in the war between overbearing authorities and independent-minded parents. In 1996, a school allowed child protective services personnel to interview a boy without his parents’ presence or knowledge (this is still legal). The parents sued and lost. Judge Melinda Harmon summarized why with this chilling statement: “Parents give up their rights when they drop the children off at public school.” In the intervening years, there has been a growing awareness that perhaps this isn’t what parents want or expect for their kids.
This power struggle was the subject of a 2012 movie starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and Viola Davis called Won’t Back Down. The movie’s synopsis reads, “Two determined mothers, one a teacher, look to transform their children’s failing inner city school. Facing a powerful and entrenched bureaucracy, they risk everything to make a difference in the education and future of their children.”
The movie represents a shift in the perception of good guys and bad guys when it comes to school. Whereas decades of films portrayed teachers and administrators as the heroes of these movies, now movies like Won’t Back Down portray parents as the good guys fighting obstructive authority.
The film depicted a fight over curriculum and quality education, but meanwhile government do-gooders are forcing parents and schools to conform to rules and regulations that reach far beyond what happens in the classroom. Chapter 4 will relate recent fights over food and health standards at public schools.
New lunch menus have put every public-school kid on a restricted-calorie diet, while two dozen states collect students’ height and weight statistics in order to track potential health problems. In the most aggressive cases, states have required schools to send letters home to parents warning that children may be at risk of or already suffering from obesity. When, however, did it become the state’s responsibility to monitor students’ body mass indexes? And what are the broader implications of these policies? Do they even work? And should public schools really be diverting their time and energy from education to these concerns?
Parents have been especially upset to discover that schools are now required by law to collect weight and height information on their children. In some states the policy is to inform parents about potential problems, which has made for some angry Captain Mommies and Captain Daddies.
THE GOVERNMENT has access to students through public schools and argues that, for the good of all children, it must impose its standards. Obesity is the current obsession. The combination of access and the current orthodoxy of government as the sole authority for combatting obesity led to a rejiggering of what government deems a “balanced diet” (now a plate instead of a pyramid).
This “plate” reflects nutritional preferences that are highly debatable. Take fat, for example. Government guidelines proscribe fat across the board, while some nutritionists counter that fat is especially important for children. As for dairy, the federal food plate includes a portion that critics insist is a U.S. Department of Agriculture gift to dairy producers more than it is truly necessary for overall health. Notwithstanding these disagreements, federal dietary guidelines aren’t in themselves a bad idea. The trouble comes when advice morphs into law.
The USDA didn’t just revamp the National School Lunch Program; it came up with a variety of new rules and mandates about how the foods should be prepared (no frying in oil, for example) and how much of each food children should be allowed (severe portion control). It has put schools in the position of having to shoulder a heavier and heavier burden of the costs—both financial and bureaucratic—for managing and enforcing their rules. The folks who have to implement the new rules were especially upset about the cost of enforcement. Just as additional safety and health prescriptions make daycare more expensive, these types of regulations result in increased costs for schools.
At the same time, because this is a federal government program it has to be implemented without exception across all schools and populations, even though the problems the new menus are meant to combat may not be prevalent at every school. The nanny state doesn’t do nuance, you see. Not only is menu flexibility out of the question, but schools are discouraging parents from providing kids homemade lunches as well. The cost and complexity of compliance, meanwhile, means that taking the healthy step of cooking the food to order at school is just about impossible.
This isn’t the first time Washington has committed itself to the problem of children’s health. John F. Kennedy made it a priority even before he took office, penning a passionate affirmation of the need for physical health among the young and defending the necessity of government intervention. The difference between Kennedy in 1960 and the current crop of government do-gooders is that the solutions Kennedy supported were much simpler than those of today. He also, far more than is currently the case, placed the burden for success on individuals and families working together with government.
“A single look at the packed parking lot of the average high school will tell us what has happened to the traditional hike to school that helped to build young bodies,” Kennedy wrote.14 The solution he proposed required government help.
The physical fitness of our youth should be made a direct responsibility of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. This department should conduct—through its Office of Education and the National Institutes of Health—research into the development of a physical fitness program for the nation’s public schools. The results of this research shall be made freely available to all who are interested. In addition, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare should use all its existing facilities to attack the lack of youth fitness as a major health problem.15
Kennedy may have argued that government has an important role in teaching American children how to live a healthy life, but he was equally persuasive about the role of adults and parents.
No matter how vigorous the leadership of government, we can fully restore the physical soundness of our nation only if every American is willing to assume responsibility for his own fitness and the fitness of his children. . . . All of us must consider our own responsibilities for the physical vigor of our children and of the young men and women of our community. We do not want our children to become a generation of spectators. Rather, we want each of them to be a participant in the vigorous life.16
The vigorous life of children and all the roadblocks that the nanny state erects to prevent it is the focus of Chapter 5, “The War on Fun.” As a recent article by Hanna Rosin in The Atlantic argued, there is harm done to kids by overprotective parents and government management of playgrounds, games, and independent play. Her central thesis was that parents who bubble-wrap their kids hurt them by never letting them learn self-sufficiency, which requires skills like how to manage risk and deal with failure. As correct as she may be, however, it is nearly impossible for parents to fight the urge to be overprotective when the law says they should be doing just that. And what else are parents to understand from playground signs banning running and sledding?
In his book No Fear: Growing Up in a Risk-Averse Society, Tim Gill, who writes about these problems in Great Britain, has noticed that America’s litigation culture is making matters even worse here.
In America, the compensation culture is a reality, and a major cause of risk aversion. Fear of liability is grounded not just in misperception or misinformation, but in fundamental differences in the way the legal system handles litigation. . . . US liability cases are conducted in front of juries, and may involve class action and punitive damages, all of which raise the stakes for defendants.17
Gill is absolutely correct. There is a practical reason why municipal playgrounds have, in many places, made the jungle-gyms lower to the ground and replaced concrete with rubber matting. Using taxpayer funds to remove hazards from the local park is much cheaper than settling lawsuits.
Fear of litigation isn’t the only trend working against kids and parents. Frank Furedi and Gill both argue that freedom is being sacrificed on the altar of safety and health. Furedi chronicles the changes over the last decade.
Society as a whole does not take children’s freedom seriously . . . [b]ecause Western societies actually regard parents who allow their children to pursue an independent outdoor life as irresponsible. In 2001, when I published my book .