Last year, a Maryland couple was arrested for allowing their 6- and 10-year-old children to walk home alone from the park. This past April, a mom in South Carolina was charged with child neglect after her 3-year-old son and 9-year-old nephew were spotted walking to McDonald’s in tandem. Craziest of all? Two parents in Florida were slapped with felony neglect charges for letting their son, 11, do the outrageously dangerous: play solo in the backyard for 90 minutes with nobody home.
In the latter case, the child was reported by a snooping neighbor. According to findings reported in a story on Quartz, that community menace must have felt very good about herself. Researchers have found that parents “need to moralistically judge other parents for their parenting skills.” It’s bad in the US and maybe even worse in Great Britain, where a study is headlined “One in Five Children Referred to Children’s Services . . . Before the Age of Five.”
As explained in a study conducted by University of California, Irvine, researchers, “People don’t only think that leaving children alone is dangerous and therefore immoral. They also think it is immoral and therefore dangerous.” In other words, simply because they think it is the wrong thing to do, they immediately stamp it as being potentially harmful to the kids. They overestimate risk and feel it’s their right to dis other people’s parenting techniques.
And if recent reports are any indication, they don’t hesitate in squealing to the authorities — consequences be damned. “I was surprised that people are so judgmental about other people’s parenting,” one of the researchers told National Public Radio.
Beyond the fact that it unjustifiably puts parents in hot water, and would do the same for me — my kids rode on the New York subway with friends at age 11 and have been known to take the family dog for late-night walks in our Brooklyn neighborhood — it’s a good way to create a new generation of insecure, neurotic adults. “Where do children learn to control their own lives?” Peter Gray, a psychologist and professor at Boston University wondered on Quartz. “If you don’t have the opportunity to experience life on your own, to deal with the stressors of life, to learn in this context of play where you are free to fail, the world is a scary place.”