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 are character traits, and character traits are effectively taught by parents, not teachers. Yet when parents naturally demand such characteristics from their children, as when Debra Harrell believed her child capable of minding herself while her mother worked, police and child services come along to punish and criminalize parental discretion. So not only aren’t we encouraging families to build up our children’s positive character traits, the state is actively denouncing and degrading those families that are providing their kids what professionals have decided is a significant advantage to their future success.
Kari Anne Roy knows that her kids and others are going to pay some kind of price for the society in which they are being raised. “What I want to talk about are children who don’t feel safe outside—not because of stranger-danger or threat of immediate injury, but because the police will be called if they’re just playing like we played when we were young. What will members of the Always on Screens Generation be like when they’re adults? When they weren’t afforded the ability to play and explore and test limits and problem-solve, when everything was sanitized and supervised, when the crimes committed against them were more likely to happen online than in the park across the street? What will this do? How will society be affected?”35
Captain Mommy Roy is coming at the problem of self-assurance from the other side. What will happen to the kids who have developed a fear of police (from being interviewed without their parents about their parents and their home life) and at the same time have been shoved inside their homes because their parents fear allowing them any freedom? Can such children grow up to be the self-assured, independent, entrepreneurial, and fearless adults we so often say we want to ensure that our economy grows and our society improves? And what of these future adults’ sense of responsibility for their neighbors and other residents of their communities? Will the experience of having a neighbor call the police on their parents really engender a sense of shared mission with those who live on the same block or in the same apartment complex?
As Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote in The Week, the fraying of our communal fabric is not a positive development.
The decline of neighborhood solidarity isn’t universal across America, and it seems far more advanced among upwardly mobile neighborhoods than
