Allowing in a Culture of Fear

Now this is a sign of the times. A lady let her nine-year-old kid ride the subway by himself. She gave him money and trusted him to figure out how to get where he was going. Expected that if he didn't know what to do, he'd ask someone.

People freaked.

From the New York Sun:

I left my 9-year-old at Bloomingdale’s (the original one) a couple weeks ago. Last seen, he was in first floor handbags as I sashayed out the door.

Bye-bye! Have fun!

And he did. He came home on the subway and bus by himself.

Was I worried? Yes, a tinge. But it didn’t strike me as that daring, either. Isn’t New York as safe now as it was in 1963? It’s not like we’re living in downtown Baghdad.

Anyway, for weeks my boy had been begging for me to please leave him somewhere, anywhere, and let him try to figure out how to get home on his own. So on that sunny Sunday I gave him a subway map, a MetroCard, a $20 bill, and several quarters, just in case he had to make a call.

No, I did not give him a cell phone. Didn’t want to lose it. And no, I didn’t trail him, like a mommy private eye. I trusted him to figure out that he should take the Lexington Avenue subway down, and the 34th Street crosstown bus home. If he couldn’t do that, I trusted him to ask a stranger. And then I even trusted that stranger not to think, “Gee, I was about to catch my train home, but now I think I’ll abduct this adorable child instead.”

Long story short: My son got home, ecstatic with independence.

Long story longer, and analyzed, to boot: Half the people I’ve told this episode to now want to turn me in for child abuse. As if keeping kids under lock and key and helmet and cell phone and nanny and surveillance is the right way to rear kids. It’s not. It’s debilitating — for us and for them. Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone

Listen, I want to give this lady a big sloppy kiss. When we were kids we did stuff. Nine years old, we'd wander to a different neighborhood, maybe on our bikes if it was far, we'd play with some other kids, climb a mountain, whatever. What's happened to us?

Read more, this lady is wonderful.

And yet —

“How would you have felt if he didn’t come home?” a New Jersey mom of four, Vicki Garfinkle, asked.

Guess what, Ms. Garfinkle: I’d have been devastated. But would that just prove that no mom should ever let her child ride the subway alone?

No. It would just be one more awful but extremely rare example of random violence, the kind that hyper parents cite as proof that every day in every way our children are more and more vulnerable.

Mmmwwaaahh! Lady, I love you!

It looks like I'm going to copy this whole article here, it's just too good.

“Carlie Brucia — I don’t know if you’re familiar with that case or not, but she was in Florida and she did a cut-through about a mile from her house ... and midday, at 11 in the morning, she was abducted by a guy who violated her several times, killed her, and left her behind a church.”

That’s the story that the head of safetynet4kids.com, Katharine Francis, immediately told me when I asked her what she thought of my son getting around on his own. She runs a company that makes wallet-sized copies of a child’s photo and fingerprints, just in case.

Well of course I know the story of Carlie Brucia. That’s the problem. We all know that story — and the one about the Mormon girl in Utah and the one about the little girl in Spain — and because we do, we all run those tapes in our heads when we think of leaving our kids on their own. We even run a tape of how we’d look on Larry King.

“I do not want to be the one on TV explaining my daughter’s disappearance,” a father, Garth Chouteau, said when we were talking about the subway issue.

Look at what we have become. We are afraid of our own shadows.

Here is where she gets analytical about it, I believe this is the crux and cause of this situation:

These days, when a kid dies, the world — i.e., cable TV — blames the parents. It’s simple as that. And yet, Trevor Butterworth, a spokesman for the research center STATS.org, said, “The statistics show that this is an incredibly rare event, and you can’t protect people from very rare events. It would be like trying to create a shield against being struck by lightning.”

Contrast the incredibly low probability of something bad happening to a kid to the sense of independence, the learning experience of controlling their own life, that they get from being allowed to do things. Somehow it has become the norm in America to avoid doing anything with any risk in it whatsoever, we interpret everything in the most terrifying way possible.

It seems to me there is value in accumulating experience, do you think?

Justice Department data actually show the number of children abducted by strangers has been going down over the years. So why not let your kids get home from school by themselves?

“Parents are in the grip of anxiety and when you’re anxious, you’re totally warped,” the author of “A Nation of Wimps,” Hara Estroff Marano, said. We become so bent out of shape over something as simple as letting your children out of sight on the playground that it starts seeming on par with letting them play on the railroad tracks at night. In the rain. In dark non-reflective coats.

The problem with this everything-is-dangerous outlook is that over-protectiveness is a danger in and of itself. A child who thinks he can’t do anything on his own eventually can’t.

Meantime, my son wants his next trip to be from Queens. In my day, I doubt that would have struck anyone as particularly brave. Now it seems like hitchhiking through Yemen.

Here’s your MetroCard, kid. Go.

Great statement: over-protectiveness is a danger in and of itself. We are raising a generation of incompetent people. And are we any safer for it?

What's amazing here is not that a lady let her kid ride the subway, but the reaction she gets. People think this is child abuse, letting a kid have some independence, trusting him to think for himself, letting him make a decision. It seems to me that in a few years, a kid like this is going to own the world, and his scaredy-cat little friends will only be able to do what somebody tells them they can do.

I expect there will be differences of opinion about this one, and in fact my expectation is that opinions will not break down along the usual conservative-versus-liberal lines -- or will they? We live under an administration that has cultivated fear, maybe allowing your kid to do something on his or her own has become a political act.