I got out of the car one day to feed the parking meter next to the driver side window. “Don’t, Mommy. Don’t. The police will come.” I went to let the dog into our front yard while he was watching his morning cartoon. “Mommy, no!!! The police.”
One afternoon after his swim lesson, he came out of the bathroom and for a second didn’t see me — I’d kneeled down to get his shoes from their cubby. When I looked up he was crying. “Mommy, mommy, I thought someone was going to steal me.”
That evening I sat him down and tried to explain it. I told him that he was right, that mommy had left him in the car for a few minutes one time and that was a mistake. I wasn’t supposed to do that. But it was all going to be fine now. Mommy wasn’t going to jail. And no one was going to kidnap him!
“Most people,” I told him, “are not trying to hurt you. Most people are good people. Do you understand? You don’t have to be afraid?”
He nodded slowly, but I could see from his face that he only half believed me. And as I thought about it, I questioned if this belief I had in the basic decency of strangers was part of the problem. Certainly, many of my fellow parents didn’t seem to share it. We live in a country of gated communities and home security systems. My sister has both, though she lives in a subdivision with about a dozen neighbors. We’re told to warn our children not to talk to strangers. We walk them to school and hover over them as they play and some of us even put GPS systems on them, confident, I guess, that should they get lost, no one will help them. Gone are the days of letting kids roam the neighborhood, assuming that at least one responsible adult will be nearby to keep an eye out. I’m told there are still things like carpools and babysitting co-ops, but I’ve never found one. In place of “It takes a village,” our parenting mantra seems to be “every man for himself.” Faced with this gulf between my own childhood and the environment in which I was raising my kids, I couldn’t help but wonder if it was good that I’d been taught a lesson, reprimanded for something stubbornly naive or careless in my nature.
In the three years since it happened, it seems like more and more people are talking about the crisis of helicopter parenting. In an essay in the Atlantic, “The Overprotected Kid,” Hanna Rosin writes how “In all [her] years as a parent, [she’s] mostly met children who take it for granted that they are always being watched.”
Other publications and websites and social media outlets and message boards are awash in eight ways to know if you’re over-parenting, or how to give your kid the freedom he needs and deserves. Psychologists and social scientists wonder if we’re not instilling children with a sense of learned helplessness that makes them into subfunctional, narcissistic young adults who have an overinflated sense of worth and sensitivity and, more recently, require trigger warnings on college syllabi.
But what I always find lacking in these warnings is some explanation, not only of how expectations have shifted so radically for parents, but of why they have shifted. The tip-of-the-tongue answer is often that the world is a more dangerous place than it was a generation ago. But it doesn’t take much research to debunk this myth and find that nationally, violent crime rates are lower than they were in the ’70s and ’80s. So how do we explain that activities that once seemed harmless — letting a kid play at the park without supervision or sitting in a car for a few minutes — have now become not only socially taboo but grounds for prosecution?
A friend and former classmate of mine, Julia Fierro, spent so much time thinking about these questions of parental anxiety, she ended up writing a novel on the subject. When I asked her what answers she came up with, she wonders if everyone doesn’t have “too much information — parenting books, birthing classes, a gazillion blogs and parenting sites and magazines, and anonymous online sites where parents are very judgmental, even when trying to help or give advice. I think all that info, all the conflicting extreme philosophies of parenting (attachment parenting vs. cry-it-out and few moderate philosophies being promoted) makes us not trust ourselves. Also, most of us who are ambitious young professionals move far from our families and so have little support or solid community.”
And maybe because we’re both so isolated and so “ambitious” in our parenting, we sabotage ourselves with impossible standards, live with a chronic fear of not measuring up in what’s supposed to be our most important calling. It’s almost as though, in the course of a few decades, we’ve all developed a cultural anxiety disorder around our children, and when I mull over this idea, I don’t feel anger or indignation over what’s happening, but an awful sort of sympathy.