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When Mothers Get Arrested for Mothering. Raising independent kids shouldn’t be this hard. (www.theatlantic.com)
submitted 1 day ago by to c/news@lemmy.world
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[–] 94 points 1 day ago (22 children)

Parkinson told me that her son—who competently walked the security guard back to their house after politely explaining that he wasn’t allowed to get into cars with strangers—had become distraught upon learning that he had apparently done something very bad.

There it is. This should have ended it. A short discussion between the security guard and the mother, with the mother explaining that her son was fine should have been the end of this, and the security guard could rest easy if he saw the kid outside again.

I'm Gen X and you already know our stories--gone from dawn to dusk in the summer with a stop in for lunch. Why have we done a complete 180 on this? Why are parents so afraid of fucking everything, it seems?

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  • [–] 1 point 8 hours ago

    I have four kids, eldest is 12 and youngest is a toddler. My three older ones, starting at age five, have free-run of our neighborhood--along with the host of other, similar aged children here. They're often out until the street light comes on. All the parents are in a group chat and we keep tabs on what's going on. Additionally, my 12 y/o rides the city bus home from middle school every day (along with a ton of his classmates) and it's not uncommon for us to allow our 10 y/o to ride the city bus with his friends to the mall like five miles away.

    But this is Hawai'i. It's how things are here. Kids are given a lot more independence and we tend to have closer relationships with our neighbors (it also doesn't hurt that we live in a kind of tucked-away community). I used to live in Florida and none of this would have ever flown. Even when I lived on a private school campus (as a faculty member), there was a clear understanding that kids were not allowed outside without some form of supervision. We were gated in and had multiple security guards!

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  • [–] 49 points 1 day ago (2 children)

    Its the Republicans and their fear mongering, almost every network tv has overflow of cop/crime shows. They think they're tough but whom is the real snowflakes in this country?

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  • [–] 12 points 1 day ago (9 children)

    We made tracking easy. Why leave your kid out all day if they have a phone that you can call whenever to make sure they're safe? Why let them go out without knowing where they are if it's so convenient to just put a tracker on them and know where they are at all times?

    As soon as we didn't have to trust our kids anymore, we stopped, and as soon as we stopped, we no longer trusted them with anything. That's the issue with convenience - we'll do anything so long as its easy and sounds useful, and we won't bother wondering what the repercussions of that might be.

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  • [–] 5 points 19 hours ago (8 children)

    Why let them go out without knowing where they are if it’s so convenient to just put a tracker on them and know where they are at all times? As soon as we didn’t have to trust our kids anymore, we stopped

    This causation is exactly backwards; this was a trend happening long, long before trackers were common. Helicopter parenting really started taking hold in the 90s and was pretty firmly entrenched by the 00s, well before every kid was walking around with a phone.

    The trackers are actually a response by parents who are trying to buck this trend and want to be able to go back to giving their kids more independence but need to prove to other parents, teachers, police, the state, etc, that they aren't being irresponsible by doing so.

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  • [–] 0 points 7 hours ago

    We gave our kids airtags for awhile. Mostly so that we didn't have to traverse the neighborhood and knock on every one of our kids' friends' houses to see if they were there. It was like playing whack-a-mole trying to track them down at one point. "He was just here, but then they went off to [redacted]'s house. But I think maybe they said they were going to play at the monkey bars for a bit..."

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  • [–] 4 points 17 hours ago (6 children)

    Helicopter parents existed before this, yes, but they were viewed as an overbearing subset of parents. They became the early adopters of this technology that didn't need to be convinced to use it. The only kids I knew with phones growing up were the ones with parents who needed them to call to check in every hour.

    But soon more and more kids had phones, so the paradigm quickly shifted, and what used to be considered overbearing and helicoptering became a normal amount of worry. You kid has the phone - why not call? Subsequently, not having your kid call to check in on a regular basis was soon seen as neglectful.

    The same thing happened with phone tracking and things like air tags. At first I knew a few people who used them for their kids, and they felt the need to defend their decision to use them, but eventually enough people used them that nobody batted an eye, and not using them was viewed as unsafe.

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  • [–] 1 point 16 hours ago (5 children)

    Helicopter parents existed before this, yes, but they were viewed as an overbearing subset of parents.

    I don't agree with this premise at all. That was true in the 80's when the movement first started, but by the late 90's it was pretty widespread, at least in my area on the west coast of the US. Maybe this isn't true in very rural US or other countries, but I'm pretty confident it was already becoming the norm in most of America by the time of the new millennium. I didn't know a single elementary age kid growing up who would have been allowed to walk or ride a bike to school already by that point.

    but eventually enough people used them that nobody batted an eye, and not using them was viewed as unsafe.

