Like most of you, we recently finished the Stranger Things series, as did our adult kids, which prompted them to ask “Did kids in the 80s really have this much freedom and independence?” And as most of you know firsthand, yes, we sure did. We rode our bikes until the street lights came on, as every Gen X person will tell you. We drank from the garden hose. I walked from my house to my friend’s house 3 miles away on a frozen pond when I was 11 or 12. We swam in a quarry that had submerged buildings (that blew in during a hurricane) just under the surface. I used to take a paperback book and climb one of our walnut trees and read for hours in the crook of a limb, twenty or thirty feet above the ground.

My second child once heard us talking about climbing trees and said “You climbed a tree?!” like we had just admitted to skydiving without a parachute. I’m not sure where this anxiety started, but all my kids viewed their independence differently than I did. Once I left my wallet at the grocery store a mile from home, and I told my 11 year old that he was in charge of his two siblings (7 and 4 years old) for the ten minutes I’d be gone. When I returned, all the lights were out, and they were huddled under the kitchen table with an assortment of utensils as weapons as if they were in Home Alone, ready to do battle with anyone who came in the house to get them. I don’t know where that anxiety came from, but it wasn’t me. My mom started driving cars at age 13. I couldn’t wait to turn 16 to get my license. Many of my kids’ friends didn’t want to get their license until they were out of high school.

You’ll probably remember the ads that came on after the nightly news that asked parents “It’s 10PM. Do you know where your children are?” And honestly, they didn’t all know. Now, were kids also probably in actual peril more than they are now? Sure. CPS intervention was rare. I knew a lot of kids who were abused at home; staying out of sight of an abusive parent, even if that meant being unsupervised away from home, might have been a safer option for that kid. There were bullies at school who would beat kids up, although there was a Fight Club in my daughter’s high school in the late 2010s. I guess you could say the Fight Club is consensual at least.

I don’t think this benign neglect was a bad thing for us, although you could also say that I would say that because I survived. The kids that didn’t survive can’t talk about how they survived. I had a sister who was hit by a car when she was very little (5 or 6), walking back from the candy store with friends (but no adults). A friend came running to our house and told my mom “She’s been hit by a car! I don’t think she’s dead yet!” (She was not actually injured, just barely brushed by the car and fell down, and the car didn’t stop). Several of us experienced perverts in public spaces, being grabbed or groped, or seeing someone expose himself. Another sister had a school teacher follow her as she walked home and threaten her and her friend (they told on her for racist bullying of a student).

If you want a truly horrifying example of parents giving kids too much independence, look no further than the story of Grace Budd who was 10 years old in 1928 when a relative stranger to the family using an assumed name claimed he had to go to his niece’s birthday party, and then offered to bring their daughter Grace along. They said that sounded dandy, and he then took her to a farmhouse where he strangled, decapitated, and then ate her over the next few days.

But somewhere between letting a stranger take your 10 year old for the day, and 18 year olds who have never used a paring knife, there has to be a sane middle ground. It’s no wonder nobody wants to be a parent anymore. It’s a full time supervisory job and the stakes (like climbing a tree) are life and death!

There is a beloved Japanese reality TV show called Old Enough! that has been airing since 1991. In this show, children aged 2-5 are given a task, like going to the store to get something. The premise is that this is the first time the child is doing this activity. This used to be much more normalized.

So what’s changed? Let’s compare some of the parenting norms from my generation (Gen X) and the current situation parents face.

Parental Accountability

  • Then (Gen X). Parents were judged socially, not institutionally. Police and neighbors handled minor issues informally. CPS intervention was rare and only in extreme cases.
  • Now. Parenting is legally scrutinized. A single bystander with idiosyncratic expectations can trigger CPS involvement, and an accusation is likely to be taken seriously. Schools, doctors and neighbors are mandated reporters, vigilant for any parenting failure that they personally find suspicious or concerning.

Parents must be as concerned with protecting themselves from insititutional consequences as they are with protecting kids. This makes parents behave defensively.

