Earlier this week, Ross Douthat of the NYT wrote an article about how children are overprotected and more specifically, how this trend of overprotection has led to parents being unfairly punished for not hovering over their children. This idea - that the culture of overprotecting children has gone too far, that parents who give their children independence are at risk of having their children taken away - seems to resonate with many. I have three thoughts about all of this.
1. I disagree that it's a bad thing to expect rigorous supervision of young children. I still see plenty of older kids riding their bikes around the neighborhood alone, I see middle schoolers alone at the playground, and I see elementary age kids playing alone in their yard while the parent is in the house. It is only the REALLY young kids - the preschool and youngest elementary kids - who are expected to be supervised by someone all the time. And since I spend a lot of time with toddlers these days and have seen their total lack of judgment and impulse control, and how quickly they can put themselves in serious danger, I think it's totally appropriate to expect rigorous supervision of younger kids. (Note: I'm not saying that it's easy or that I do it perfectly or that it's not a major challenge for people without support. I'm just saying that it seems like a reasonable expectation that young kids need to be actively supervised.)
2. I disagree that kids are wrongly being thrown into the foster care system because of our overprotective culture. I spent two years representing abused and neglected children in their foster care cases, and when it comes to removing kids from their home, it's very rarely the case that the kid gets removed without reasons that go far a one time incident of a child being left in a park. (It is much more frequently true that once a kid has been in foster care for awhile and the parents have made their home safe, the system can be too slow in allowing the kid to return back home.) The cases described in the article where the kids were left at a park, or wandered through a parking lot near home unsupervised, or were at home alone for a few hours and then ended up in the foster care system -- not once in my hundreds of cases did I see a situation like this, unless this lack of supervision was the pattern rather than a one time exception. These events might cause someone to call CPS, and cause CPS to open an investigation -- but a court is unlikely to remove a kid from their home based on a one time incident of lack of supervision. Kids get removed because they are left alone for days at a time, or because they are abandoned indefinitely with a friend or relative, or because the pattern of being left alone has caused some kind of harm to the child (like missing a bunch of school, or the child injured himself because of lack of supervision, or the child developed attachment disorder) - not because they are left at the park once for an hour. I'm not saying that the child welfare system never makes a mistake, or that there aren't some outlier cases where something like this might happen. But if you're providing a generally safe home and someone reports you to CPS because your 10 year old child was playing unsupervised in the park, in the vast majority of cases, nothing will happen - the case will just close.
3. There should never be a case where a child gets removed from a loving home just because the parent is poor. The real story here, which is mentioned briefly in the article, is how this "culture of overprotection" is especially hard on single parents who do not have child care and somehow still have to find a way to provide for their family. These are the cases where kids do get removed from the home -- where parents do have to turn lack of supervision into a pattern, and where this lack of supervision (at least allegedly) causes harm to the child. This seemed to be the case for at least half of the parents profiled, and these are the ones that really tug at the heart strings. I absolutely 100% could-not-agree-more that struggling parents need more child care support as they take steps towards economic self sufficiency. The lack of affordable child care is hugely problematic for single parents who must meet work requirements in order to receive welfare, food stamps, and housing benefits, or who are trying to attend school or a job interview so that they can provide for their family. We should design public assistance programs so that parents aren't forced to make these tough decisions - for example, by ensuring that parents can always get the child care support they need or else be exempted from work requirements in public assistance programs. And for all parents struggling to find child care as they attend job interviews, community college, etc., we need to have more affordable, flexible hours, conveniently located, high quality child care available. To me, this seems like one of the absolute best things government subsidies or charitable funds could be supporting.
What do you think about the article, or about the idea that kids are overprotected, or about anything else on this topic?
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