    Again, I think you have this backwards: letting your kids go out unsupervised was already well accepted as being "bad parenting" well before air tags rolled around. The air tags are the excuse parents have for why they aren't "bad parents" by letting their kids go out. They're actually empowering more independence among kids and parents versus a society dead-set against allowing them that independence, as we see from the article.

    I really think your timeline on this is all wrong and so it's leading you to a backwards conclusion.

    I don't know if you're a parent, but it's pretty hard to convey just how judgmental society is towards every aspect of your parenting and how that can actually lead to real, tangibly harmful situations, nevermind mental health consequences. At best, the peer pressure is real, the depression and anxiety around being accused of being a bad parent is real, and at worst you have to be concerned over literally being arrested or having your kid taken from you. These are what pushes parents to use these devices; the ones that don't trust their kids already have a well-accepted social framework of just not letting them go out unsupervised at all, which is the expectation at this point.

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  • [–] 2 points 12 hours ago (1 child)

    Dude (ma'am?) I had kids in the 90s and 2000s and was never a helicopter parent and though I do agree with your damned if you do, damned if you don't, the world is judgemental as fuck, that over-involved parenting style is not harmless either. My kids were in a group of kids at school and even in HIGHSCHOOL some of those parents tracked their kids everywhere they went. It's a level of surveillance I cannot imagine imposing. But it wasn't all the kids ever. The surveilled kids did not do well adjusting to freedom, and didn't trust their parents much. I don't think it hurts little kids as much as long as you have a plan to build their independence before high school, which these parents did not.

    It is true here that elementary school won't let kids be walkers now without an adult or teenage sibling to walk with them at dismissal. You can arrange a walk-pooling group but it has to have a grownup. From the bus they don't though, can just walk home.

    The kids across the street from us still run in the yard by themselves and run up the street to visit their friends, there are I'd say 8 year olds riding bikes alone & in groups, we do not live in an HOA or gated anything just in a neighborhood in the city. Though I obviously don't know if the bike kids are air-tagged or something, they look like when I was little just fewer of them now.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

    Dude (ma’am?)

    I'm from California originally, that's an agendered term to me! lol (that said, I am dude in the way you're thinking)

    I had kids in the 90s and 2000s and was never a helicopter parent

    Fair enough... I still think it was pretty widespread at this point, but I do get the sense California was "ahead" of the curve on that, so it may have entrenched earlier for us and so may be more exaggerated to me. I also think the helicopter parenting well predated everyone being tracked, which is really what my point was. Again though, fair enough.

    I don’t think it hurts little kids as much as long as you have a plan to build their independence before high school, which these parents did not.

    Agreed, the HS thing is kind of wild. Can't really imagine that. I was surprised that our kiddo's teacher was so agitated when we suggested the walk to school, I had kind of hoped in this part of Europe it would be more accepted.... and even moreso surprised that she doesn't let her 4th grader anywhere without supervision. We're in a mid sized European capital, it's eminently walkable and kids can even ride trams and buses for free. Go figure.

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  • [–] 1 point 15 hours ago (2 children)

    Yeah, it seems different parts of the country adopted this differently, then. I grew up in suburban Minnesota in the late 90's/early 2000's, and all us kids would just get on our bikes and go wherever we wanted all day. I remember frequently biking to a convenience store I liked that was about 2 miles away all on my own in 1st grade so I could buy candy with my spare change. The only kids whose parents cared at all to check in were the ones that the other parents complained were too nosy, and only those kids had cell phones before the mid 2000's came around and it seemed everyone's parents finally gave in and got them a cell phone. I didn't see people care about where their kids were until they already had the technology to do so.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 hours ago (1 child)

    I guess just chalk it up to different experiences then. In fairness, I could see what you're talking about being in play today... I just know in our area, the helicoptering far, far predated the ubiquitous tracking. I recall it being well in place before the iPhone even came out...

    Might be a bit of a raw nerve for me at the moment as well since I'm literally in the midst of defending letting my 8 year old walk to school against overzealous teachers who apparently don't let their 4th grader anywhere unsupervised, so mea culpa if I came on a bit strong.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 hours ago

    Makes sense; it's a pretty big country - I'm not surprised different places had different ideas of safety. I'm sure it's a complex mix of factors like everything else in the world. I wish we could just make one change and undo the fearfulness, but I imagine it'll be a slow climb if we make it out at all...

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  • [–] 15 points 1 day ago (2 children)

    And there weren't tracking devices in every pocket back then either.

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