Excellent opinion piece on the criminalization of parenthood. Opinion Don’t turn parents into criminals ROSS DOUTHAT When I was about 9 years old, I graduated to a Little League whose diamonds were a few miles from our house, in a neighborhood that got rougher after dark. After one practice finished early, I ended up as the last kid left with the coach, waiting in the gloaming while he grumbled, looked at his watch and finally left me – to wait or walk home, I’m not sure which. I started walking. Halfway there, along a busy road, my father picked me up. He called my coach, as furious as you would expect a protective parent to be; the coach, who probably grew up having fistfights in that neighborhood, gave as good as he got; I finished the season in a different league. Here are two things that didn’t happen. My (lawyer) father did not call the police and have the coach arrested for reckless endangerment of a minor. And nobody who saw me picking my way home alone thought to call the police on my parents, or to charge them with neglect for letting their child slip free of perfect safety for an hour. Today they might not have been so lucky. For instance, they might have ended up like the Connecticut mother who earned a misdemeanor for letting her 11-year-old stay in the car while she ran into a store. Or the mother charged with “contributing to the delinquency of a minor” after a bystander snapped a photo of her leaving her 4-year-old in a locked, windows-cracked car for five minutes on a 50-degree day. Or the Ohio father arrested in front of his family for “child endangerment” because his 8-year-old had slipped away from a church service and ended up in a nearby Family Dollar. Or (I’m just getting warmed up) like the mother of four, recently widowed, who left her children – the oldest 10, the youngest 5 – at home together while she went to a community-college class; her neighbor called the police, protective services took the kids, and it took a two-year legal fight to pry them back from foster care. Or – in this week’s high-profile story – like Debra Harrell, an African American single mother in Georgia, who let her 9-year-old daughter play in a nearby park while she worked a shift at McDonald’s, and who ended up shamed on local news and jailed. In some cases, the conduct of neighbors and the police may be defensible. But the pattern – a “criminalization of parenthood,” in the words of The Washington Post’s Radley Balko – still looks slightly nightmarish, with forces we should recognize, name and resist. First is the upper-class, competition-driven vision of childhood as a rigorously supervised period in which unattended play is abnormal, risky, weird. This perspective hasn’t just led to “the erosion of child culture,” to borrow a quote from Hanna Rosin’s depressing Atlantic essay on “The Overprotected Kid”; it has encouraged bystanders and public servants to regard a deviation from constant supervision as a sign of parental neglect. Second is the disproportionate anxiety over child safety, fed by media coverage of every abduction, every murdered child, every tragic “hot car” death. Such horrors are real, but the danger is wildly overstated: Crime rates are down, abductions and car deaths are rare, and most parents leaving children (especially non-infants) in cars briefly or letting them roam a little are behaving perfectly responsibly. Third is an erosion of community and social trust, which has given us what Gracy Olmstead’s article in The American Conservative dubs the “bad Samaritan” phenomenon – the passer-by who passes the buck to law enforcement as expeditiously as possible. Finally there’s a policy element with a welfare system whose work requirements can put a single mother behind a fast-food counter while her kid is out of school. This last issue presents a distinctive challenge to conservatives like me. If we want women like Debra Harrell to take jobs instead of welfare, we have to find a way to defend their liberty as parents. Otherwise we’ll be throwing up defenses against big government while ignoring a police state growing in our midst. – The New York Times
Posted on: Tue, 22 Jul 2014 15:27:09 +0000
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