I spoke to a mom who was insulted and yelled at by a New York City police officer after her daughter and a friend’s son almost stepped into an intersection when the light was red. Now, if the kids had been blocks ahead of their mothers, and, God forbid, they’d gotten hurt, I would have expected the verbal lashing they received. But the children didn’t even get a full step off the curb before an idling driver blasted his horn and the moms themselves lunged for their kids, yelling at them to step back and wait for the light to turn. The kids were so scared by the ruckus they were clutching at their moms even as the officer made a beeline for the parents and began berating them. The officer accused them of neglecting their kids and threatened them as if a terrible accident had taken place. But, again, nothing had actually happened.
I wrote a column for the Pittsburgh Tribune Review about a monkey-shaped teething toy that was recalled by the Consumer Product Safety Commission because a few babies had gagged on the tail. But here again no one was injured. Come over to my house any night of the week, and you can see my baby gag on teething toys, spoons, and his fingers. Will the CPSC be issuing a recall for those as well?
In each of these cases, the state is intervening in choices and decisions that used to be up to parents. Whether to allow children to go unchaperoned to the local pizza shop or what drinks or food to send to school were choices that used to be left to mom and dad. Not anymore. Now the state’s safety, hygiene, and health standards dictate, and their judgment might or might not coincide with yours. Indeed, when it comes to childhood, there is hardly any area of life that is left entirely up to individual parents.
But wait, as the TV infomercial says, there’s more! As No Child Left Alone will chronicle, the nanny state is
• taking kids from their parents (and in some cases parents have been charged) for the crime of the children being obese;
• criminalizing parents for allowing their kids some unsupervised time outside;
• pressuring all women to breastfeed and mandating that every employer encourage breastfeeding at work;
• putting every public-school kid on a diet;
• collecting health data on students, and, in certain states, harassing parents about their children’s weight;
• banning running at playgrounds;
• banning certain games and some types of play at public school;
• driving up the cost of daycare with burdensome regulations and certification rules, which puts safe, clean daycare out of the reach of low- and middle-income families.
One assumption driving this government intervention is that the only way to serve the so-called best interests of the child is to rely on state control. As the author of Paranoid Parenting, University of Kent sociology professor emeritus Frank Furedi, puts it, “[United Kingdom government] initiatives are underpinned by the assumption that parents cannot be trusted and must be subject to constant surveillance.”4 But this is not the way the United States Supreme Court has defined the rights of parents.
In Meyer v. Nebraska (1923), the court held that parents have a right to raise their children free from interference and that the right to raise a child as a parent sees fit is a liberty granted by the Fourteenth Amendment. This right is not unlimited, however. A parent has the right to “bring up children . . . according to the dictates of his own conscience,” the Court said, but it is within the power of the state to obligate a parent to educate his or her child.
It is not as if there’s been no tension between parents’ rights and government dictates since that court decision nearly a century ago. But this is the first time government has ever taken such an interventionist, prescriptive approach to imposing its own standards for childrearing.
Politicians at all levels of government talk about what they will do to “protect,” to “shelter,” to “improve the lives of,” and “support” “our” children. But does this really improve kids’ lives, or does it just assert control? It is also true that regulation raises costs. For every legislative act of “child protection” there is a financial cost to parents and taxpayers. My problem is that a reasonable balance between the interests of necessary regulation and government oversight on the one hand and the rights of families and the effect on the marketplace on the other doesn’t seem to be part of the state’s calculations when it comes to children. It is also difficult to justify government’s one-size-fits-all solutions when most problems affect only a tiny fraction of the population. This is public policy that serves only the interests of those who are exceptions to the rule.
These realizations changed the way I thought about raising my kids. Before, I was Mama. Now I am Captain Mommy, on guard against overprotective, overbearing, nannying authorities trying to take my choices away. And I’ve discovered that many other parents feel the same. Moreover, parents aren’t the only ones who have noticed this problem.
Dana Mack’s sociological study The Assault on Parenthood5 seems to have been the first popular book to assert that a combination of psychologists, public servants, and public-school educators have been working against and getting between parents and their kids. “The African proverb ‘It takes a whole village to raise a child,’” Mack complains, “seems to serve as a rallying call for the establishment of a communal authority to set new standards and methods of child-rearing.” Government has only gotten more involved in the business of parenting since Mack’s book was first published in 1997.
From the academy, too, comes a condemnation of dictating behavior to parents. In their book Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing, evolutionary psychologist Barry Schwartz and political scientist Kenneth Sharpe write, “Anybody who has raised a child . . . knows the limits of rules and principles.” They explain:
We can’t live without them, but not a day goes by when we don’t have to bend one, or make an exception, or balance them when they conflict. We’re always solving the ethical puzzles or quandaries that are embedded in our practices because most of our choices involve interpreting rules, or balancing clashing principles or aims, or choosing between better and worse.6
As the authors show, the problems arise when these rules are written and administered by government, which does not allow for individual discretion in balancing competing principles or applying the consequences and punishments associated with breaking the rules.
And from the legal realm there’s Harvey Silverglate’s Three Felonies a Day, in which the lawyer and civil-liberties crusader argues that the rules have become so complex and cumbersome that just about everyone breaks the law every day. “Wrongful prosecution of innocent conduct that is twisted into a felony charge has wrecked many an innocent life and career. Whole families have been devastated,” Silverglate says.7
Philip K. Howard, corporate lawyer, Common Good8 crusader, and author of such titles as The Rule of Nobody and Death of Common Sense, couldn’t agree more. “Instead of defining the edges of wrongful conduct, protecting a broad zone of individual empowerment, modern law sees its role as telling people what to do and how to do it.”9
Silverglate does have an optimistic view of the possibilities for reform, however, because the problem is so common, as we’ll see throughout this book. “Vague laws threaten Americans from all walks of life and all points on the political spectrum,” Silverglate contends. “Yet that depressing fact is actually encouraging, because it suggests the possibility of a broad coalition in support