life. And it makes me suspect I won’t be able to give my children the independence that I know is best for them.36
Dougherty is right that he is going to face opposition should he try to give his children the gift of their independence. But there is another concern as well. In her book about resilient cities, president of the Rockefeller Foundation Judith Rodin argues that when neighborhoods lack solidarity, it is harder for neighbors to function effectively as first responders in the face of emergencies and crises. Neighbors who are strangers and who call the police on others’ kids, rather than concerning themselves with the fate of an unaccompanied child, are less ready to help out when the inevitable crisis hits the local community. And a crisis will come, says Rodin. She argues in The Resilience Dividend that since “crisis is the new normal,” it is ever more important to develop our resilience, which she defined in the Huffington Post as “the capacity for an entity—individual, business, community—to plan for a disaster and rebuild more effectively and adapt and grow in the face of disaster.”37
“Communities that know one another and trust one another are more resilient in times of disaster because often your neighbor is your first responder no matter how effective the official response network. If you don’t know your neighbor and they are not willing to act for you and you for them you are simply less resilient.” Even though her book is about responding to emergencies, Rodin has an important lesson to teach parents, police, administrators, and authorities about improving children’s lives. Neighbors who get to know one another, meet each other, and connect because of their physical proximity are much less likely to call the police, as one neighbor did to Kari Anne Roy. Instead of needlessly bringing in the authorities, children and parents can learn to trust their community a little more and, hopefully, if necessary, even help one another in an emergency.
TO CHANGE THE CULTURE, CHANGE THE LAW
After nearly a decade of fighting for parents’ rights to choose for themselves the level of freedom to allow their offspring, Skenazy believes it is time for laws to reflect that value as well. The current message to kids is harmful, she says. “The world is not perfect—it never was—but we used to trust our children in it, and they learned to be resourceful,” Skenazy told the New York Times. “The message these anxious parents are giving to their children is ‘I love you, but I don’t believe in you. I don’t believe you’re as competent as I am.’”38
She’s written a kids’ and parents’ bill of rights that she hopes to get legislated everywhere as soon as possible. The proposed legislation reads in part:
[T]his legislature decrees that children may walk, cycle, take public transportation and/or play outside by themselves, with the permission of a parent or guardian.
Allowing children to exercise these rights shall not be grounds for civil or criminal charges against their parents or guardians, nor shall it be grounds for investigation by child protective services, removal of the children from their family home, or termination of parental rights.39
Skenazy’s proposed law also deals with the epidemic of parents accused of neglect for choosing to have their kids wait in the car while they run a quick errand. This parental-rights legislation aims to increase common sense and lessen the regulatory burden as well. “More children die in parking lots than die waiting in parked cars while their caregivers run an errand,” it states. “The majority of children who die in parked cars were forgotten there for hours or got into the car unbeknownst to anyone and could not get out,” the legislation continues.
Punishing parents who let their children wait in the car for five minutes will not bring back the children forgotten there for five hours.
Therefore, parents should be allowed to make their own decisions, based on the location, temperature, and duration of their errand, as to whether or not they wish to let their child wait in the car.
Laws against children waiting unsupervised for a short amount of time in a parked car shall be repealed.
There is good reason to hope that Skenazy is successful, even apart from protecting the rights of parents to bring up their own children. Legal reform might ease the way for more of today’s children to be allowed to gain the skills necessary for adulthood. Several recent books and articles suggest that, especially among many young people who go to college, adulthood and responsibility are about the last thing they are capable of.
Some of this comes from overprotective parenting, to be sure. And indeed, former Stanford University dean Julie Lythcott-Haims writes in How to Raise an Adult about her firsthand experience dealing with college students over the past two decades and how often basic life skills are missing among what is otherwise an accomplished group. What once came naturally is now not happening within the process of maturation at all. Lythcott-Haims claims
[t]here’s a scarcity of information on how one acquires life skills, presumably because children who are otherwise healthy and developing normally used to develop these skills naturally in the normal course of childhood, and we’re only just beginning to recognize that these skills are missing in many children and must be affirmatively taught.40
In August 2015, well-known social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and noted civil-liberties and free-speech crusader Greg Lukianoff wrote a startling piece for The Atlantic chronicling the same desperate problem described by Lythcott-Haims, namely, the trouble with young people and their difficulty dealing with mature responsibilities. “The current movement [on college campuses],” they wrote, “is largely about emotional well-being. . . . [I]t presumes an extraordinary fragility of the collegiate psyche, and therefore elevates the goal of protecting students from psychological harm.”41 The authors then chronicle the impact this angry protectiveness—that is, punishing those who attempt to interfere with the goal—has on the students themselves.
“Vindictive protectiveness,” Haidt and Lukianoff declare, “teaches students to think in a very different way . . . [preparing] them poorly for professional life, which often demands intellectual engagement with people and ideas one might find uncongenial or wrong.” Having to engage with people who think and act differently than yourself is supposed to be a function of adult life, not just a job requirement. The authors argue there is a more immediate impact as well: “A campus culture devoted to policing speech and punishing speakers is likely to engender patterns of thought that are surprisingly similar to those long identified by cognitive behavioral therapists as causes of depression and anxiety.”42
And lo, depression, anxiety, and drug and alcohol abuse are now more prevalent on college campuses than ever before. No one is saying there is a straight-line correlation between how kids are raised and their inability to handle open debate and opinions with which they disagree. But as we’ve noted throughout this chapter, parents who embrace their role as guides to adulthood, including developing their children’s grit, self-reliance, and psychological and physical independence—what Lythcott-Haims calls “affirmatively” teaching life skills—run up against the nanny state.
Sociologist Frank Furedi argues that we are getting the wrong outcomes—the outcomes Haidt, Lukianoff, and Lythcott-Haims decry—because we are misunderstanding what children need to succeed and providing exactly the wrong tools.
The tragedy is that the best way to protect children is to cultivate their aspiration for independence and autonomy. It is through the experience gained from engaging with the world that children gain the resources to manage risks and develop strategies for dealing with threats to their personhood. Sadly, in the current climate of child protection, parents are discouraged from doing precisely what is likely to provide their kids with the existential security they need to make their way in the world.43
It may seem like