Media

  • Then (Gen X). Parents watched local news on one evening broadcast and had limited awareness of the rare tragedies that can occur.
  • Now. Parents live inside 24×7 news cycles in which crime stories can go viral. Algorithms amplify the worst case scenarios.

Humans are very bad at probabilistic thinking when confronted with emotional stories. Even if a story is unlikely, when you hear about a true crime involving a child, you immediately imagine that it could be your own child.

Identity

  • Then (Gen X). Being a parent was the norm, and it was just one role among many that adults played. Kids lived in a world designed for adults.
  • Now. Parenting is a choice and for those who chose it, it’s a core part of their moral identity. Children are viewed as emotionally fragile projects. Parenting mistakes feel like moral failures. Parents fear being judged as negligent or uncaring. They are constantly focused on optimizing their parenting skills to meet the demands of this core role they perform.

Collective Trust

  • Then (Gen X). Neighbors knew each other. Adults corrected bad child behavior collectively. Children were “known” in public spaces. Parents trusted other adults, even when they shouldn’t.
  • Now. People don’t know their neighbors. Public correction of someone else’s child is unacceptable and inappropriate. Adults avoid involvement for legal reasons. Neighborhood trust is lower, so a concerned adult might resort to calling CPS rather than having a difficult or unwelcome conversation with the parent. Parents no longer trust strangers, insitutions or each other, so they compensate with surveillance.

Schools

Even if Gen X parents wanted to foster the familiar independence in their kids that they enjoyed, modern institutions train dependence through things like:

  • Zero-tolerance policies
  • Hyper-safety rules
  • Reduced unstructured play
  • Constant adult mediation of conflict

Class Pressure

Middle and upper-middle class parents especially believe that:

  • Childhood is determinative
  • Failure is permanent
  • Competition is intense

Like the stereotypical “tiger parents,” they oversupervise their kids to ensure success which actually leads to less success as kids fear the loss of a parental safety net.

In William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies, a group of British schoolboys are stranded on an uninhabited island after a plane crash. After a brief attempt to organize themselves democratically, they devolve into violence and anarchy. The message of the novel is that civilization is a thin veneer; remove the structure and humans will revert to tribal violence. It’s bleak.

But it’s not true!

In 1965, six Tongan boys were shipwrecked on a remote island for 15 months. They cooperated, created a shared garden, created a rotating chore schedule, resolved conflicts with “time outs,” cared for the injured collectively, and survived through teamwork. This is a complete contradiction to Golding’s novel. There are other examples from reality, and in general, the outcomes were positive and cooperative. It has likewise been observed that children engaging in unstructured play with peers often create their own rules that foster safety, cooperation, and enjoyment–and those rules are less intrusive than the ones created by adults.

In 2018, Utah was the first state to introduce the first “free-range parenting” law. It stipulates that parents are not considered neglectful for allowing children to engage in independent activities such as walking to school, playing outside, or being home alone. The law does not set fixed ages for these activities which means it is still up to interpretation, but it is designed to move away from the increased triggering of CPS involvement that has become the trend. Since then 11 more states have followed suit, introducing “Reasonable Childhood Independence” laws. This doesn’t appear to be a partisan issue as the states that have adopted these laws represent both Democratic and Republican leadership.

I’m sure there’s some generational bias going on, but I keep thinking that if we want the current generation to embrace parenting, then parenting needs to not suck. It needs to be just one of many roles in your life. Parents and kids both need a little more independence from each other in the process, like they did back in the 80s. But also let’s not beat and perv on those kids like people did back then. Some progress is good.

  • Have you seen these issues with parenting in your community?
  • Do you think having a Mormon community makes parenting easier because of higher levels of trust?
  • Did you have more independence as a child than your kids did? Why did it change?
  • What ages did you do independent activities like walking to school (or the bus stop), going to the store, playing outside, or being home alone? Was this the same for your kids or were they older?
  • What do you think of Reasonable Childhood Independence laws? Are you concerned about the downside (e.g. abusive parents going unchecked)?
  • Have you encountered “gentle parenting” or other new trends? What do you think of these approaches?

Discuss.