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Notes -
The Long Arm of the State and Parenting
@ControlsFreak challenged me on my assumption that society has changed to the extent that the average parent faced real consequences if they treated their children the way every child was treated even 40 years ago, in the dark days of the 1980s.
Immediately I fell into personal anecdote, “I’ve been pressured by other women to supervise my children doing tasks I was able to do alone at the same age.” “All the parks have signs that children under 12 need to be supervised.” I even gave a personal anecdote about an Amtrak train that made it seem like I am disturbingly misremembering things or a short-lived policy was walked back. This gave me pause. So I did the more rational thing and asked, what kind of data can I find on this?
Looking around, I found a study that analyzed how many kids had parental rights terminated in the year 2000 compared to now. Their data only goes to 2016, but it does present a trend:
There is a trend of more children being taken away from their parents, which is what I expect.
For every parent that has a child removed, there will be more that are investigated. What does that number look like?
1/3 of American children are investigated by the time they are 18. That sounds like a ridiculous number. Are American parents just becoming disturbingly vicious and attacking their kids more than in the past?
No. Basically my intuition - the intuition of most parents - is correct. Insufficiently supervising your child will get you a visit from CPS and your child potentially removed. The data bears that out.
Now I am curious. Denizens of the Motte: How many of you see children between the ages of 8-12 out and about without a parent in your day-to-day life? How does that compare with the freedom you or your parents had when they were children (if they were born before 1990?)
How many of you were allowed to do simple things, like run to grab an item at the grocery store by yourself, before you were 10? How old were you when you first got to buddy up with a similar age child and split off from your family at an county fair or water park? If you are a parent now, what age would you consider this safe to allow your child to do?
Certainly lack of a "village" plays into this as well. There are countless thinkpieces about how people don't know or trust their neighbors as much as they used to (frustratingly though, I can't seem to locate studies that go back more than a decade so this is just anecdotal). But in environments where families know each other, they know each other's kids, they are more likely to watch out for them and be more tolerant of them. Some kid walking alone, "oh, that's just Jimmy from the Latta house, hey Jimmy!" Where in a neighborhood surrounded by strangers, no one knows each other, either by face or by where they live. That 10 year old isn't little Jimmy Latta, he's a vulnerable child on his own without adult supervision. Call the police!
And it turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy, of course. Children outside on their own has become so de-normalized that seeing one is an aberration and immediately suspicious just because it is so rare.
It's also as if people are "de-maturing" kids, for lack of a better term - they're not as trusted, not expected to care for themselves, not expected to have important life skills. Without the time alone to fend for themselves and navigate the world without an adult in tow, some of that "life skills" maturing I think takes longer to emerge.
Worth noting the "free range parenting" trend seems to have peaked around 2009-2010 but it's been ages since I heard anything from those people. I get the sense they've given up against the tide. Parents want to do the safe thing and follow the herd, either because they genuinely believe it's best or as a CYA measure.
Yeah, I wouldn't trust any random neighbor empowered with a catastrophically powerful State-backed heckler's veto over my family unit either!
A few states have taken steps to decriminalize or legalize young people existing in a public place since then, and the people who want freedom for their kids have had time to self-sort into those areas. A good chunk of the "free range" is on the Internet, by the way- the Karens have gradually been coming for that too by banning them from the spaces they visit and restricting what they can freely do there.
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