The heck with the nanny state; what about the protective-custody state?

[jducoeur]

So there I was, a few days ago, driving around Cambridge, when I passed a sight that has stayed uncomfortably with me. It was a neat line of small children on the sidewalk, each maybe four years old. (I'm bad with ages: small, but big enough to be walking down the sidewalk escorted.) The line was neat because they were attached to a pair of ropes -- each child's wrist was tied into the rope, and each rope had an adult at the front and back, with about six kids between them.

My inner engineer marveled at the simple efficiency of this solution for keeping a dozen children safe while walking down a busy city sidewalk. But my inner sociologist squirmed uncomfortably.

Mind, the kids didn't seem to mind: their eyes were wandering hither and yon as they walked, largely ignoring their right hand held up slightly by the rope. But that's kind of the point -- children at that age learn from everything happening to them. So I have to wonder: what does this teach?

I confess, I find it creepy as all hell. The implicit message seems to be that captivity is right and appropriate, so long as it is intended to keep you safe. I suspect that most people would word that differently, but many would agree with it in spirit. It makes my skin crawl.

To understand a person, it's often best to understand their formative literature. If you want to understand me, I commend the novelette With Folded Hands, by Jack Williamson. (The basis for the followup novel The Humanoids.) It's fairly old (I confess, I last read it decades ago), but perhaps even more than 1984 it shaped much of my political philosophy. If the above scene does *not* make you squirm, the story might help you understand why it does me...

Comments

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Having read the above comments, I am struck by the tunnel vision of current parents. I understand raising children is VERY HARD. I understand that getting little kids to do anything is very hard. But...

How did we, by which I mean people over about the age of 30, survive to adulthood?

I do remember once being asked to hold onto a rope--I forget the occasion--but generally it was "hold hands", or follow instructions. We were clearly able to move around as a herd when I was three, let alone six.

Did something change in how kids behave, and if so, why? Did the world get more dangerous? Did we get less tolerant of mishaps? Are we understaffing our child care to the point where the adults have no choice but to use force-multipliers like ropes?

This always confuses me. Presumably there have been hundreds of generations of humans, each going through the stage when they were four and not following directions and needing to be guided and in loco parentis and all that. And somehow we survived without chain gangs, leashes, always-on helmets, and velcro bodysuits.

Why? How?

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

>Presumably there have been hundreds of generations of humans, each going through the stage when they were four and not following directions and needing to be guided and in loco parentis and all that.

Of course, and there were enough casualties that they pull the "average life expectancy" statistics way out of whack. If you survived into age seven or eight in the middle ages, you were likely to live to your sixties or seventies, but because so many little kids died, the average age is something like 30-40.

Several different things have changed. One: labor is more expensive, even not-much-skilled baby/toddler care, so fewer caregivers per kid. Two: a lower birthrate may make parents more careful of this particular kid, but more important, the litigious society we live in makes daycare institutions positively allergic to any kind of risk, because it raises their insurance premiums a ridiculous amount. See the Free Range Kids blog I posted about for some examples of this.

[ladysprite.livejournal.com]

Have you ever heard the phrase "tied to the apron strings?" Kids were kept, functionally, on leashes for generation upon generation. This isn't some new, crazy, "nanny state" phenomenon.

And I'd think that being able to go outside, holding onto a lead rope, gives the kids a lot more freedom than being kept indoors in a confined area would. It's not constraining, or overprotective, or paranoid; it's a way to give the kids a measure of freedom, mobility, and diversity of experience that they otherwise wouldn't have.

[etherial.livejournal.com]

I look forward to the day I can hand my child a cell phone with a sticker that says "in loco parentis". On speed dial will be me, my wife, the family doctor, and the family lawyer.

[serakit.livejournal.com]

I have never worked in a daycare, but I've worked in summer camps and elementary schools, and I recall only too clearly the multiple trips out, both walking around Roxbury and on the T, that I took with a class of second and third graders. We didn't have the lead ropes, and we didn't lose any kids-- but I was terrified the entire time that we would lose one, and there were occasions where it was only luck that saved us from losing one. I'm not sure if it's a change in kids' behavior or not, but only about half the class was capable of holding hands and walking in a line. The other half was a constant struggle, and one kid *I* had trouble hanging on to even after he'd been instructed to hold my hand the entire way. If my attention has to be devoted to that one kid who needs to be watched constantly to ensure he doesn't run off, I need a quick and easy way of determining if the other nineteen are safe or not. "Are they all holding on to their loops" is a very simple way of remaining aware of the rest of them while devoting my attention to that one kid who cannot respond effectively to any form of discipline I can dish out. (There's always one kid like this, in any classroom.)

[jducoeur]

Yeah, I think that's part of why this bugs me. I mean, I consider myself to have been quite well-brought-up by my parents, and there's not much I would have changed.

And yet, I get the sense that if you tried to raise a child that way today, you'd get a call from social services, for everything from traveling in the way-back reading comic books, to the fact that I was taking care of myself in the library across the street after school by age six (? something like that -- before eight), to being employed by my father with relatively adult expectations and responsibilities at 14, to being exposed to alcohol early enough to have a serious respect for its power and risks.

