The call reached Bethany Lanell Persons while she was driving to drop something off at her other daughter’s softball practice. Her two youngest children, Leo and Vera — nine and six at the time — had set off on the one-mile walk to the Indianapolis library, a route they had walked without an adult for years. When their mother got there, the children were outside, surrounded by two women and three police officers. Vera ran to her sobbing. One of the women lectured Persons about “crazy people out there.” The police mentioned a recent car accident on that road. “If walking on a sidewalk is dangerous because there might be a car accident, it doesn’t matter how old you are,” Persons says.
Her children had not been hurt, lost or endangered. They had been reported, and the reporting was the event.
The cop call as a reflex
Erica Schwiegershausen’s piece in The Cut is a survey of what happens when a changed supervision norm meets a functioning phone. The examples accumulate: Karyann Parkinson, whose five-year-old son Sam was walking to a pond in their gated Virginia community to collect goose feathers when a security guard called the police; she was convicted of “contributing to the delinquency of a minor,” drew a six-month sentence that the judge suspended, and now sits on Virginia’s registry of child abuse and neglect for seven years while she appeals. Evelyn Hackel, who first let her nine-year-old daughter walk alone to the library and had police follow the child home and question the parents; days later, four squad cars surrounded their house after someone called 911 to report a child alone in the cold. The daughter was still wearing her winter coat.
The piece is careful about how this happened, and Lenore Skenazy gets the credit for the account. The author of Free Range Kids and president of the nonprofit Let Grow traces the paranoia to the 1980s, when photographs of missing children began appearing on milk cartons after a string of high-profile kidnappings. Stranger abduction has always been vanishingly rare, but, as Skenazy puts it, “it felt like it was an everyday occurrence — just part of the texture of living in America.” Family life reorganized around the feeling rather than the risk: houses farther from schools, streets engineered for speed, and a generation of children driven everywhere, which meant they never went anywhere alone.
By now the baseline is not caution but prohibition. A recent poll from the Institute for Family Studies found that more than half of American 14-year-olds are not allowed to leave their own street without an adult. One mother describes mentioning that her 11-year-old was home alone and reading alarm on a stranger’s face: “Do I really need to hire a babysitter for my 11-year-old? I was babysitting other kids by the time I was 12.”
What the intervention does to the child
The piece’s most useful reporting is about the children at the center of these encounters, because the cost there is not abstract. Margaret Berg’s eight-year-old son was stopped by a group of women on his way home from a friend’s house and held until police arrived; he tried to run, and when his father found him he was bawling. “They thought I was abandoned. I felt like they were trying to kidnap me,” the boy said. He thought he was in trouble.
There is a class dimension that the essay does not let the reader miss either. An estimated one in three children in the United States will be the subject of a Child Protective Services investigation before turning 18, and the risk is highest for families of color. Parkinson’s husband says CPS told the family that “a five-year-old child can never be unsupervised” — a standard with no basis in statute in a state that has passed a law saying the opposite.
Because the law and the instinct are now out of step. Virginia is one of 13 states that have adopted “reasonable childhood independence” laws, which hold that a parent is guilty of neglect only for putting a child in serious, obvious danger rather than any time a child is unsupervised. Parkinson’s conviction happened in one of those states, which is why it is being appealed. Legal permission, it turns out, does not travel as fast as a bystander’s 911 call.
The argument for a longer leash
The case against constant supervision is being made by people who study children rather than merely worry about them. The psychologist Peter Gray’s new book, Restoring Childhood, argues that today’s kids need considerably less supervision and adult meddling in order to thrive; doing things for themselves is how children learn to cross a street, talk to strangers, ask for help, and eventually function as adults. Skenazy’s version of the point is blunter: “You’re never going to be a parent and not have any anxiety. But we can’t constrict our children’s independence so we don’t have to worry. Part of letting them grow up is letting go.”
Schwiegershausen also makes the connection that opponents of free-range parenting usually skip: children who are not allowed to roam do not simply stay home and read. They stay home and look at a screen. Lindsey Hein, a mother of four boys in North Carolina, had the police called on her five-year-old for running home from a friend’s house nearby, and says she would still rather have her sons playing pickup football in the neighborhood than watching someone else’s life on a phone, even if it means not always knowing exactly where they are.
The remedy the piece leaves you with is smaller than a policy program, and more awkward. It asks adults in public to treat an unaccompanied child as a neighbor’s kid rather than an emergency — which is what Persons says she wanted: “If you actually care about that child’s well-being, show them that you are a friendly, trustworthy neighbor.” The anxiety that produces the call cannot be legislated out of a parent or a passerby. The only question the piece really puts to its reader is whether a child’s ordinary afternoon should be shortened to manage it.
Read the full story at The Cut.