with a health warning. . . . But since the turn of the century, the regime of child protection has become steadily more pervasive and intrusive. The relentless erosion of children’s freedom has been paralleled by the constant tendency to politicise parenting.18
Gill says that state intervention to protect children from risk is actually limiting the experiences of all children. I got a terrific education on these issues when I spoke to Mike Lanza, a Captain Daddy in California who has been building a community devoted to the proposition that children need to be outside, enjoying free play as much as possible. His book Playborhood argues for parent-made outdoor shareable play spaces for local kids. Lanza has had his own run-ins with local authorities who question his parenting choices. But he remains steadfast in his commitment to the quality of life necessary for his kids to thrive.
It feels like there is a government agency uniquely focused on preventing parents from encouraging kids to have fun: the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Of course, the CPSC is supposed to help consumers uncover hidden dangers in consumer products. But like many regulators, the definitions have gotten much broader and the mandate much more expansive. Indeed, the CPSC isn’t even satisfied with recalling and banning toys and games anymore. Now the agency has decided that protecting children requires suing private business owners who don’t do what they want, even if their products aren’t for children! CPSC has also gotten into the business of hectoring parents about how precisely they ought to use some products, as if we who have children couldn’t get along without the anxiety-inducing warnings and advisories of Uncle Sam.
The list of CPSC “hasty responses” is long and varied—pajamas, baby baths, desk toys—and the list of consequences—killing business, worrying parents, wasting taxpayer money—is also impressive.
GETTING TO KNOW this community of subversive parents who don’t like the government telling them how to raise their kids, and who are fighting for their rights, has raised important questions for me: How did we get here? How did this kind of overbearing authority become part of our fabric? I read a piece that offered a possible explanation. In his 2006 Los Angeles Times op-ed, Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard University and the author of Stumbling on Happiness, describes how societal changes often happen slowly enough that most parents just aren’t paying attention.
The human brain is exquisitely sensitive to changes in light, sound, temperature, pressure, size, weight and just about everything else. But if the rate of change is slow enough, the change will go undetected. If the low hum of a refrigerator were to increase in pitch over the course of several weeks, the appliance could be singing soprano by the end of the month and no one would be the wiser. . . . Culturally, we haven’t noticed that laws, rules, bureaucracy was moving against parents’ authority because it was happening in small ways over a long period of time. But when it happens in Technicolor (i.e., banning sledding or arresting parents) then the outcry is immediate from some quarters because it is blatantly contra the cultural norm that no one noticed had changed.19
I find Gilbert’s explanation persuasive. I don’t think the effort to dictate and organize parents’ lives is coordinated or centrally controlled. This is a systemic change that has been going on for decades across the country, incrementally, and for a variety of intended purposes. The nanny state has blossomed because of real changes to our social culture. But though there may have been real problems, what seems clear by now is that government solutions just aren’t effective. Moreover, these remedies may do more harm than good.
I went looking to see how bad the problem is for parents. It can be pretty bad. In the worst case scenarios, parents can lose custody of their children. Chapter 6, “Obesity Police,” explores what happens when the government takes kids away from their parents—because the kids are considered obese.
In the name of combating obesity, doctors and legal experts assert that the state can do a better job than mom or dad. There are multiple problems with this proposed solution, however. First, should the category of neglect be expanded to include allowing your child to overeat? Second, should this be an appropriate area of concern for child welfare services? As happens so often with regulations, definitions are expanded to the point that they now include whole categories of behavior that never used to be considered legitimate targets of action. This is certainly what has happened with obesity. Perhaps we should include the other conditions for which parents can be accused of neglect: self-harm, anorexia, depression, drug abuse, drinking excessively, bullying.
There is a fundamental flaw in the fact that child-welfare bureaucrats see families as separate individuals in conflict rather than as a homogeneous unit deserving of help as a whole. So often, in cases of obese kids, the parents are also obese. Why don’t these parents deserve the same care and protection? Instead, the child-welfare system can seem almost predatory.
Expanding the mandate of child-welfare services has been a near constant trend since the inception of the first child-welfare program. Indeed, it is a common problem in the welfare state. As David Boaz, executive director of the libertarian CATO Institute, explains, “Bureaucracies are notoriously unwilling to become victims of their own success. So, true to form, the public health authorities broadened their mandate and kept on going. They launched informational and regulatory crusades against such health problems as smoking, venereal disease, AIDS, and obesity. Pick up any newspaper and you’re apt to find a story about these ‘public health crises.’ Those are all health problems, to be sure, but are they really public health problems?”20
When it comes to obesity, the problem is astonishingly complex, and there is no proven remedy. I will review the history of child welfare with an eye toward understanding the pediatric obesity problem.
Boaz doesn’t even agree that obesity is a matter for public policy consideration. “Let’s start using honest language,” he advises. A “legitimate public health issue,” Boaz explains, involves “consumption of a collective good (air or water) and/or the communication of disease to parties who had not consented to put themselves at risk. . . . [O]besity [is a] health problem . . . [a] widespread health problem . . . [but] not [a] public health problem.”21
WHILE WRITING this book, I’ve been asked too many times to count whether my attitude about overbearing government includes favoring parental choice as it relates to vaccines. The answer is no.
My view on vaccines mirrors my attitude about government intervention in general. I believe strongly in reasonable, effective, limited government involvement in the lives of private citizens, and only for public problems and crises that are in fact amenable to government-implemented solutions.
I’m a mom of four children, all of whom were vaccinated. I want everyone else to vaccinate their kids as well. And when the government mandates vaccines, everyone’s kids are protected. What is called “herd immunity” only works against contagious diseases like measles and whooping cough when more than 92 percent of the population is vaccinated. Parents who refuse to vaccinate choose to endanger others’ kids as well as newborns and those who are immunocompromised, and I want the government to penalize them. And yet, as Jimmy Kimmel noted in March 2015, the culture in some places, like Los Angeles, where he lives, has become inverted. Kimmel quipped, “Parents here are more afraid of gluten than they are of smallpox, and as a result, we’ve got measles, measles are back.”22
Kimmel was reacting to a health crisis triggered in December 2014 at Disneyland in Anaheim, California, when more than 100 people who were exposed to measles subsequently got sick. “The rate of growth [in measles cases] gives us a good idea about the percentage of people in the population who are immune,” explained Maimuna Majumder, a research fellow at Boston Children’s Hospital. A preliminary analysis “indicates that substandard vaccination compliance is likely to blame for the 2015 measles outbreak,” Majumder and her coauthors concluded in their research letter for JAMA Pediatrics.23
Measles, mumps, whooping cough, and other preventable illnesses have returned to the United States because of concentrations of parents opting not to immunize their kids and a compliant government allowing them to get away with it. It took the crisis in 2015 to get politicians and the public at large to focus pressure on what had by then proven to be too-lenient