By David Larson
We tend to focus on the freedoms of adults — like the ability to vote, speak one’s mind, and own private property — but for children to grow up to be independent, responsible, confident, and productive, they need a degree of freedom too. And what used to be considered a normal level of freedom for kids is now, unfortunately, under attack in many places.
A number of high-profile cases have brought this debate to public attention. The John Stossel segment below describes a scenario where one Texas mother, Heather Wallace, made her 8-year-old son walk half a mile home (in their very safe Texas neighborhood) after he was misbehaving in the car. Wallace was jailed and charged with placing her child in imminent danger of death. She was also fired from her job because the initial charge was a felony, even though she ultimately pleaded guilty to a lesser charge.
Another mother, Kay Eskridge, in Kentucky was shocked when a neighbor’s 7-year-old child was questioned by police for being outside in her own neighborhood, until it happened to Eskridge’s 8-year-old daughter as well, when she was riding her bike only three houses from home.
But the case that has supercharged this debate at the moment regards Brittany Patterson, a Georgia mother, who was arrested in front of her family this month and charged with misdemeanor reckless conduct, allegedly for knowingly endangering one of her children.
Patterson had taken an older child to a doctor’s appointment and left her son, days from his 11th birthday, home alone. He got bored at home and walked less than a mile into town, where he was picked up by police simply for walking while young. The mother didn’t know he had walked to town, but when the police called to tell her, she said she wasn’t at all worried about his safety in the quiet town, since he was a very active and capable kid. But they weren’t so sure, so now she may have to spend a year behind bars.
The elimination of childhood freedom isn’t just about the law. Businesses often decide to bar unsupervised children, even older teens, from their premises. I snapped the image below when I was at the Southpoint Mall in Durham recently. I was shocked to see that everyone who isn’t a legal adult must be supervised on weekend evenings. A 17 year old can’t even meet up at the mall on a Friday or Saturday night to go the movies with their friends or sit around in the food court without a parent chaperone looking over their shoulder, which, for many teens, eliminates the whole point.
If you read the comments under any of these stories, you’ll see adult after adult saying things like, “When I was young, my parents had no idea where I was. I just had to be home when the street lights came on.” They talk about adventures in the woods with siblings, going to the movies on dates, going to the mall with friends, exploring abandoned buildings, swimming in dirty rivers, poking around places they probably shouldn’t.
This is where kids learn the skills they need to be strong adults. They get themselves in a little trouble and learn their boundaries. They get in petty squabbles and learn to resolve them. They try new things that seem difficult or scary and overcome them, maybe after some trial and error.
These activities come with risk, but forcing kids to stay inside or to be supervised by an adult 100% of their waking hours is not a guarantee of their health and well-being. Yes, they may be a little safer from child abductions. But those are very rare crimes done overwhelmingly by family or friends, and only 1% of the time by strangers. They also might avoid broken bones and scraped knees. But the tradeoff is that the child is unprepared for the real world.
NYU professor and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has been sounding the alarm that this sheltered childhood is actually a far greater threat than anything that’s likely to happen walking a half mile home or riding a bike in a safe neighborhood. In his book “The Anxious Generation,” Haidt shows data that this new paradigm of childhood (indoors, overindulgence on screens, and constant supervision by adults) has created a neurotic generation unable to cope with emotions or solve challenges by themselves.
Instead, they lean on the ever-present authority figures to step in and solve their problems. Haidt presents chart after chart showing anxiety, depression, and suicide spiking in America’s children and proving this new indoor screen-based childhood is not safer.
In addition to the impact on children, parents (most frequently mothers, it appears from the news stories) are also being harmed by this dynamic. Their very reasonable and historically typical parenting decisions are being questioned and often criminalized by authorities. Nosy neighbors who aren’t used to, or don’t want to, see children playing near their homes are a main cause of the trend. Overzealous law enforcement who take those complaints seriously, rather than telling them to mind their own business, are another.
Lenore Skenazy, a mother who started the “Free-Range Kids” movement and wrote a book of the same name, is fighting back. Her website LetGrow.com encourages parents, law enforcement, city officials, and schools to let children have the freedom that other generations enjoyed.
On Skenazy’s site, she maps out which states have laws that protect children’s independence, which are punitive towards them, and which give discretion to law enforcement or child-protective services to decide. North Carolina is a state she considers to be among the latter.
But many states are passing laws to protect parents and secure independence for children, to the degree their parents reasonably allow. Utah was the first to pass a “Reasonable Childhood Independence” bill, in 2018, and since then, Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Virginia, Connecticut, Illinois, and Montana have joined them. Maybe North Carolina could consider doing the same. Kids from Murphy to Manteo would thank them for remembering to protect their freedoms too.
David Larson is opinion editor of Carolina Journal.
