Kennedy may have argued that government has an important role in teaching American children how to live a healthy life, but he was equally persuasive about the role of adults and parents.
No matter how vigorous the leadership of government, we can fully restore the physical soundness of our nation only if every American is willing to assume responsibility for his own fitness and the fitness of his children. . . . All of us must consider our own responsibilities for the physical vigor of our children and of the young men and women of our community. We do not want our children to become a generation of spectators. Rather, we want each of them to be a participant in the vigorous life.16
The vigorous life of children and all the roadblocks that the nanny state erects to prevent it is the focus of Chapter 5, “The War on Fun.” As a recent article by Hanna Rosin in The Atlantic argued, there is harm done to kids by overprotective parents and government management of playgrounds, games, and independent play. Her central thesis was that parents who bubble-wrap their kids hurt them by never letting them learn self-sufficiency, which requires skills like how to manage risk and deal with failure. As correct as she may be, however, it is nearly impossible for parents to fight the urge to be overprotective when the law says they should be doing just that. And what else are parents to understand from playground signs banning running and sledding?
In his book No Fear: Growing Up in a Risk-Averse Society, Tim Gill, who writes about these problems in Great Britain, has noticed that America’s litigation culture is making matters even worse here.
In America, the compensation culture is a reality, and a major cause of risk aversion. Fear of liability is grounded not just in misperception or misinformation, but in fundamental differences in the way the legal system handles litigation. . . . US liability cases are conducted in front of juries, and may involve class action and punitive damages, all of which raise the stakes for defendants.17
Gill is absolutely correct. There is a practical reason why municipal playgrounds have, in many places, made the jungle-gyms lower to the ground and replaced concrete with rubber matting. Using taxpayer funds to remove hazards from the local park is much cheaper than settling lawsuits.
Fear of litigation isn’t the only trend working against kids and parents. Frank Furedi and Gill both argue that freedom is being sacrificed on the altar of safety and health. Furedi chronicles the changes over the last decade.
Society as a whole does not take children’s freedom seriously . . . [b]ecause Western societies actually regard parents who allow their children to pursue an independent outdoor life as irresponsible. In 2001, when I published my book . . . I was genuinely surprised to discover that virtually all experiences associated with childhood came with a health warning. . . . But since the turn of the century, the regime of child protection has become steadily more pervasive and intrusive. The relentless erosion of children’s freedom has been paralleled by the constant tendency to politicise parenting.18
Gill says that state intervention to protect children from risk is actually limiting the experiences of all children. I got a terrific education on these issues when I spoke to Mike Lanza, a Captain Daddy in California who has been building a community devoted to the proposition that children need to be outside, enjoying free play as much as possible. His book Playborhood argues for parent-made outdoor shareable play spaces for local kids. Lanza has had his own run-ins with local authorities who question his parenting choices. But he remains steadfast in his commitment to the quality of life necessary for his kids to thrive.
It feels like there is a government agency uniquely focused on preventing parents from encouraging kids to have fun: the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Of course, the CPSC is supposed to help consumers uncover hidden dangers in consumer products. But like many regulators, the definitions have gotten much broader and the mandate much more expansive. Indeed, the CPSC isn’t even satisfied with recalling and banning toys and games anymore. Now the agency has decided that protecting children requires suing private business owners who don’t do what they want, even if their products aren’t for children! CPSC has also gotten into the business of hectoring parents about how precisely they ought to use some products, as if we who have children couldn’t get along without the anxiety-inducing warnings and advisories of Uncle Sam.
The list of CPSC “hasty responses” is long and varied—pajamas, baby baths, desk toys—and the list of consequences—killing business, worrying parents, wasting taxpayer money—is also impressive.
GETTING TO KNOW this community of subversive parents who don’t like the government telling them how to raise their kids, and who are fighting for their rights, has raised important questions for me: How did we get here? How did this kind of overbearing authority become part of our fabric? I read a piece that offered a possible explanation. In his 2006 Los Angeles Times op-ed, Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard University and the author of Stumbling on Happiness, describes how societal changes often happen slowly enough that most parents just aren’t paying attention.
The human brain is exquisitely sensitive to changes in light, sound, temperature, pressure, size, weight and just about everything else. But if the rate of change is slow enough, the change will go undetected. If the low hum of a refrigerator were to increase in pitch over the course of several weeks, the appliance could be singing soprano by the end of the month and no one would be the wiser. . . . Culturally, we haven’t noticed that laws, rules, bureaucracy was moving against parents’ authority because it was happening in small ways over a long period of time. But when it happens in Technicolor (i.e., banning sledding or arresting parents) then the outcry is immediate from some quarters because it is blatantly contra the cultural norm that no one noticed had changed.19
I find Gilbert’s explanation persuasive. I don’t think the effort to dictate and organize parents’ lives is coordinated or centrally controlled. This is a systemic change that has been going on for decades across the country, incrementally, and for a variety of intended purposes. The nanny state has blossomed because of real changes to our social culture. But though there may have been real problems, what seems clear by now is that government solutions just aren’t effective. Moreover, these remedies may do more harm than good.
I went looking to see how bad the problem is for parents. It can be pretty bad. In the worst case scenarios, parents can lose custody of their children. Chapter 6, “Obesity Police,” explores what happens when the government takes kids away from their parents—because the kids are considered obese.
In the name of combating obesity, doctors and legal experts assert that the state can do a better job than mom or dad. There are multiple problems with this proposed solution, however. First, should the category of neglect be expanded to include allowing your child to overeat? Second, should this be an appropriate area of concern for child welfare services? As happens so often with regulations, definitions are expanded to the point that they now include whole categories of behavior that never used to be considered legitimate targets of action. This is certainly what has happened with obesity. Perhaps we should include the other conditions for which parents can be accused of neglect: self-harm, anorexia, depression, drug abuse, drinking excessively, bullying.
There is a fundamental flaw in the fact that child-welfare bureaucrats see families as separate individuals in conflict rather than as a homogeneous unit deserving of help as a whole. So often, in cases of obese kids, the parents are also obese. Why don’t these parents deserve the same care and protection? Instead, the child-welfare system can seem almost predatory.
Expanding the mandate of child-welfare services has been a near constant trend since the inception of the first child-welfare program. Indeed, it is a common problem in the welfare state. As David Boaz, executive director of the libertarian CATO Institute, explains, “Bureaucracies are notoriously unwilling to become victims of their own success. So,
