Parenting Without Fear
YOU MAY HAVE heard the story about the Minnesota mother who faced jail time after accidentally failing to properly strap in her child’s car seat. Or the cops who arrived to question a mom who told her neighbors that her 9-year-old could help them do chores. Or the police officers who went door to door hunting for a man after he drove off from the mall with a toddler—who turned out to be his daughter. They’d been shopping. An onlooker had assumed he was a kidnapper and called the police.
We live in an age of fear, especially where children are concerned. Even as the world has become safer and richer, parenting has become a paranoid exercise in removing all possible risk from a child’s life. This is exhausting for parents and even worse for children. Too many have been taught that they are fragile, weak, and in constant danger. Instead of getting experience problem-solving and bouncing back, they have grown up unable to rise to the challenges that life presents.
No journalist has more effectively chronicled the strange and dismal culture of contemporary child rearing than Reason contributor Lenore Skenazy, 59, who is not ashamed of being “America’s Worst Mom.” She got that nickname after she let her son, then age 9, ride the New York subway home by himself in 2008. “Half the people I’ve told this episode to now want to turn me in for child abuse,” she wrote in a much-read piece for The New York Sun. “As if keeping kids under lock and key and helmet and cell phone and nanny and surveillance is the right way to rear kids.”
Skenazy went on to found the Free-Range Kids movement, dedicating her career to investigating and explaining how today’s parents became so afraid and what effects that fear is having on their children. In 2017, she co-founded the nonprofit Let Grow with a mission of encouraging schools and families to allow kids to “have some adventures” and therefore “grow resilient.”
In January, Skenazy spoke with Frank Furedi, 71, a Budapest-born sociologist now years later, “was the sheer optimism, the sense of power expressed by people who were normally extremely passive and fatalistic.” After the Soviets crushed the revolt, the family fled to Canada, where Furedi was drawn into the student left. Anti-Soviet and anti-statist—but not delighted with the West’s status quo either—he became a self-styled libertarian Marxist. He “saw the state not as a medium of liberation but as a medium of oppression, as something that limited the possibility for more radical change,” he explained to .
