can’t walk a block home by herself? Do we really want parents quitting their jobs to stand out at the school bus stop every afternoon at three? While we’re at it, do we really have to think in terms of the least likely, most horrific possibility—a carjacking! a house fire! a kidnapping!—every time we make any decision regarding what parents and kids should legally be allowed to do? If so, wouldn’t that mean criminalizing any parent who drives her kid to the mall? After all, car rides can be deadly, too. Where does the obsession with safety stop?
That’s the overarching question our good Captain addresses here, and the one we all have to consider unless we want to pursue absolute safety, which requires constant surveillance, unfettered intervention, and a farewell to freedom for parents and for kids.
Which doesn’t sound so great when you put it that way.
So start the charge, Captain. It’s time for a revolution.
—LENORE SKENAZY,
founder of the book, blog, and movement Free-Range Kids
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
—C. S. LEWIS1
DO YOU WANT TO SEE government operating as if it can and should raise your kids for you? Try enrolling your child in state-licensed daycare. When our eldest daughter was 18 months old and started at the local preschool, the intrusion into our family’s decisions started almost immediately with strict rules about which foods I could send from home and how I should prepare and portion fruits and vegetables. My husband and I would joke by singing “Peel Me a Grape”!
I used to inquire about the reasons behind each of these policies. The answer was always the same, whether it was an issue of safety or hygiene, cleanliness or health: The state says so.
As the years passed, the rules piled up. No plastic bags. We had to provide multiple sippy cups because once a cup is proffered it cannot be used again. Requirements for daily sunscreen slathering, and a state mandate that all uneaten food be thrown out lest anything become “hazardous” over the course of the day—these are just a few of Pennsylvania’s daycare decrees. We got used to all that. It was annoying but tolerable, until I had my fourth kid.
When my son’s caregiver inquired what she should know about him, I asked for exactly one thing: Please swaddle him for every nap. Swaddling means snugly or tightly wrapping baby in a blanket. It keeps them feeling safe and secure, and it is the only baby advice we followed. Harvey Karp, author of Happiest Baby on the Block, is a genius! It had worked for our three daughters, so we were sticking to it with our baby boy. No can do, the daycare lady said apologetically. The state doesn’t allow us to swaddle.
I was shocked. In the three years since my third child began daycare, Pennsylvania, along with several other states, had changed the regulations to include a ban on swaddling. The reason is safety, because there have been cases of babies suffocating when covered by thick, loose blankets, and the overarching threat of SIDS. This is less common now that we’re all taught to sleep babies on their backs, but it is still a danger, though there are no reported cases of babies suffocating due to loose blankets at daycare, certainly not in Pennsylvania (I checked). But I wasn’t thinking about any of that when I learned about the new rules. As a mother, I want to do what works, and what worked for my other three kids—whether sleeping at daycare or at home—was wrapping them tightly in a blanket, like a burrito. Around the same time, Dr. Karp took up the cause as well, telling the Washington Post that banning swaddling in daycare was misguided. “We know it increases sleep and reduces crying,” Karp said. “Those are extremely important goals.”2 Amen, brother.
I demanded to know what I could do and was told that a doctor’s waiver would allow the daycare workers to wrap my son. I tried one pediatrician at my kids’ practice, and she refused because the American Academy of Pediatrics doesn’t recommend swaddling after two months. I eventually found a pediatrician who signed the waiver and became my instant hero. With the waiver, my boy was wrapped for naps. I was happier, my son slept more, and the daycare workers had an easier time caring for my baby.
After four kids you’d think I would be used to this sort of bureaucratic intrusion into my personal decision-making. And up to a point I was. But more and more government-mandated parenting started getting under my skin.
I was fed up. And when push came to shove, I fought for my rights. But how many other parents would do the same?
Lots, it turns out. Mine was only the most personal instance what turns out to be a much more widespread phenomenon of the authorities getting between parents and their kids. I had joined the ranks of the Captain Mommy Squad, protectors of parental rights, defenders of personal family authority.
I’m a journalist, along with being a parent, so, as part of my job blogging and writing, I started paying attention to similar stories. What I found was that I didn’t know the half of it. Too many parents have had run-ins with government nannies just for exercising their own judgment. These parents are facing far more dramatic situations than my own. Indeed, they make up a whole subpopulation of persecuted moms and dads who are willing to stand up for their right to raise their own kids. These are the Captain Mommies and Daddies.
There have been banner headlines about a rash of “criminal” moms and dads. Danielle and Alexander Meitiv got in trouble with police and child protective services for allowing their two kids to walk home alone. Nicole Gainey, a 34-year-old mother of two, was arrested on a charge of felony child neglect for allowing her seven-year-old son, Dominic, to walk alone to the playground less than a half-mile from her home in Port Lucie, Florida. South Carolina single-mom Debra Harrell was arrested for letting her nine-year-old daughter, Regina, play unattended in a nearby park while she worked. And a mom from Scottsdale, Arizona, was arrested and her kids taken into state custody after leaving two of them alone in a car while she interviewed for a job. Nothing happened to any of these children, and yet the state decided to punish the parents.
There are kids who have been threatened with suspension for contravening the school zero-tolerance policy for bringing parent-packed herbal drinks to school because the beverage may contain trace amounts of alcohol. And since I make my kids’ lunch every day I was especially upset to read about a four-year-old in North Carolina who had her home-packed lunch confiscated. It seems her turkey and cheese sandwich, banana, potato chips, and apple juice didn’t meet the standards set by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, as understood by the school’s government-empowered food inspector. “What got me so mad is, number one, don’t tell my kid I’m not packing her lunch box properly,” mom Heather Parker railed to the newspapers.3
Parents have begun to feel disrespected by their kids’ schools. In Cumberland County, Tennessee, Jim Howe was arrested at his kids’ school when he complained about the policy banning walking into the building to pick up his children, instead of driving up. One principal threatened a visit from child protective services if a mom continued to allow her daughter to ride the city bus to school. Other parents have gotten intrusive letters telling them their kids are getting fat.
One dad was given a citation from police for disorderly conduct because he argued with officers who reprimanded him for taking his kids to frolic on the banks of a local frozen river.
ALARMED BY THIS EVIDENCE of a growing society-wide campaign to preempt individual parenting choices and criminalize choices that do not conform to state standards, I started following up with phone calls. I spoke to a mom in Atlanta who described how at her kids’ private school, the board had just been forced to accept a new rule that all parent volunteers henceforth be “mandated