her own worry that something terrible might happen to him. A simple act of parental discretion turned into a movement, and Skenazy was reborn as the godmother of all Captain Mommies. What Skenazy uncovered goes beyond the single phenomenon—now all too common—of parents harassed by authorities for deciding to let kids be out in the world alone. Her decision regarding her son exposes the real conflict that exists between families and the nanny state and the harm that it causes the kids, their parents, and society at large.
The number of stories detailing mothers, fathers and guardians who have been harassed, threatened, humiliated, and arrested for allowing their kids to be alone and do for themselves is nearly endless. The adults affected by the overreach of police, judges, medical, educational, and social-service personnel come from the lower, middle, and upper classes. They are married and single. They are men and women. In other words, this is happening everywhere and to everyone.
The consequences for an adult range from the inconvenience of having to explain to a child why police were threatening and scary, to spending thousands on bail and lawyers’ fees, to being removed from your home and family. The psychological impact on adults is important, but the emotional and psychological impact on kids creates a problem for society when those same children mature into adulthood.
The adults and the kids lose trust in the people who are charged with keeping us safe and healthy, and the kids are kept from developing necessary life skills like self-reliance, creativity, intuition, and grit. The overreaction of the nanny state to young people who are allowed to operate independently feeds the already overly developed anxiety of too many parents regarding their kids’ freedom. Moreover, look at any bookstore’s shelf of current titles on education, child development, sociology, and public policy, and you’ll see one analysis after another of why deficiencies of these characteristics in our children is hurtful to us all.
Consider the best-seller How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, in which author Paul Tough shows that character matters more than intelligence when it comes to kids’ academic and life success. He focuses on what the research shows regarding teaching children self-reliance and self-control and what some schools are doing to try to incorporate those ideas into their curricula. But what about what happens beyond these few schools (Tough profiles two), when everyone else—the vast majority of schools, not to mention police departments and legislators—are actually working against parents who might want to promote these characteristics in their kids?
Tough is a fan of psychologist Angela Duckworth, who argues that grit is what educators should be teaching.
So far, the best idea I’ve heard about building grit in kids is something called growth mindset. This is an idea developed at Stanford University by Carol Dweck, and it is the belief that the ability to learn is not fixed. That it can change with your effort. Dr. Dweck has shown that when kids read and learn about the brain and how it changes and grows in response to challenge, they’re much more likely to persevere when they fail because they don’t believe that failure is a permanent condition.1
Parents who offer their kids some freedoms may not be doing so due to any understanding of such direct developmental effects. Certainly Skenazy wasn’t trying to teach her boy anything like Dr. Dweck’s lessons on perseverance and its importance to future success. Skenazy was giving her son the opportunity that she’d had when she was a kid, namely the chance to rely on oneself for limited periods of time and learn about how the world works. Yet in 2007 Skenazy caused an uproar when she wrote a newspaper column about allowing Izzy to ride the subway by himself. After her initial decision to let Izzy off his previously tight parental leash, she endured numerous phone conversations with the police to defend her choice. And as she explained it to me, she now believes that society is “criminalizing things that used to be perfectly OK, such as punishing parents for trying to raise independent children, [something that] used to be a value and now is worth a hefty fine or a stint in lock-up.”
After Izzy got home without incident the first time, Skenazy allowed him to ride alone again, this time on the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR). The security officers on his train weren’t happy. As she described it, the conductor wouldn’t listen to her son and radioed ahead to the next station, where the conductor held up the train until the cops came—the very stop where Izzy was getting off and his friend’s family was waiting on the platform to pick him up. The officer wouldn’t allow Izzy or the family to leave until he’d spoken to Skenazy.
Fluke, you say? No, because a couple of months later, when Izzy again rode the LIRR, Skenazy got another call requiring her to vouch for her son again. This time, the officer complained bitterly about the dangers of children riding alone, even though, as Skenazy pointed out, the LIRR rules state that any child over eight is allowed to ride the train unsupervised. “That doesn’t matter ma’am, what if someone tried to take him,” moaned the officer. To which Skenazy replied, “This is 5pm on a Thursday and I think that if anything bad was happening to [my son] the police would try to help him.” The officer only replied argumentatively, “What if two people were trying to abduct him?”
Such experiences reveal that the current default standard is that nothing is safe enough, says Skenazy, and police “are often in agreement that anything could happen.” Skenazy started a blog called Free-Range Kids, wrote a book, and became an advocate for changing the parental culture around allowing kids some freedom. She did a TV show and has appeared as a guest on dozens of interview programs and talk shows. At first she was talking mostly about changing the parenting culture. But now she spends a lot of time talking about reforming the law. What changed is that her experience with the police has been repeated over and over and over again by parents across the country and with far worse results.
Too often, authorities such as the local police or security officers impose rules of safety divorced from any real danger, by following what they perceive to be rules written so broadly as to be applicable to entirely innocent situations. In many cases, the police seem more worried about “what could happen” than even the most helicoptering parent, often overreacting in situations where nothing—nothing—has happened.
Such conflicts have visited injustice on some parents and have turned others into parental-rights vigilantes—a.k.a. Captain Mommies.
In July 2014, Debra Harrell of North Augusta, South Carolina, was booked for “unlawful conduct” toward a child for allowing her nine-year-old daughter to play at the playground near her home and her mother’s job. The cause of the complaint was another mother at the playground, who upon hearing from the girl that she’d been dropped off while her mother worked, decided it was best to call police to protect the girl. Did she need protection? According to other parents, indeed, she did. Lesa Lamback, who enjoys the park with her family, told a reporter that “you cannot just leave your child alone at a public place, especially. This day and time, you never know who’s around. Good, bad, it’s just not safe.”2
Skenazy has actually done the research, however. Given today’s crime statistics on abduction, as she explained to the New Yorker, it would take some effort to get your kid snatched away. “If you actually wanted your child to be kidnapped, how long would you have to keep him outside for him to be abducted by a stranger?” she asked Lizzie Widdicombe, her interviewer. “Seven hundred and fifty thousand years,” Skenazy said.3
The day of the alleged infraction regarding Harrell’s daughter, the playground was full of people; it was fine weather; and the girl could have walked the short distance home, where she had a key. Or she could have gone (and did go) to her mother’s job at McDonald’s to check in and have lunch. No matter. According to a lot of people, that isn’t good enough—children have to be watched every second, because you can’t know what might happen. What did happen as a result of alerting the police was bad enough, however. The girl was put into state custody because of her mother’s arrest. The mother was fired from her job for being in trouble with the law. (Her job was subsequently reinstated because of all the publicity.) Then the mother had to fight the charges, and a fund to help her was established. A lot of time and effort was taken up by the local criminal-justice and social-services authorities in order to find a solution to a nonproblem. Nothing had happened to the girl, which is a recurring theme in these cases.