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“There Is a Tree That Stands,” by Itsik Manger, translated by Leonard Wolf, from The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse, edited by Irving Howe, Ruth R. Wisse, and Khone Shmeruk, copyright © 1987 by Irving Howe, Ruth Wisse, and Khone Shmeruk. Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
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FIRST AMERICAN EDITION
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Schachter, Abby W., 1969– author.
Title: No child left alone: getting the government out of parenting / by Abby W. Schachter.
Description: New York: Encounter Books, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015044908 (print) | LCCN 2015041108 (ebook) | ISBN 9781594038624 (Ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Child welfare—United States. | Children—Government policy—United States. | Family policy—United States. | Parenting—United States. | Parents—United States.
Classification: LCC HV741 (print) | LCC HV741 .S347 2016 (ebook) | DDC 362.7/25610973—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015044908
PRODUCED BY WILSTED & TAYLOR PUBLISHING SERVICES
To my parents,
Ruth and Leonard Wisse,
and to my husband,
Ben Schachter
Contents
Foreword
Lenore Skenazy
Introduction
1. Arresting Captain Mommy
Criminalizing parents for raising independent, self-assured children
2. Breast Is Best, or Else
Advocating for breastfeeding isn’t enough—it has to be the law
3. Daycare Nannies
Too few child-care centers that cost too much—the result of too many regulations
4. School Statists
Obsessed with health and fat shaming
5. The War on Fun
Banning play, toys, and games
6. Obesity Police
Kids taken into state custody because they’re fat and other child-welfare woes
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
CAPTAIN MOMMY \′kap-t
CAPTAIN DADDY \′kap-t
“I’D LIKE TO LET my kids walk to school, but . . .”
But what?
You’re the parent! They’re your kids! You want to give them the freedom you loved—to walk, explore, stay home, go out, or even, once in a while, to get lost or goof up. To do things on their own.
But . . .
As Captain Mommy knows all too well, it’s no longer straightforward.
For the first five years after I founded the Free-Range Kids movement, parents who wanted to let their kids walk to school would end that sentence with, “but I don’t want them to get kidnapped.” Fair enough . . . even though the chances of that happening are so outlandishly small, that if for some reason you actually WANTED your child to be kidnapped by a stranger, do you know how long you’d have to keep him outside, unsupervised, for that to be statistically likely to happen?
About 750,000 years. (And after the first 100,000, you really couldn’t even call him a “kid” anymore.) But that’s for another book.
Suffice it to say that a few years ago, the “I’d like my kids to walk” sentence started ending differently: “. . . but I don’t want to get arrested.”
Fear of predators had been supplanted by fear of the police.
The stories, after all, were in the news: “I let my nine-year-old play in the park and was thrown in jail for negligence.” “I let my kids eleven, nine, and five play in the playground across the street from me, and I was put on the state’s child-abuse registry.” “I let my two-year-old wait in the car while I ran in to get her life jacket and was charged with child endangerment. And yes, I get the irony.”
Real stories.
The problem seemed to be twofold. First, the government is made up of human beings. Humans who watch TV, read Facebook, hear about childhood crimes and tragedies, and end up just as outraged as the rest of us. Problem Number Two is this: They feel that they can prevent all these sad tales from ever happening again if only they passed some more laws.
So they do. And now in 19 states, you can’t let your kid wait in the car while you go run a short errand. In British Columbia, the Supreme Court ruled that it is illegal to let your child stay home alone as a “latchkey kid” until age 10, because—the judge mused—what if the house caught on fire? In Rhode Island, four legislators proposed a law that would make it a crime to let any child below 7th grade—age 12!—off the school bus in the afternoon unless there was an adult waiting to walk the kid home.
That