Why we can’t stand free-range parenting

Danielle and Alexander Meitiv of Maryland want to raise their children as “free-range kids,” giving them the kind of range of movement that those of us over 30 recall as a normal part of childhood. One of my cherished childhood memories is the long walks my best friend and I would take home from church through New York’s Riverside Park, which Google Maps records as 1½ miles, stopping at every playground along the way.

This is slightly longer than the walk home from the playground that caused Montgomery County’s Child Protective Services to investigate the Meitivs last year, after someone called police to report the alarming sight of ... children walking down the street alone. On April 12, after another “good Samaritan” called the cops, CPS seized the children, leaving the parents frantic with worry for hours.

In fact, the sort of abduction that CPS apparently wants the Meitivs to obsess over is incredibly rare and always has been.

Why has America gone lunatic on the subject of unattended children? Parents hover over their kids as if every step might be their last. If they don’t hover, strangers do, calling the police to report any parent who leaves their child to run into the store for a few minutes. What’s truly strange is that the parents who are doing this were themselves left to their own devices in cars, allowed to ride their bikes and walk to the store unsupervised, and otherwise given the (limited) freedom that they are now determined to deny their own kids. The police are making arrests that would have branded their own parents as criminals.

I didn’t find much good research to explain this mass shift in American parenting. I did, however, develop some theories from watching parents, law enforcement officials and others discuss the pros and cons of free-range parenting.

1. Cable news. When you listen to parents talk about why they hover, you’ll frequently hear that the world is more dangerous than it used to be. This is the exact opposite of the truth. But it may feel more dangerous because the media landscape has shifted.

2. Economic insecurity. As college degrees have become more valuable, parents feel as if they must micromanage their children’s lives to make a good showing on college applications. The result is vastly more supervised activities.

3. Working mothers. More mothers are paying others to take care of their children. It’s easy to impose severe limits on the mobility of your children when you are not personally expected to provide 24-hour supervision.

4. Lawsuits. The liability revolution of the 1970s has made every institution, from parks departments to schools, much more sensitive about even tiny risks, because when you go before the jury in a case about a hurt child, arguing that what happened was less likely than getting hit by a bolt of lightning is going to have much less impact than the evidence of a hurt child.

6. Mobile phones. All these strangers calling 911 to report a 6-year-old left in a car outside a store for a few minutes are probably doing so because it’s easy. If that person had to dig for paper and pen to write down the license plate, then find a pay phone and stand around talking to the 911 operator, most would probably just move on.