What is the actual origin of today's overprotective parents/society with respect to kids??

In My Humble Opinion
1

I don’t need to link to the stories of parents getting arrested for leaving their kids in the car or out in the yard for a little bit. That shit’s crazy.

But I’m curious why society got to be this way? I have a theory I’ll reveal below.

I was born in 1971. It’s universally observed that parents kinda didn’t give a shit about safety when we were growing up. But it’s an odd mix at the same time. We definitely grew up with PSAs on TV about “stranger danger,” and there were other ones about safety in the home and whatnot.

Moreover, it’s not as though people were unaware of danger. Every Halloween we got the “have parents check your candy” BS on TV. My family moved from Indy to Glenview, IL, in 1978, and John Wayne Gacy had just been caught for killing a bunch of young people. For that matter, four young employees of a Burger Chef were murdered in Indy in the same year IIRC. Nevertheless, here was my reality as a kid:

• My mom would regularly leave my sister and me in the car “for a few minutes” when running errands around town. I would never think of doing that with my 9-year-old now.

• We never wore seat belts until my dad almost died in a wreck in 1981 (he wasn’t wearing his and was thrown from the car). Of course we all wear seat belts now. I think this change can be ignored, since it really is due to greater knowledge of a genuine safety concern.

• I remember when the Twix bar was introduced in 1979. There was a coupon for a free one in the paper. I walked by myself (with my parents’ knowledge) as an 8-year-old through Glenview (a pretty urban suburb of Chicago) to the Dominick’s and claimed my Twix. I wouldn’t let my kid do that now, and I don’t think she’d be comfortable doing it, either. I thought nothing of it at the time.

• OK, this one is crazy. Halloween, 1979. A kid from school and I just kinda wandered all over Glenview, getting a mountain of candy. Two 8-year-olds totally unobserved, wandering around out late.

• For that matter, my sister and I walked to school in Glenview starting in 1979. It was probably about a 20-minute walk from our house.

• We moved to Crown Point, IN, in 1980, in a big sprawling neighborhood that was basically houses in the woods in the countryside. This led to a Tom Sawyer-ish existence, in which we would play in creeks and the woods, ride horses on the farmer’s neighboring property, build tree forts, crawl through culverts, um, play with fireworks and gunpowder, build fires, etc. You know, the classic “be home in time for dinner” followed by “come in after dark” level of supervision, which is to say, basically none.

I’ll also tell a friend’s story of pure negligence. He came from a family of seven kids, and his parents had them all tucked into a hotel room and then went out with other adult friends, leaving the kids to sleep by themselves!

So, society has clearly changed. I would never think of applying the above safety “standards” to my daughter, and I’m not some huge helicopter parent, either. I’m not particularly frightened of a stranger carrying her off–that’s pretty rare, all told. And yet… I do feel a duty to make sure she’s safe.

So what’s the reason for the change? Here’s my theory. We were raised Catholic. My parents really believed in it. And everyone I knew had a religion. And I think parents just really believed that God was looking after their kids. Things would be OK, since that’s how life is: things mostly turn out OK.

And I think that, on the whole, we’ve lost our faith in such God-granted safety. I’m a New Ager, and I even think we do receive a certain type of protection from various sources. But I don’t have that easygoing “Jesus won’t let anything bad happen” type of naivete that my parents and society in general seemed to have back then.

The funny thing is that parents of the time were right 99.9% of the time: they let us kids run wild, and mostly we survived. Even having lived through it myself and knowing that fact, nope, I wouldn’t give my daughter that level of freedom, and she doesn’t want it (nor do kids in general these days).

Those are my observations and speculations. Although I have that theory, it’s not something I’m particularly confident about. I eagerly await your own observations and thoughts!

2

I don’t agree that it’s religion, because my mom is of the ilk who believes “God gave you a brain for a reason!”

And yet, we were left in the car when mom did an errand (and wanted to be without the damn kids for a minute!), we rode around in the back of the station wagon totally unfettered. I was friends with the neighborhood kids of varying ages, and we also had Tom Sawyer-ish experiences. We’d take our bikes, some change, some sandwiches and chips, and just GO in the summer or on days off. And we certainly didn’t tell adults everything that happened (like the time we found a hobo – remember when there were hobos? – sleeping in our fort near the railroad).