By and large, I think those were all positives for my life and development -- and yet I hear all of them frequently decried (and sometimes declared illegal) in modern society.

It produces a constant sense that we have catastrophized childhood with an underlying expectation of "Of *course* keeping a child safe is always an overriding concern". I worry about the side-effects of that assumption...

[kls-eloise.livejournal.com]

Well, in my case, I was raised by my mother. She was home. She was in the house with (just) me, or (just) I was in the back yard while she was in the house, or when I got older I was on my bike riding around the block and she could go out on the back porch and call me if she wanted to know where I was (good lungs on that lady.)

My daughter is in daycare. It is necessary. In order to live in the state with our family and friends, and live the way we want to live, I need to work. Honestly, I want to work. Sitting at home, keeping the house, watching daytime television, and having only a four year old for conversation would put me over the edge. I work. Ergo, she goes to daycare.

In her room at the daycare, there are twelve toddlers who are three or four years old. There are two teachers - that is the state mandated staffing level. Some of the kids are well behaved, some less so (there's always one...) That means that if they are to go somewhere, each adult is trying to keep track of SIX three year olds. Of course they need mechanical assistance. The last thing that *I* ever want to hear is that you left MY kid unattended in a strange, crowded place while you ran off after the one who doesn't listen!

The adults who watch them are a lot more outnumbered than they used to be.

As far as kids changing, at the risk of sounding like an old fogey - yes, they have. They often don't listen like they used to. They often don't follow directions like they used to. They often don't understand consequences like they used to. Many parents don't want to damage their little psyches, or make them feel bad, so they get to do as they like - and kids are amoral little animals - until we teach them to be otherwise. How many kids have you seen whose parents can't control them? Now multiply that, and it's what the daycare has to deal with. Personally, I'm perpetually shocked that they don't murder the lot of them. Asking them to hold a rope is pretty reasonable.

[jducoeur]

As far as kids changing, at the risk of sounding like an old fogey - yes, they have. They often don't listen like they used to. They often don't follow directions like they used to. They often don't understand consequences like they used to.

Hmm. That begs the question: why? My observation is that kids learn responsibility if and only if they are *given* responsibility, preferably quite early.

Mind, none of my musings are intended to fault any individuals. Mostly, I'm concerned that, as a society, we seem to be falling into a rather scary-looking spiral of coddling children more and more, which means that they wind up *needing* more coddling, so we swaddle them ever more tightly, putting off the need to grow up ever longer. That seems likely to have poor long-term effects on our culture...

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

One of the reasons why is that spanking and so on are now considered child abuse. Pain is a really quick and effective way of getting an idea across. However, using the non-pain methods take a lot more concentrated effort by the parent over a much longer time period, and some parents just can't do that, so the lesson is never learned.

As for responsibility, I agree with you. But a toddler pretty much doesn't understand that concept, and the responsibility one can give them at that age is a much smaller thing compared to the responsibility of not dashing into traffic, hence the loop rope device.

[richenza.livejournal.com]

They often don't listen like they used to. They often don't follow directions like they used to. They often don't understand consequences like they used to.

Yeah, maybe. Then again, maybe not. I remember knowing "that kid" from when I was a kid, and my experiences in my neighborhood don't really make me feel that there are that many more of "those kids" now than 30 years ago.

In my opinion, what has really changed is the immediate vilification of the parent any time anything bad happens to a child. I'm not saying there aren't really truly neglectful bad parents, but all of us have done something we "shouldn't have". Maybe we left the kid in the tub alone for thirty seconds. Maybe we drove to the store not realizing the kid was in his car seat but he was not buckled in. It's pure statistics that our one or two moments of "parent-fail" don't end in tragedy. But look at the comments in every news story. This one is a real gem:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/08/16/united_airlines_loses_10_year_old_girl_enters_social_media_hell.html

Note how many people are outraged, not that a company failed to provide a service that was paid for, but that a parent would allow a child to fly alone at all, without a cell phone and a GPS tracker chip and a can of mace.

[jducoeur]

In my opinion, what has really changed is the immediate vilification of the parent any time anything bad happens to a child.

Yeah, I think that's a big part of it, and is part of why I'm looking at this as a sociological problem rather than any individual's fault. There seems to be this pervasive belief that it should be *impossible* for any child to ever get hurt, and that someone must be blamed to the point of vilification should it ever happen.

That *does* seem to be a significant change from when I was growing up, and I agree that it is likely driving a lot of other things via the resulting social (and legal) pressure.

Of course, that's itself a special case of the growing meme that life should be fair, and that it must be *somebody's* fault when it isn't. But that's a much larger point...

[richenza.livejournal.com]

Well, one thing it drives for me personally is that I worry when I have to leave the kid strapped into his car seat and nip back into the house for my purse. I'm not worried he'll unstrap himself, hotwire the car and take off. I'm not even worried that strangers will mess with him, because honestly, the statistics are astronomical.

I am worried some busybody neighbor will call CPS and I will have to spend the next week explaining away that one moldy item in the back of the fridge mold, or why cosleeping won't kill him, or why my gay roommate is not a potential pedophile, no matter what you saw on the news.