Nobody argues for more surveillance of children. That, for Kathryn Jezer-Morton, is what makes the current state of parenting strange. The case for autonomy has been won on paper: kids are anxious, overscheduled, and watched; they need room to make mistakes and figure things out; and she has “never met anyone who thinks kids need more surveillance and more parental intervention.” So why is the freedom so rarely granted?
Her answer, in The Cut’s Brooding column, is that the obstacle is not primarily logistical but social. Giving a child autonomy means permitting risk. Permitting risk means accepting that failure is possible — confusion, fear, injury, tears, worse — and that if it arrives, it will be charged to the parent. If you cannot accept that possibility, you have no business allowing the risk at all, and choosing that is, on her telling, both cruel and selfish: your peace of mind priced above your child’s development.
The vigilante in your head
She grants the structural explanations — urban planning hostile to children, an economy that makes raising them expensive, racism in policing and among bystanders, jobs that demand parental presence and push families toward scheduled activities instead of free play. She just finds them incomplete. The missing part is parenting culture itself, which she treats as something parents collectively do to each other.
The mechanism is a specific kind of social surveillance: “the cumulative effect of a million parental-concern vigilantes picking up their phones to dial the cops on our kids for walking down the street alone.” The real ones matter less than the imagined ones. What she is describing is that audience taking up residence in the heads of otherwise confident parents — an internal judge with “very few accommodations for mistakes and no tolerance for mistakes that are not followed by immediate course corrections and elaborate apologies.” Parenting culture, she writes, has bowed to its loudest and most reactive members, and children are worse off for it.
There is a gendered edge to this that she turns on her own side. Women reassure each other that they are not the authors of mass terror; they maintain, gather, and nurture. The shadow of that role is vigilance with nowhere to go: “Some of us are nurturing needlessly in places we’re not needed,” she writes. “Our vigilance, sharpened at a whetstone of decades of recursive affirmation, can cause harm.”
What the fear is actually about
The essay’s central episode is a weekend in New Orleans for a friend’s fiftieth birthday. Her fifteen-year-old son, the oldest child on the trip, found basketball courts near the rental and eventually took a group of younger kids to one. Some parents were grateful for the accidental babysitting. Then they began asking whether she had heard from him. She had not, and she does not track his location as a matter of principle — a detail that had not seemed worth reconsidering even in an unfamiliar city. “A ripple of concern passed through the group, and I felt my mood begin to crater.”
The children came back an hour late, sweaty and happy, and relief dissolved the irritation. But the hypothetical is where the argument lives. If they had been lost, scared, or hurt, she would have owed everyone an apology, her position on location tracking would have been harder to defend, and she would have been ashamed of her choices. She would like to think her commitment to her children’s autonomy would survive that. She is honest that the shame would be hard to withstand — and that this is the whole problem: the deterrent is not injury but the verdict.
She names the anticipated reply before anyone can post it. Why hadn’t she asked where the court was? Why hadn’t she warned the other parents so they could consent to the risk? If it had been me, I’d have done it differently. That reflex, she suggests, is less about the child than about the person saying it, who gets to feel their own love and goodness confirmed by contrast.
No apology is perfect enough
To show how steep the social price is, Jezer-Morton turns to Nikole Hannah-Jones’s new essay in The New York Times Magazine, in which Hannah-Jones writes that her family’s public-school experiment did not work and that her daughter had not been well served by her primary school. Her account is unusually candid about a choice that cost something and about why she made it. The reception was “predictably gleeful in their sanctimony”: charges of narcissism, of every flavour of bad parenting, of virtue signalling — a term, Jezer-Morton notes dryly, now used interchangeably with basing your choices on a set of personally held virtues.
What interests her is the shape of the pile-on: a contest over who loves their children most. “Our love for our children is unquantifiable, unprovable with any formula,” she writes. “It’s a quantity that does not exist in math or science.” Yet the accounting continues, and the standard it applies has no floor: “no apology is perfect enough, no amount of accountability can restore a parent’s standing.” That is the reason nobody wants to move first, because the social cost of being the parent whose child gets hurt — or merely judged — is steeper than the cost of holding the child back.
The frame she is arguing against is binary: perfect safety or doom. Most mistakes sit in the wide middle and are recoverable, and children who watch their parents take principled risks learn something about emotional decision-making that has no clean rule to teach. The ask at the end is modest and unglamorous: if you want brave children, you have to invite worry, regret, and sometimes shame into the house — and extend to other parents the forgiveness you will eventually need yourself. Her closing image is parents circling a car park of the mind, sneering at each other through tinted windows, looking for the exit.