of God,
Take a little scarf with you
To keep from catching cold.
And dear, put your galoshes on,
The winter’s cold and aching.
Be sure to wear your fleece-lined cap;
Woe’s me, my heart is breaking.
And, pretty fool, be sure to take
Your woolen underwear
And put it on, unless you mean
To lie a corpse somewhere.”
I try to fly, but I can’t move . . .
Too many, many things
My mother’s piled on her weak bird
And loaded down my wings.
I look into my mother’s eyes
And, sadly, there I see
The love that won’t let me become
The bird I want to be.
Criminalizing parents for raising independent, self-assured children
THOUGH IT WAS WRITTEN in the 1930s, this poem by Yiddish poet Itsik Manger perfectly presents the helicopter parent of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Manger’s description of a stereotypical overprotective Jewish mother easily fits the mold of a generation’s worth of American parents who “protect” their kids so well the children have been prevented from enduring any minimal risks or responsibility that would also surely broaden their lives.
As I complete this manuscript, Manger’s poem provokes a very different image and in some ways a more discouraging one. Individuals can change their individual parenting styles or techniques. But when a larger entity intrudes, change can become more difficult to effectuate. In the 2015 version of the poem, the parent replaces the son and the mother becomes the nanny state, issuing rules, conditions, and definitions for the proper care of children that supersede parental authority and squash children’s independence and self-reliance. And while there has been some backlash from moms and dads against helicopter parenting—the no failure, no risk, no independence variety—along with many parents who never would or could ascribe to that philosophy in the first place, the police, child protective service workers, school administrators, and others in authority assert the state’s right to punish parents for breaking its norms and laws.
The irony is that whether you are a helicopter parent, like the mother in this poem, or if you ignore, reject, or want to break out of this mold, too often some representative of our intrusive, overprotective government comes along to impose a whole separate legal standard of safety and care. As we’ll see in this chapter, the results are punishment for parents and a variety of negative consequences for children.
THE GODMOTHER OF ALL CAPTAIN MOMMIES
Lenore Skenazy decided to let her nine-year-old son Izzy ride the New York City subway alone. She wanted to allow her son a small taste of freedom and independence, while managing her own worry that something terrible might happen to him. A simple act of parental discretion turned into a movement, and Skenazy was reborn as the godmother of all Captain Mommies. What Skenazy uncovered goes beyond the single phenomenon—now all too common—of parents harassed by authorities for deciding to let kids be out in the world alone. Her decision regarding her son exposes the real conflict that exists between families and the nanny state and the harm that it causes the kids, their parents, and society at large.
The number of stories detailing mothers, fathers and guardians who have been harassed, threatened, humiliated, and arrested for allowing their kids to be alone and do for themselves is nearly endless. The adults affected by the overreach of police, judges, medical, educational, and social-service personnel come from the lower, middle, and upper classes. They are married and single. They are men and women. In other words, this is happening everywhere and to everyone.
The consequences for an adult range from the inconvenience of having to explain to a child why police were threatening and scary, to spending thousands on bail and lawyers’ fees, to being removed from your home and family. The psychological impact on adults is important, but the emotional and psychological impact on kids creates a problem for society when those same children mature into adulthood.
The adults and the kids lose trust in the people who are charged with keeping us safe and healthy, and the kids are kept from developing necessary life skills like self-reliance, creativity, intuition, and grit. The overreaction of the nanny state to young people who are allowed to operate independently feeds the already overly developed anxiety of too many parents regarding their kids’ freedom. Moreover, look at any bookstore’s shelf of current titles on education, child development, sociology, and public policy, and you’ll see one analysis after another of why deficiencies of these characteristics in our children is hurtful to us all.
Consider the best-seller How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, in which author Paul Tough shows that character matters more than intelligence when it comes to kids’ academic and life success. He focuses on what the research shows regarding teaching children self-reliance and self-control and what some schools are doing to try to incorporate those ideas into their curricula. But what about what happens beyond these few schools (Tough profiles two), when everyone else—the vast majority of schools, not to mention police departments and legislators—are actually working against parents who might want to promote these characteristics in their kids?
Tough is a fan of psychologist Angela Duckworth, who argues that grit is what educators should be teaching.
So far, the best idea I’ve heard about building grit in kids is something called growth mindset. This is an idea developed at Stanford University by Carol Dweck, and it is the belief that the ability to learn is not fixed. That it can change with your effort. Dr. Dweck has shown that when kids read and learn about the brain and how it changes and grows in response to challenge, they’re much more likely to persevere when they fail because they don’t believe that failure is a permanent condition.1
Parents who offer their kids some freedoms may not be doing so due to any understanding of such direct developmental effects. Certainly Skenazy wasn’t trying to teach her boy anything like Dr. Dweck’s lessons on perseverance and its importance to future success. Skenazy was giving her son the opportunity that she’d had when she was a kid, namely the chance to rely on oneself for limited periods of time and learn about how the world works. Yet in 2007 Skenazy caused an uproar when she wrote a newspaper column about allowing Izzy to ride the subway by himself. After her initial decision to let Izzy off his previously tight parental leash, she endured numerous phone
