ANOTHER TYPE OF STORY that has become too common is about parents who choose to leave their children in a car unattended in order to run a quick errand and are found guilty of a crime by the nanny state.
Kim Brooks wrote in Salon of her ordeal (100 hours of community service, lawyer bills, conviction for contributing to the delinquency of a minor) because police were given a recording of her son sitting alone in a car.27 Brooks had to run into the store, and her four-year-old son didn’t want to tag along. She decided to let him wait for her in the car. How did the police get involved in the first place? Why didn’t they tell the busybody recording this nonincident to mind her own business because they have other things to do?
New Yorker Alina Adams made sure that the law couldn’t come after her before she admitted in print that she lets her six-year-old daughter stay home alone for short stretches of time. And just like every other time she’s loosened the parental leash on her three children, this change came about by necessity. But as a matter of principle, Adams rejects the need for laws defining when children can be on their own. As she explained it to me, “I’m not a fan of arbitrary guidelines. I’m against mandatory minimums for kindergarten or retirement. [I’m] against government making that decision because it is an arbitrary rule without seeing what’s going on.”
Adams believes that every child is different, making each situation different as well. But that’s not good enough for nanny-statists who are convinced they are “saving the kids” by pushing for these laws. The one-size-fits-all solution is the only one government can handle, and so we get rules and regulations that interfere with parents’ choices rather than supporting them.
How did we get here? Skenazy is right that raising independent children used to be a value that society embraced. Indeed, television used to depict this independence as part of normal life. Take a look at the first few episodes of Leave It to Beaver, for example. The narrative is repeated in several episodes. The Beav goes off alone to walk to school, or into town to get a haircut, and some innocent trouble ensues. The first episode aired in 1957, when the Beav was supposed to be eight years old, and at that time the show’s writers took it for granted that a kid that age could and would go places alone. Now, you may be thinking, well, that was the time before crime rates exploded and the cities became dangerous. But standards of childhood independence were normative in the late 1970s as well. As Petula Dvorak pointed out in the Washington Post, the 1979 standards of readiness for first grade (six-year-olds!) included answering the following questions in the affirmative:
• Can your child tell, in such a way that his speech is understood by a school crossing guard or police, where he lives?
• Can he travel alone in the neighborhood (four to eight blocks) to store, school, playground, or to a friend’s home?
• Can he be away from you all day without being upset?28
Such a checklist would be deemed completely inappropriate today, except for the last one, maybe. But why should standards of self-reliance have changed so dramatically? There are various answers.
For Schwartz and Sharpe, the biggest issue is our society’s lost moral will, which they prefer to call practical wisdom, otherwise known as common sense. We need an “antidote to a society gone mad with bureaucracy” they argue, but that kind of personal judgment is simply not something our current culture will tolerate. We have decided we need rules, standards, and regulations to make our children safer, and we are not allowed to ignore those standards and regulations for the sake of our children’s development or in favor of our own judgment. Police, judges, and child-welfare workers, meanwhile—those who are supposed to be enforcing the rules—aren’t allowed the discretion to decide whether the rules are being correctly applied.
As Scott Simon remarked on NPR in regard to the “hard lemonade” case, “[T]he public officials involved . . . needed practical wisdom and the discretion to exercise it.”29 Schwartz and Sharpe believe practical wisdom is a skill that can be nurtured and taught if we were to develop the “institutions to nurture it.” But they see our society moving in the opposite direction. “In our ever more corporate, and bureaucratic culture, constant demands for efficiency, accountability and profit have led to an increasing reliance on rules and incentives to control behavior,” they argue.30
LACK OF FREEDOM COSTS OUR KIDS AND OUR COMMUNITIES
Philippe Petit, tightrope artist and author of Creativity: The Perfect Crime, says there is no intuition or creativity without practice, and that requires that parents trust their kids. “[M]y proposal is to not open a door and, you know, propel the kids forward, but to open the door a tiny bit and have the kid use it, moving the door that was ajar. Now it’s full. And then they’re going to discover; they’re going to explore with their own way of thinking, their own intuition and improvisation. And then, yes, the adult is there to make sure there’s no accident.”31
Petit is describing a commonsense approach and the willingness to allow for failure. Trial and error is a basic method of learning, and it demands both halves of that pairing. Without stumbles, failures, and risks (horrifying as the latter word may be to our ears), we cannot inculcate skills important to kids’ development and character.
Psychologist Peter Grey talks a lot about creativity and skills that are lost because kids are not allowed to be alone, unsupervised, or spend unstructured time with other kids. When Grey interviewed Danielle Meitiv, he noted that her children appeared self-assured. “When we assume that children are irresponsible, they may behave irresponsibly (partly because they have so little opportunity to practice responsibility), which reinforces our initial assumption. It’s a vicious cycle. My own experience has been that children almost desperately want to take responsibility, for as much of their own lives as they can handle, and when allowed and trusted to do so they rise to the occasion and feel proud and happy.”32
Meitiv seconded Grey’s view, explaining that “given the opportunity, kids often prove to be much more capable than we expect. My own kids have done so numerous times.” But state institutions are not interested in this essential road to adulthood. Meitiv explained that not only did they have this terrible experience with the local police and child protective services, but that her children’s school personnel have also repeatedly undermined her choices to allow her kids their own independence. Their only basis for this interference, she claims, is that “anything can happen.” Meitiv told Grey how she’d turned this mania into a game with her elder son. We speculate “about the ‘anythings’ that could happen. Aliens could abduct him from the hallways! Rampaging wildebeests could trample him! An asteroid could flatten the one classroom where he is doing his homework. Sadly, one thing we don’t expect anytime soon is an outbreak of logic or common sense.” (We will further discuss stifling creativity by quelling independence and self-reliance in Chapter 5.)
A lack of grit and stick-to-itiveness among children has become a hot topic in education recently as well. As Tough explains in How Children Succeed, parents should want to engender traits like conscientiousness, self-control, curiosity, and perseverance in their kids since those are better indicators of success and satisfaction and the kind of future we want for our kids.33 But as these many examples of government interference show, the teaching of self-reliance and self-control to children is unacceptable to the nanny state when practiced by parents rather than as part of a school’s curriculum.
Grit was also the subject of the February 2013 Harvard Education Letter, discussing the importance of certain character traits for students’ academic success. “We have really good research showing the correlation between perseverance and grit and student success,” Boston University assistant professor of education Scott Seider was quoted as saying. “But there is very, very little research that demonstrates that we can take the level of grit or perseverance that a kid has and increase it.”34 This is crucial. Seider is right: Schools can’t find a way to increase grit and perseverance in kids because those