Washington Post writer Petula Dvorak kicked up a hornet’s nest with her recent column, “Why I let my children walk to the corner store — and why other parents should, too.”
Dvorak’s 7- and 10-year-old sons walked 495 feet in their Capitol Hill neighborhood, armed with nothing more than the family dog and a cellphone.
“Clutch your pearls, America,” she wrote.
Her sarcasm is not misplaced.
We all know about the Florida mom who was arrested for letting her 7-year-old walk alone to the park and the South Carolina mom who was jailed for letting her 9-year-old play alone at the park. A new survey finds 68 percent of Americans believe it should be illegal for children 9 and younger to play at parks unsupervised.
The hundreds of comments at the end of Dvorak’s column range in tone from “Spot on, sister” to “Arrest this woman.” We are a nation divided.
I applaud Dvorak for bravely allowing her boys their freedom and, even more bravely, writing about it. (“This author ought to be slapped silly” is one of the gentler online criticisms.)
But I take issue with the part where she tries to convince the rest of us to follow her lead.
She argues that the world is actually getting safer, noting that murders are down 36 percent for children 14 and younger and 60 percent for children ages 14 to 17, compared to 1993 statistics. And the vast majority of crimes against children are perpetrated by people they know.
“Only one-hundredth of 1 percent of missing children are abducted by strangers or even slight acquaintances, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children,” she writes.
“Yes, it is a different world,” she writes. “It’s a safer world.”
Here’s where she, and other voices who call for a lengthening of the proverbial leashes, lose me. First, how do we know those declining crime statistics aren’t a result of so many parents hanging around the playground with their kids? Maybe our paranoid helicoptering has, in part, ushered in this “safer world.” Maybe.
Beyond that, I don’t think you can take an endeavor as all-consuming and soul-searching and life-altering as parenting and tell people how to do it based on statistics.
Parenting is a matter of the heart far more than the mind. We use charts and percentiles to measure their growth and their achievements. But we use our instincts for the life-and-death stuff. We make those calls based on the trials and triumphs of our own childhoods, the accumulated tragedies of our adulthoods and, most important, the readiness of our own singular children, whose spirits and needs and abilities are theirs and theirs alone.
“The demands on parents — moms in particular, if you notice the arrest stories — are greater than ever to hover and supervise 24/7,” Dvorak writes. “That kind of parenting hurts everyone.”
So does assuming everyone should do it your way.
Twitter @heidistevens13
