Katherine Martinko on Treehugger notes how parenting styles really aren’t styles so much as judgments on other parents:
Maclean’s reported in its most recent issue that only about 100 kids are kidnapped each year in the U.S. in the stereotypical ‘scary stranger’ scenario, which is “a small fraction of one percent of missing kids each year.” Meanwhile, vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for U.S. kids between 1 and 18, killing around 1,600 kids annually. So, when parents drive a kid from point A to point B to avoid the risk of kidnapping, they’re actually putting their child in greater danger.
While everyone is entitled to their own personal phobias and has the right to choose how to act on those fears, what is entirely unacceptable is requiring other parents to raise their kids according to those beliefs.
As ]Professor Barbara] Sarnecka puts it, “I shouldn’t be legally required to act irrationally just because a lot of other people have a particular phobia.”
This, however, is the frightening direction in which our society is headed and it needs to be counterbalanced by more public discussion about the benefits of promoting independence in kids. Sarnecka recommends that parents talk positively about their own childhood memories and avoid fear-mongering conversations. Most of all, walk the talk! Fight the busybodies by setting your kids free. The more kids are out and about unsupervised (within reason), the more normal it will become.
No kids here, but given how little my parents kept an eye on me once I reached a certain age, I think, as a parent, I would have ended up having more than one conversation with police department personnel about how I was raising any kids I had.
And I would have been quite irritated about it.
There is a certain amount of short-sightedness to the worry about your kids being kidnapped. The goal of raising children should be to raise good citizens; raising people who end up terrified of their own shadows does not for a good citizen make. Fortunately, there appears to be a counter-movement over the last year or two against the wrapping children in bubble-wrap movement, so perhaps these worries about kids will pass.
Or perhaps not. In decades past, it just wasn’t possible to keep an eye on the kids like you can today. Add in the smaller size of families, and kids are viewed with more sentimentality than, perhaps, they were in yesterday. I’m just speculating, of course, since actual measurements of sentimentality seems a dubious effort, but it does make some sense.
