Why Are We So Overprotective of Our Kids? Is it Because They Cost So Damn Much?

The latest quarterly installment of the
Reason-Rupe Poll (whole
thing here) underscores just how overprotective Americans have
become toward children.
In a column for Time, I summarize the findings:

[The poll] documents the ridiculous level of kid-coddling that
has now become the new normal. More than two-thirds of us think
there ought to be a law that kids as old as 9 should supervised
while playing at a public park, which helps
explain (though not justify) the arrest of a South
Carolina mother who let her phone-enabled daughter play in a busy
park while she worked at a nearby McDonald’s. We think on average
that kids should be 10 years old before they “are allowed to play
in the front yard unsupervised.” Unless you live on a traffic
island or a war zone, that’s just nuts.

It gets worse: We think that our precious bundles of joy should
be 12 before they can wait alone in a car for five minutes on a
cool day or walk to school without an adult, and that they should
be 13 before they can be trusted to stay home alone. You’d think
that kids raised on Baby Einstein DVDs should be
a little more advanced than that.

The oddest thing is that our attitudes seem to be getting worse
the safer kids are getting. Read the whole column for info on
trends that show children are flourishing and actually less exposed
to violence than ever. So why are ever-more-convinced than our
young’uns cannot possibly survive on their own for even five
minutes?

There are surely many causes for the mainstreaming of helicopter
parenting. Kids cost a hell of a lot to raise. The U.S. Department
of Agriculture figures a child born in 2013 will set back
middle-income parents about
$245,000 until age 17 (and that’s before college bills
kick in). We’re having fewer children, so we’re putting fewer eggs
in a smaller basket, so to speak. According to the Reason-Rupe
poll, only 27% of adults thought the media were overestimating
threats to the day-to-day safety of children, suggesting that 73%
of us are suckers for sensationalistic news coverage that distorts
reality (62% of
us erroneously think that today’s youth face greater dangers than
previous generations). More kids are in institutional
settings—whether preschool or school itself—at earlier ages, so
maybe parents just assume someone will always be on call.

Read
the whole thing here.

Way back in 1997 (!), I wrote “Child-Proofing
the World: By every measure, children are doing better
than ever. Why all the anxiety? And where will it
end?“

The short answer to where it will end is, apparently, nowhere
and never.

Make sure to read Lenore Skenazy’s
Reason contributions, which detail with humor, brio,
and anger the insanity that has taken over American discourse
regarding child-rearing. And check out her great site, Free-Range Kids, too, which
should be required reading for every parent, would-be parent, and
educator.