When I was 8 or 9, my mom went back to school, so more than once I prepped dinner and even put it in the oven. I was a “latchkey kid”, too.

Now my closest female friend bemoans that she has no time for “extras” (like moisturizer, don’t ask) because she has an 8-year-old. What?

I think part of it is that people see monsters everywhere these days. When I was a kid, we had lovely neighbors next door and across the street, both retired couples. My instructions were, if anything bad happened, to go to one of their houses. These days, people would think those same neighbors were going to kill and eat their kids or something.

3

I think it’s a mistake to treat the 1970’s as the beginning of the process, and now as the end. The fact is, this is an incremental process that’s been going on for the best part of the century.

I went to a funeral of an older lady a couple of years ago, where one of the anecdotes told about her was how she was out with one of her similar-aged sisters walking around the neighborhood with their baby sister, and she got accidentally tipped out of her pram. The older sisters were something like 5 and 6. I don’t think that would have been condoned in my '70s childhood. Or Little House on the Prarie - not the most stellar example of parenting, but Ma and Pa were comfortable with leaving kids no older than about 6 at home in the back of beyond with a snowstorm coming on - I think that would have been a bit much for the seventies too.

My theory - in days gone by, especially pre-antibiotics, there were SO MANY things that could kill your kids that really, worrying about the tiny chance that they might be randomly murdered by a stranger was foolish. There was a hundred times bigger chance that they might get a fatal case of polio, scarlet fever, or the flu. That’s where people’s worrying energy goes.

Also, the less kids people see out and about doing their thing, the less normalized it is, and kids are exposed to a danger now that didn’t exist back in the 70’s, 60’s or 50’s - well-meaning strangers calling the cops on you because they saw your seven-year-old go down to the lolly shop by themself.

It is regional too. Where I live, it’s still moderately normal for pre-teens to take themselves off to school, though certainly the acceptable age has gone up. Eight, which is how old I was when I first started going to the bus stop by myself, would be right out. Ten-year-olds do though. Boatloads of eleven- and twelve-year-olds starting high school take themselves to school on the train. I suspect an excellent public transport system does a lot to stem the flow of infantilization.

4

I think the 24-hour news cycle has a lot to do with it.

When I was a kid, I think there was only a half-hour of national news, followed by a half-hour of local news. At the time the networks had lots of news and only 30 minutes to present it, so the rare kidnapping/attack of a kid somewhere just didn’t make the cut. If it didn’t happen in your city, you didn’t hear about it. Now the networks have huge swaths of time to fill and any kid-in-peril story gets screen time. This makes it appear kids are in danger far more than they are. And the population reacts over time by increasing its protective stance, and the “norms” are adjusted as well. My parents routinely left me and siblings in the car while shopping, sometimes for hours. The norms have moved so far this might bring an arrest today.

FTR: I was a kid in the 60’s.

5

Additionally, not only is it the mortality rate, but the birthrate as well.

People are WAY more invested in their one or two kids, than their five or ten a century ago. It’s hard to helicopter parent ten kids.

6

I was born in 1970 and I too blame the media. They just make day to day life look so scary. Crime and the boogyman is around every corner. I don’t expect the media to dig into statistics but every time they speak about a white kid being abducted, I wish they would show some perspective. The sensational story makes the news. Once a portion of society starts to change their child rearing tactics, then it becomes very scary to buck the trend because of the way it will look to your neighbors. I still ride my bike outside and for years I’ve noticed that there are simply no kids anywhere.

We used to be outside in the neighborhood until dark almost every night and my parents weren’t too concerned. Five on five baseball across the main street at the local community college. Hanging out at the library of that college. Fishing alone at the lake. I never recv’d any parental guidance like that at all. I’m not a parent, so I don’t know what the current concerns are but if I was, I would not be happy with my kid playing video games in the basement all summer.

