Convincing parents that the world is safer than they think

An interesting post, Let the Children Play by Walter Russell Mead, riffing off an article by Hanna Rosin, The Overprotected Kid.

Rosin suggests that parents are more protective now than they once were because they think the world is a more dangerous place. But the statistics don’t actually bear that out: abduction and other crimes against children are as rare as ever. Rosin quotes David Finkelhor of the Crimes Against Children Research Center, who says that crimes against children have fallen alongside the overall decrease in crime rates, and were never very high to begin with.

There might be another factor at work here that Rosin overlooks, one so ingrained in the elite, creative class culture that it’s invisible in some ways to the representatives of that culture. Yesterday’s larger families and autonomous childhoods have given way to small, carefully planned families with closely managed children. Marriage and childbearing are both delayed into one’s thirties. Having a child is so expensive that it is weighed against the lifestyle losses parenthood brings. These and other factors combine to make younger Americans treat children almost as consumer products or status symbols, the capstone to a successful career and marriage. Parents not only try to live through their children, but also seem to see them as a kind of lifestyle accoutrement. In turn, then, children come to exist more and more for the sake of the parents, and are anxiously watched and fretted over.

Rosin is completely correct that parents ought to give children more room to play and explore, to test boundaries and face some degree of risk on their own. But doing so might require more than convincing parents that the world is safer than they think. It should involve re-opening a debate into the meaning of having children in the first place—weaning our elites away from treating children as consumer luxuries and instead bringing children into the world for their own sake.

A good example that not all arguments are fact based. Sometimes the root disagreements are about differences in values and perceived risk and those can be the hardest issues to address and to reach shared agreement.

Beyond Mead's comment on the changing valuation of children, I suspect that there is also an issue of numbers. In the Baby Boom there were two numbers that influenced a lot of things - the number of children in a family and the number of children in a neighborhood. If most families have multiple children, there is an intra-family socialization process that can be very beneficial. If most neighbors have children there is a natural herd self-policing that goes on, again beneficial for early learning. Bill Bryson captures some of that in his biographical The Life and Times of The Thunderbolt Kid about growing up in Des Moines, Iowa in the 1950s.

If you only have one or two children, there is a lot less intra-family socialization going on. If you live in a neighborhood where children are fewer and further between, there is less peer socialization.