They rode up a very mild hill and moved slowly as they talked and laughed with each other. To me, it seemed almost idyllic, a visage from a different era. Then my friend said, “I feel sorry for those kids. It’s like their parents aren’t paying attention to them.”
When I was a child playing with my friends, I think the very last thing I wanted was my parents paying attention to me.
My friend is a Baby Boomer, and like me, has no children. He and I grew up in eras when children did exactly what these two were doing: play outside without adult supervision after school, on weekends, and during the summer. It was so common and normal during our childhoods that absolutely no one questioned it. And didn’t he, like I, have fond memories of that? Of course he did, he admitted. So why, I asked, was he pitying these kids for doing the same thing?
“Wellll,” he thought aloud, searching for an explanation, “things are different now.”
They certainly are. For starters, childhood has never been safer. Bike helmets and soft padding instead beneath playgrounds instead of blacktop are just two small examples.
But the elimination of many dangers is not the only thing different today. Parents are also different. Or at least the middle class ones are. For let’s not fall into the trap of having the middle class stand-in for a nation at large, even if politicians and the press constantly promote this misrepresentation. Pretending everyone is middle class erases tens of millions of Americans who are poor, work and commute excessively, and don’t have the wherewithal to over-parent their children. Whereas many middle class parents can find a combination of time and resources to ensure their children are chaperoned and overseen pretty much 24 hours a day.
Many people, probably many parents, will insist that the two things go hand-in-hand: children today are safer because parents are more safety conscious. The helmets worn by the two boys biking by my house are a great example of that. The boys probably wore them because their parents made them, whereas my friend and I never even owned bike helmets when we were kids. Conscientious parenting is definitely part of the equation. But statistically, it’s a small part.
The biggest factor in the long term decline in child mortality isn’t bike helmets or arm floaties in the swimming pool or suntan lotion or any of the other many precautions middle class parents take. It’s vaccinations against viral diseases and antibiotics to combat bacterial infections. And kudos to the parents who follow federal and state public health recommendations, getting their children fully vaccinated instead of helping spawn new epidemics of old diseases such as measles, RFK Jr be damned.
But many modern, middle class parents want to believe they nearly fully control and are responsible for their children’s health and safety. Yet that’s not even vaguely realistic. And once you get a handle on how the modern world works, the irrationality of modern over-parenting in the name of safety begins to boggle the mind a bit. While fretting over highly improbable or even phantom fears, most parents are constantly indulging arguably the most dangerous thing you can do to a child in today’s America: putting them in cars.
Of course car safety features are the best they’ve ever been, and most parents eagerly take advantage of them, employing seatbelts and car seats, as they should. But that doesn’t change the basic premise: cars are essentially death machines. Somewhere between 40,000–50,000 Americans die in car accidents every year. Well over a thousand of them are children. Another roughly 2,000,000 Americans are injured annually in cars, including over 150,000 children. In fact, cars are the leading cause of childhood death in the United States. Automobiles are so dangerous that they help explain the slight uptick in child mortality over the last fifteen years that came after a century of consistent decline.
Despite this, many parents stick their kids in a car upwards of several times a day with nary a care, but fret that some maniac is going to jump out of the bushes and steal their children if let out of their sight for a moment. The truth? In the United States, child theft is actually exceedingly rare and statistically insignificant compared to the threat of cars.
The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention estimates that only about 100 American children are abducted by strangers annually. That’s out of more than 73 million minors in America. And in fact, the vast majority of kids who go missing either run away on their own or get taken by a disgruntled family member, not a stranger with candy. Which is why The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children estimated that only 0.3% of all missing children cases in 2019 were abductions by strangers.
The point here is not to criticize modern middle class parents or make them feel bad. That would be hypocritical as I have no children of my own. But as someone who has been teaching college students for a quarter-century, it seems to me that the overprotective parenting style, along with other factors (eg. modern K-12 education, near constant attention to screens), have had a profound effect. Ask any long time college instructor. They will tell you. Things have changed.
Today’s 18–22 year olds are nowhere nearly as competent as their predecessors. Note: I did not write “smart.” Today’s students are plenty smart. But they are, on the whole, less competent. And they know it. Their ability to do for themselves has been crippled. Denied a childhood of self- and peer-directed discovery, problem solving, dispute resolution, and genuine play, many young adults no longer know how to make their way through the world in basic ways.
They’re well aware of this and it causes many of them great anxiety. It has also engenders many of them with very unrealistic expectations about what others will do for them. Because the parents and other adults in their lives constantly directed them in nearly all endeavors, they expect that direction to continue as they themselves become adults.
In the classroom, they now often require detailed instructions for every assignment. When I began teaching, I didn’t even bother giving them an assignment sheet, and they were fine with that. They knew what to do when I said “write a paper.” Now my assignment sheets often a double-sided, single spaced page, and some students still complain that it’s not enough direction.
Alas, it’s not just in college.
I know dozens of people in management positions in industries as varied as entertainment, software, and auto repair. Absolutely all of them, when I ask, complain about how their new, young workers can’t seem to figure out basic tasks by themselves, or even think it reasonable that they should, instead expecting their superiors to explain everything for them.
When I conducted an image search of the term “2 kids sharing a bike” the first spate of pictures that came were all images of kids sharing bikes . . . with a parent.
As I prepare to conclude my 26th year of teaching college students, many of my colleagues are most concerned about the impact of AI. And I too take that issue seriously. But truly, my larger concern is for what our society will look like in the sooner-than-you-think future as a new generation of fearful, insecure adults take the reigns.
Then again, I doubt it could be much worse that what their Trumper parents and grandparents are attempting to wreak.
This essay originally appeared at 3 Quarks Daily.