7

I think the missing children on milk cartons fad had a lot to do with it. Although the milk cartons were the most talked about medium, they also plastered missing kids all over junk mail, unrented bill boards, community bulletin boards, and schools. I think youngsters must have grown up believing there was an epidemic of missing children (and many older people were frightened too) and raised their children accordingly.

And there was the tragic case of Adam Walsh, a child who disappeared in 1981. A popular movie called “Adam” in 1983 brought his case into the public consciousness. His father, John Walsh, then devoted his whole life to being a crusader for lost children. He got a hit weekly show on network TV that millions of people watched. He generated a lot of publicity lobbying Congress and state legislatures and he toured the country giving speeches about the up to 2 million children that go missing each year. Of course, everyone interpreted that as meaning 2 million children were abducted by strangers each year. That figure (if it was even true) include runaways, parental custody disputes, and misunderstandings between parents.

8

I’m the same generation Pullin. Yep. I really think this is it. Something happens to a kid anywhere and it’s in your face for the next 24 hours. My dad wanted to write a book about it. He only got as far as a title though - ‘More and More about Less and Less’.

9

Fear. Americans go through life terrified, and it manifests itself in many other ways.

10

Right. I think it was the same way before the 70s, probably more so.

11

I do think this is part of it, but there are factors that also go in the opposite direction:

• As I said, we definitely had the “stranger danger” messages when I was a kid, so that fear did exist already.

• I think the fact has also gotten out there that abductions by strangers are pretty rare. I’m not sure how much people are really afraid of this happening, and is that fear level really more than it was in 1977?

• A lot of the protectiveness of parents isn’t related to stranger danger, I think. I think there is just this greater overall feeling that you need to be watching your kids to make sure they don’t get hurt, etc.

I do think it’s a factor, however. But I’m not sure of the exact neural pathways by which it has come to influence behavior…

12

The car part is the only part that I think is based more on rational risk analysis and changing technology…cars in the 70s and 80s had lots of air flow, even when the windows were up. They didn’t heat up like today’s cars do. I’m not sure why they’ve changed the way the cars are made - whether it’s because of changed mandatory safety regulations or a change in materials used or a change in design fashion - but I used to sit in my mother’s car for, literally, hours, reading a book while she was shopping. Sometimes she’d “crack a window” for me, but not always. Of course, if she didn’t and I got hot, I could turn an actual crank and get some air - today, you can’t roll down a window unless you have the key and know how to use it and can get from the backseat into the front seat without knocking it into neutral and starting it rolling (did that as a kid, too. Oops.).

Today, I drive to people’s houses for a living, and sometimes I’m early, so I’ll sit in my car and check Facebook or the SDMB or finish up some paperwork. And I can’t sit comfortably in a closed car for more than 10 minutes, even when it’s only 70 degrees out. It gets so stuffy, so quickly, and then it gets hot. Even rolling down a window only helps a moderate amount unless there’s a stiff breeze.

It’s not just perception or fearmongering… it really is not safe to keep a person of any age in a closed car for more than a few minutes - and an unexpected line even at a gas station register can turn your planned 90 seconds into 10 minutes quite easily. And that’s because cars have changed, not because the world has.

13

The irony is that crime is historically low and kids are safer than they have ever been. I think one issue is the media focuses on bad news and crime which distorts people’s world view. Also for the people in charge, “Won’t somebody think of the children?” is an easy path to popularity whether or not the laws and rules are effective or make sense. some of that is just them being craven and some of that is it would make it easy for opponents to say, “Mayor Wilkerson actually voted against the “Protect Our Children Act!”” even if that act was stupid.

On top of all this, you also have the issue that there is no push back on the other side. Kids don’t seem to want the freedom. They don’t want to push the boundaries. They don’t want to go outside. There is so much more to do inside than there was when we grew up.

So when you have a force pushing from one side and no force pushing back you get momentum in the direction we see.

