SS and Medicare, are financed through payroll taxes).
I can also assure you that no right-wingers, or members of the libertarian catamite wing of the R-Party, will ever whimper once about these expenditures. They will cry for federal income tax cuts.
Happy T-day!
BOTU at November 26, 2009 8:46 AM
"Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure."
If Helen Keller could see that, why can't others?
Radwaste at November 26, 2009 8:46 AM
... and BOTU spams us all again.
Look up whatever he says, because it's likely to be wrong.
Radwaste at November 26, 2009 8:50 AM
Also the total gun deaths in the US per year are probably closer to 20-25 thousand and that includes, of course, all the gang bangers in DC, LA, Chicago etc. not to mention shootings by police officers. These two catagories are the lions share of deaths. Isabel.
Isabel1130 at November 26, 2009 9:53 AM
Isabel1130: From Wiki, "In 2005, 75% of the 10,100 homicides committed using firearms in the United States were committed using handguns."
There are another 15,000 or so suicides by gun, but I did not include those deaths 9asd as they are0 as they do not pose a "risk" to others.
Radwaste:
If you look google federal budget, and do the math, you will see that spending for the Department of Defense, Department of Agriculture, the VA, and two items marked "Homeland Security" and Civilian Defense" make up more than one-half of federal outlays. These are outlays financed by income taxes and borrowing.
Social Security and Medicare are financed by payroll taxes.
Therefore, I am correct when I say that of your income taxes, more than one half is consumed by the above-mentioned federal agencies.
Have not you ever wondered why successive R-Party Presidents--Reagan, Bush, Bush jr--never proposed a balanced budget?
Did you not ever wonder why Bush jr, with an R-party House, Senate, and Supreme Court, proposed only huge federal deficits? That all of the aforementioned programs grew like wildfire during the years of R-Party domination?
Yes. Obama may be even worse--he is not tackling the ossified lard in the federal budget, not getting out of Iraqistan.
Lastly, I ask you--are you really quaking in your boots over terrorists? Or, are you (more sensibly) worried about getting into an auto accident, or getting by a criminal?
Recently, many posted here they feared home invasions and thus kept guns handy. I thought even that was silly, but far more reasonable than fearing terrorists, given the numbers.
Did you ever wonder why the terrorist threat was so hyped up by Bush?
BOTU at November 26, 2009 10:58 AM
Follow my link, BOTU. Don't play silly games aabout where the money comes from.
And do remember something people are eager to deny:
100% of Federal funding is the Consitutional duty of Congress.
Radwaste at November 26, 2009 11:22 AM
"For example, since 9/11, more than 100,000 Americans have been shot dead--in plain-vanilla crimes, perped by non-terrorists."
Yes BOTU, but as you see in your original post you didn't claim 10,000 gun homicides. You claimed 100,000. Isabel.
Isabel1130 at November 26, 2009 11:23 AM
"Malta! An island!" she marvels. "Who's stalking the kids there? Pirates?"
I'd have more respect for her if she didn't come up with nonsense like this. Is there some minimum contiguous land mass necessary for pedophiles to exist in an area?
momof4 at November 26, 2009 5:22 PM
I recently took my three kids into Manhattan, ages, 12, 15, and 17. I was bombarded with complaints and horror stories by friends and relatives over the fact that I let my kids go into separate stores while I browsed the street vendors. They all had a cell phone on them, all know their names, my phone number, their father's number, and what to do in case we actually became separated for a period of time. Imagine that not only did we not lose each other, but that we all enjoyed our day in Manhattan and came home safely with plans to do it again. This was the opposite of when they went in with their father and an aunt who had them hold onto a string and any time one fell a step behind was screamed at that some stranger could come steal them away from them. My son is over 6 feet with long curly hair. I think that the only people that were scared were the tourists that were walking nearby.
I understand being safe, but there is a difference between being aware and being nuts. I've met more nice people in my travels than crazies and I'll keep on doing it my way. Mark me a bad mother along with Lenore because she has the right idea.
Kristen at November 26, 2009 5:53 PM
I'm thrilled to see someone finally writing about this. I regularly see 10 and 12 year-old kids act like total freaks, (complete with sissy-tantrums that would have earned even a toddler a spanking just two decades ago) and people act like it's perfectly acceptable.
Then, when the spoiled, undisciplined child with not a shred of impulse control becomes a teen, the parents (and numerous "experts") blame hormones. That the kid is merely acting the same way he has his entire life (as opposed to, oh I don't know, growing up a bit) doesn't seem to occur to them.
Raging Ranter at November 26, 2009 8:05 PM
I trace my transformation from tomboy to fashionista to a trip I took with my parents to NYC when I was 15. It was clear that I was a stubborn teenager who wanted to be off on her own, so I was sent off for five hours by myself. This was in 1984, so there were no cell phones, no email, no nothing to help me if something went wrong.
Not only did nothing go wrong, I discovered Saks Fifth Avenue, thus triggering a shopaholic gene that has extended to this day. On a more serious note, I also felt a great deal of responsibility and pride that I was able to go shop for myself in such a large city. If my mom had been hovering around me the entire time, I would have gotten neither the outrageous clothes I purchased nor the sense of self-sufficiency.
Helicopter parents are raising narcisstic kids without true self-sufficiency or self-esteem. It's a scary thought.
Kimberly at November 27, 2009 7:02 AM
Helicopter parents are raising narcisstic kids without true self-sufficiency or self-esteem. It's a scary thought.
Amen to that. Daughter #1 went with a bunch of her friends to Manhattan on the train not too long ago. She had her cell phone with her. I told her to call me if they needed a ride home from the train station when they got back. Other than that, I heard not a peep. When they DID get back, however, she called me to give them rides home, and they all told me about their day and what fun they had. They hadn't done anything outrageous, and my daughter got a lot of crazy applause for playing the giant floor piano at FAO Schwartz, which she said was beyond cool. Then they were going to go to dinner, but a couple of the other kids they were with ditched #1 and 2 others, but as it happend, they ran into another of their friends from school who was also in the city, and they had dinner with him, so all was well. One of the girls I drove home thanked me for coming to get them and asked me to please not tell her mother about their New York adventure, because "she'd kill me if she knew I left town without telling her." I said, "you know, honey, that's not the way to get your parents to trust you" and she said, "believe me, they would tie me to a chair if they could get away with it. I'm lucky they let me walk to school." (She lives about 5 blocks away.) How sad is that?
Flynne at November 27, 2009 9:28 AM
Maybe it's a partial consequence of parents having so few kids these days ... when all your genetic eggs are in one or two little baskets, you have to be extra careful. I reckon we should go back to the days of just popping out half a dozen or more ... then firstly you wouldn't be quite as worried about losing one or two here and there (sh-t happens), and secondly, you'd be so busy you wouldn't have time to helicopter-parent. Parents have too much free time.
Lobster at November 27, 2009 3:52 PM
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