A little over a year ago, I wrote about the parental safetyism arms race, or the idea that parenting norms are being defined by the most risk-averse parents, eventually extending to “normal” parents who feel pressured to comply with these changing norms, lest a neighbor call CPS on them (or, more realistically, lest they be harshly judged or lectured by other parents.)
Per that article, most parents are less risk-averse than the social media discourse would have you believe. Even most parents who follow this Substack, who tend to be the exact profile you would expect of a helicopter parent (often but not always white, upper middle class, liberal, and millennial) believed the following:
84% felt it was safe for a 6-10 year-old to walk 5-10 minutes to school
86% felt it was safe to bring a baby under 4 months to a crowded indoor family gathering
62% felt it was safe to allow a 10-13 year-old to ride the subway or city bus during the day
78% felt it was safe to allow a 10-13 year-old to fly as an unaccompanied minor to visit a relative who would pick them up at the airport
84% felt it was safe to allow a 9-year-old to sleep over at a friend’s house
97% felt it was safe to allow a 9-year-old to sleep over at a cousin’s house (assuming there was no specific red flag about the cousin.)
And yet, these are topics rife for debate. If you mostly consumed news and social media and had very few real-life conversations, you’d think most parents thought them wildly unsafe. New “helicopter parenting” trends have emerged, such as the end of sleepovers, with parents saying things like: “The possibility that my child might have a good time, or come back with a trauma — what do you think I’m picking?” When a child is playing in his own back yard, CPS is sometimes called, and for some reason they screen in these reports and sometimes open investigations. When a six-year-old boy was spotted playing in his own back yard while his mom was inside, CPS was called, and they proceeded to interview him about whether or not anyone was showing him pornography—something he probably didn’t know existed. A mom of a ten-year-old was arrested when the child was spotted going for a walk outside. And, most recently, a mom was sentenced to six months suspended sentence for letting her five-year-old walk half a mile within a gated community. She will be on the child abuse registry for seven years.
There’s clearly a disconnect between the things most parents feel are fine, and the way society at large overreacts to these things. And yet, for whatever reason, the zeitgeist still relies on blaming “neurotic millennial parents” for adhering to these norms.