14

Also, there are a lot more dual-earning households, which creates some practical barriers to kids spending as much time outside. When kids are home, they’re often inside doing homework or busy being smothered by their parents because we seem to have some freakish competition over how well our kids do in school. When I was a kid in the 1970’s, I would’ve annoyed the bejeezus out of my mom had I stayed inside all day while she was home. So when I demonstrated a smidgeon of responsibility, I was given a choice: “Find something to do or I will give you something to do.” Most times that equated to, go hang out with your friends somewhere else. Nowadays, lots of moms work, leaving kids little time at home for that type of free activity.

You also get a combination of crap going on: working moms like me being encouraged by child-rearing books (did your parents read these? ever?) to constantly supervise their kids to encourage some sort of actualization that perversely can’t happen unless you back off a bit, make sure you get lots of quality time to compensate for the time spent away (clearly working moms are the downfall of society despite the fact that most of us have to), then when they get older, there’s this bizarre parental competition over how well their kids do in school that seems to require this over-assistance with homework (and there’s a ton more of that, too, starting in preschool) and tons of extracirriculars kids didn’t have that early.

15

I’m older than the OP. By the time he was born the process was well underway. He might have had some “free range kid” experiences, but it was already a minority experience then.

16

I’m a child of the 50s.

At ten (10!) I would saddle and bridle a horse and ride all over the farm, alone.

Even in the city, my friends and I would roam all over the neighborhood, without adult supervision.

I remember at 5, waking up in an empty house and calling the operator to ask where my mommy was, she said she saw my mother headed to the house. No calling the cops, no panic.

The world I grew up in no longer exists.

I have to say that the world I grew up in had half as many people. I think that makes a difference for childhood freedom.

17

When kids were working 12-hour days at textile factories and in the cotton fields, they were treated like miniature adults. Even in my parents’ day, lots of children were expected to pull their weight–especially farmer’s kids. Not to save up for a shiny red bicycle, but to support the household. You can’t baby someone while simultaneously benefiting from their labor.

So I think the concept of childhood fragility and innocence has received a lot of attention over the past few decades simply because we can better afford to treat children as fragile and innocent. And with psychology and social science, we’ve learned what happens when childhood fragility is not fully appreciated. You get adult dysfunction. We know now that adult dysfunction isn’t caused by demonic spirits or character defects. It’s oftentimes caused by childhood trauma. Smacking a kid around used to be seen as harmless. We don’t assume that kind of stuff is harmless anymore. And I think this is a good thing.

18

Fear, as already said. Because fearful people can be controlled, and more importantly, because fearful people will buy your safety-solution.

Everything else is details.

19

Like everything else, I think it’s a combination of things and one laps over another.

My first response would have to be drugs. When street drugs started “infiltrating white society” you never saw so many mommies suddenly snatching up their precious kids out of harm’s way. Around the time JFK was shot there was a rumor going around that drugs were being injected through the wrapper! left holes too tiny to see! in the candy being sold along with notebook paper and pencils at our little hole-in-the-wall “bookstore” (never saw a single book in there.) The next year our parents who knocked us around like ragdolls sent us to a different school to be safe.

Drugs make people do (not so ha-ha) funny things like steal your car, your bikes, and whatever they can find in your unlocked house already being bombarded at suppertime with a Mason-Dixon line that went vertical, …war, and a toilet paper shortage! on the TV news. Neighbors started changing friends depending on who and who didn’t support whatever they believed in. Sleepovers now involved furtive phone calls (on party lines no less rolleyes) so as to check on whether anyone involved was “not like us”…which could cover religion and politics as well as skin color and rumored drug use.

With so many people against each other there was no longer the united front that kept kids in line and responsible for their actions, so they did dumb things and didn’t get in trouble for it, and failed to learn things that would keep them safe if other people did dumb things… We changed from communities to gated communities that left people behind bars on both sides of the track. Hence play dates (no more wandering around) and people not knowing their own neighbors, since we avoid looking each other in the eye which could be perceived as confrontational.

So far, nothing has brought us all back together again. Maybe climate change will as we gather around life-preserving fires.

20

Right. I think the heat and “stranger danger” with respect to cars are two different things. The first is absolutely realistic, and your points are valid. I think most of the moral panic about leaving kids in the car is about the latter, however.