Illustration: Hannah Buckman
This article was originally published in Broodinga newsletter offering in-depth thoughts on modern family life. register here.
If there’s one thing that unifies American parents into one giant demographic, it’s a state of shared siege. Sometimes I meet a parent with whom, superficially, I don’t have much in common, but I can reliably break the ice by talking about being overwhelmed by something kid-related. Sports schedules? Homework? Phone stuff? There’s a sweet spot somewhere.
Acting under siege is another way to demonstrate awareness. He says: “Wow, being a parent is definitely demanding – because I work hard at it! To jump into the social situation of parenting in America and act like being a parent isn’t hard is to immediately become an asshole. That’s not how this game works. Being a parent is hard. All right?
Being a parent is certainly difficult, but acting That being a parent is difficult is an important part of what it means to be part of the social world of American parents. It cannot be an exaggeration to say that American parents are the most conscientious parents in the world. I specify demonstrative because there are many forms of consciousness, many of which are private, more at the level of acts of service, such as a nightly offering of cut fruit, or constant attention to a child’s academic success. What I’m talking about is consciousness as a public act, which extends beyond the home and ultimately becomes readable at the level of public policy. It’s the kind of awareness that has made parents hesitant to let their children walk or bike alone in their neighborhood — not necessarily because of traffic, but out of fear of intervention from other hypervigilant parents.
Hypervigilance has become a calling card of American parents, and as I discovered while trying to break the ice with strangers, it’s a nonpartisan safe zone. This transcends race and class. The funny thing is, privately, many of us don’t identify with hypervigilance. We might find this excessive. We roll our eyes at it – it’s the business of other the parents, not us. But in public, we follow the rules of hypervigilance because we don’t want to risk being seen as reckless. There is nothing more shameful than a careless mother – we all know that down to our fingernails.
Even parents who don’t care about being seen as carefree – like my husband, who doesn’t care what other parents think of him, a mindset I extremely envy – tend to stick to the established rules . by our most alarmist peers. It’s just easier that way; this avoids irritating social friction.
The secure space of hypervigilance is very important for our children. What if, by allowing our fear of being shamed to determine how we parent in public, we are inadvertently contributing to a serious, decades-long, slow-moving public health crisis? A new article in the Journal of Pediatrics makes a very compelling argument about how parental hypervigilance contributes to the oft-reported mental health crisis in children and adolescents.
While recent coverage of a teen mental health crisis uses the COVID-19 pandemic as a causal starting point, this article traces the beginning of a long trend of decline in the mental health of American children to the 1960s, when childhood independence began to decline. Indeed, in 2019, suicide had become the second leading cause of death among children aged 10 to 15, behind unintentional injuries. (Before the 1960s, deaths from illnesses such as pneumonia and influenza were second.) COVID made conditions worse, but they were already very bad. The extensive evidence in this article raises a provocative question. What if children’s mental health crisis was partly the consequence of a crisis of confidence among parents?
According to the article – interestingly written by Drs Peter Gray, David F. Lancey and David F. Bjorklund and definitely worth reading to the end – there are several ways in which parental intervention in Children’s autonomy is likely to harm children’s emotional well-being. -be. Lancey is an anthropologist of childhood; Bjorklund and Gray study child development with particular attention to cognitive development and the role of play.
The authors state that the first half of the 20th century is considered “the golden age of unstructured play.” The children’s play was not only unstructured: it was unsupervised and tended to take place outside. The data convincingly shows that when children have more independent mobility from the age of 5, their health improves. Our children must be able to move independently in their community.
One of the most fascinating sections of the article focuses on what children do and do not consider “play.” There is leisure and family time, but play is specific: it is ideally initiated by children rather than adults and does not include adult supervision or participation. Outings to the park guided by parents are therefore not optimal from a play point of view. A frankly devastating Swiss study indicates that children able to play outside without supervision have more friends and are more active than children whose time Outdoor play involves trips to the park with an adult. If your kids are bored at the park and ask to go home after half an hour (that was often the mood back when we went to the park), think about how your mere presence there can inhibit your children’s ability to initiate independent play.
What causes parents to prevent their children from becoming independent, and how can we address these factors? This is a question that requires serious research, but I imagine traffic must be at the top of the list for why parents are afraid to let their children walk alone, and the the data supports our fears. Should children’s mental health advocates join forces with urban planners to push for urban infrastructure reform? If parents emphasize the need for children to play outside without supervision and demand safe conditions for this unsupervised play, a grassroots movement could emerge. We need wide sidewalks everywhere. It starts with our insistence.
Traffic is an easy explanation (and a difficult problem to solve), but what about our own attitudes? Insecurity is part of what makes it difficult to let our children take risks in an environment where the most outspoken parents are the most vigilant. A certain level of insecurity forms the basis of most of our parenting activities. My least favorite cliché – no contest – is “Kids don’t come with an instruction manual!” »
This remark is idiotic for two reasons. Raising children wouldn’t be improved if it was more about building a bookshelf. If you want a child that reminds you of a bookshelf, buy a bookshelf. But also, who would rather believe a set of step-by-step instructions than rely on their own observations? Was it because your Your parents were shelf builders and now you want to build your own shelf? What gets people talking about instruction manuals is discouraging.
The question “Am I doing this correctly?” » seems to emerge spontaneously from the depths of our souls, but it is also a response to our social environments. It’s no wonder that most parents are hesitant to be the first to send their children to the park alone. How dare anyone display such brazen confidence in a world where uncertainty is the only stable ground?
Do you know what makes us like this? You knew this was coming: social media. Algorithms surface the loudest, most engaging voices, and these are usually the voices that trigger the alarm. We know this is true for politics, but also for parenting. Flame wars over Facebook mom groups for safety are currently an Internet legend. As a result, there is often very little talk about nuanced approaches to empowering children, because everyone knows that this kind of topic will spark a whirlwind of responses. It is fundamentally impossible to have a good faith conversation about children and safety in an algorithmic space. When these conversations happen, they happen privately, out of sight. This is particularly a problem for new parents, who don’t have the opportunity to see examples of sensible, confident parenting online.
Whatever the reason we are this way, it is our problem and our responsibility to solve it. Our own reluctance to allow our children independence should be considered as serious a problem as the decline in young people’s mental health, because they are linked. Gray, Lancey, and Bjorklund include an important reminder: children are predisposed to learn. They can learn safety rules and create their own rules. Children who walk alone in their neighborhood discover things that adults would never notice. They don’t have to go far to feel independent: the end of the neighborhood, out of sight of a parent, can make them feel like they’re another world away. A few months into our long COVID lockdown, I started letting my youngest son go on short walks alone. He was 6 years old. One day he came home and said he had come across a dead pigeon; he was the happiest I had seen him in months. He still talks about it.
