“We Live in an Age of Irrational Parenting”
“Bluntly put: It’s hard to think of a safer time and a better place than the United States of 2015 to raise children — but we act as though the opposite were true… National crime rates have been falling since the early ‘90s. It’s something we adults, unlike kids, have been taking full advantage of for years, walking unaccompanied late at night in places our own parents would never have dared to tread…
I think what really underlies this generation’s fears has to do with a much greater force than tabloid journalism or government transparency or even Bureau of Labor Statistics. Rather, it’s the principle of economic scarcity. We’ve deferred having children for so long — college-educated woman today have their first child at 30.3 years old — and we have so many fewer children than we once did (an average of two per family, as opposed to five in 1850) that we assign them a far higher value and therefore fret far more about their physical well-being…
Back in the 1980s, the psychologist Jerome Kagan presciently noticed that something was happening to American parents: Absent having any other conspicuous way to prove moral worth — by taking care of their own parents, say, or heading up local civic organizations — we instead try to show our virtue through parenting.”
I was talking about this with some other people raised in the Bay in the 90s/2000s, and all the things our parents absurdly wouldn’t let us do or the check-ins after 5 minute drives to school, and how kids today are under-socialized. I also suspect that kids who grow up with not just helicopter parents but a general helicopter culture are more likely to experience the world as a place full of potential dangers.
