CRIMINALIZING PARENTS FOR TEACHING RESPONSIBILITY
In other states, parents have run afoul of the babysitting rules. One mother in New Canaan, Connecticut, was arrested and charged with “risk of injury to a minor” for allowing her older children to babysit for younger ones.17 Consider that a basic aspect of families is that members are supposed to care for one another. Is the law designed to contradict what are natural bonds? And why is the decision of who is responsible enough to babysit one that the government makes?
But arrest isn’t as bad a losing custody of your kids. The Atlantic’s Colin Friedersdorf reported in July 2014 on a mother who had lost custody of her four children because she left them home alone together while taking a class at the local university.18 She fought for four years—four years—to get her kids back, and as she told Friedersdorf, her whole attitude has changed.
An unexpected knock at the door still makes my heart beat rapidly. I’m more conscious of strangers’ stares and comments when I go out with my children. Ultimately, I found this ostensibly well-meaning system of child protection to be an exercise in often baseless finger-pointing, pitting neighbor against neighbor, family member against family member. As people vie for power and victory, it all becomes so much less about kids’ best interests and more about adults’ selfish interests. In criminalizing previously culturally normal activities, such as an unaccompanied child playing at a public park, we open the door for any unorthodox parental decision to be subjected to similar unfavorable scrutiny.
The Washington Post’s Radley Balko notes that from his perch as a chronicler of “the increasing criminalization of just about everything and the use of the criminal justice system to address problems that were once (and better) handled by families, friends, communities and other institutions,” he has noticed a growing list of stories highlighting “those themes intersecting with parenthood.”19 Balko was upset by the Harrell case in South Carolina, as well as the arrest of Jeffrey Williamson of Blanchester, Ohio, for “child endangerment” because his son skipped church and went to play with friends instead. As with so many of these cases, nothing had happened to the boy.
Balko’s criticism of these types of nanny-state interventions is right on; these problems used to be solved without police or child protective services, whereas today’s overreaction is going to cause both parents and their children undue harm.
You needn’t approve of the parents’ actions in any of these cases to understand that dumping them into the criminal justice system is a terribly counterproductive way of addressing their mistakes. (And I’m not at all convinced that three of the four stories were even mistakes.) The mere fact that state officials were essentially micromanaging these parents’ decisions is creepy enough. That the consequences for the “wrong” decision are criminal is downright scary. It doesn’t benefit these kids in the least to give their parents a criminal record, smear their parents’ names in their neighborhoods and communities and make it more difficult for their parents to find a job.20
In their book Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing, Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe raise a similar question about who should decide when a risk is too great and who—if anyone—actually has the power to use their independent judgment to override the system, which has inserted itself into decisions that used to be made by parents and guardians without outside interference.
Schwartz and Sharpe tell the story of a father who took his son to a Detroit Tigers game. The seven-year-old boy asked for lemonade, and the father bought him a Mike’s Hard Lemonade because that was all the concession stand had and he didn’t know it was an alcoholic beverage (he’s an archeology professor at the University of Michigan). A security guard saw the boy sipping the hard lemonade and called the police, who in turn called an ambulance. The boy was rushed to hospital where they found no trace of alcohol in his bloodstream. The story should have ended there as an example of overzealous concern on the part of police and ballpark security. But no. Instead, “police put the child in a Wayne County Child Protective Services foster home,” where he stayed for three days. “Next, a judge ruled that the child could go home to his mother, but only if his dad left the house and checked into a hotel. . . . After two weeks the family was finally reunited,” Schwartz and Sharpe explain.21
The authors note that at every stage the authority figures—the police, the judge, social workers—spoke of how they hated having to follow the rules but insisted that they had no choice; it was procedure. Shouldn’t these people have the independent discretion to decide whether in each individual case the rules are actually being applied to protect kids or whether, as with the hard lemonade example, a parent made a mistake that should not be punished by breaking up his family? But commonsense judgments aren’t allowed, argue Schwartz and Sharpe. “The policemen, the social workers, and the judge who took [the boy] away from his family, and then forbade his father to see him, were following rigid procedures that assumed that the judgment of these officials could not be trusted. As institutional practices like these become calcified, we lose our bead on the real aims and purposes of our work and fail to develop the moral skills we need to achieve them.”22
NANNY STATE VS HEALTHY COMMUNITIES
Threatening parents for letting their kids learn independence is not just a waste of precious resources that police and social-service agents really don’t have to spare. It harms our understanding of what it means to be part of a healthy and helpful community.
Children’s book author Kari Anne Roy was visited by police and child services personnel in Austin, Texas, after her neighbor “returned” Roy’s son to his house and informed police about her having allowed her six-year-old son Isaac to be outside unsupervised down the block from his house.23 If a visit from a policewoman, who didn’t file any report, it should be noted, wasn’t bad enough, Roy then had to deal with a Child Protective Services agent who came to her house, interviewed her kids, and did file a report. When writing about this experience for the Dallas Morning News, Roy stipulated that she understood why child services workers have a hard job and even why some of the procedures the agent followed were necessary. But even with that understanding, the impact of this experience is not without a serious cost to her and her children.
My kids reported that she asked questions about drugs and alcohol, about pornography, about how often they bathe, about fighting in the home. And again, I understand the need for these questions. I understand CPS investigators have an incredibly difficult job. But the conflict I feel is immense. My children were playing outside, within sight of the house, and now my 6-year-old and 8 -year-old and 12 -year-old have seen their mother spoken to—multiple times—as if she, herself, was a child being reprimanded. They have all been questioned, by a stranger, about whether they’ve ever been shown movies of other people’s private parts. And no matter what I say, I can tell that they think they’ve done something wrong.24
Roy was also bothered, and rightly so, that the woman who originally called police cannot be held responsible for causing trouble. “The neighbor can call CPS as many times as she wants. If she truly feels there’s neglect, she can’t be prosecuted for making false allegations. We could try to sue her for harassment. We could try to press charges for kidnapping if she approaches our son again and tries to get him to move from where he’s playing. But in all reality, when children are involved, the person who makes the complaint gets the benefit of the doubt. For parents, it is guilty until proven innocent.”25
Tracy Cutchlow, a mom and journalist, wrote for the Washington Post identifying the reason there are more and more stories like this one of adults calling the police because they see a child alone—either in a car, at the playground, or walking.26 “We can’t rely on our neighbors to help look out for our kids, and that’s why our neighborhoods don’t feel safe enough. When you let a 10- and 6-year-old walk home on their own, it feels scary because they’re fully responsible for their own safety. What’s missing is the sense that we’re all responsible for everyone’s children,” she explained. Everyone has heard the African proverb about