Get Along Husband (Not really in jail.)
How old do you think a child should be before he stays home alone for several hours straight? Waits in a car alone? Goes into the mall unsupervised? Babysits a sibling? Carries a pocket knife? Plays in the front yard unsupervised?
Now, how about your own child? Is he more or less mature than kids his age? Perhaps your 12 year old is quite ready to babysit your 4 year old, but your 15 year old can’t even be trusted to feed the dog every day. Who is in a position to make these decisions?
Chances are, if you’re raising your children the way you, yourself were raised, some busybody who disagrees with your methods could call the authorities and make your life miserable. This paper by law professor David Pimentel is an interesting read for any parent who ever turned the car seat to face forward before her child was two (say, because he was puking all over himself because of motion sickness and getting neck cramps from constantly trying to face forward) or let her grade-school children play in the front yard alone. I suggest you read the whole thing, not only because it’s interesting, but because I believe it has particular relevance to the homeschooling community.
Fear of having legal action taken against them because of perfectly reasonable practices often keeps parents from making otherwise rational decisions concerning their offspring. The pressure to conform to the overprotective parenting culture causes parents to go out of their way to remove their children from the path of risks that don’t even exist, while exposing them to more likely risks that are deemed socially acceptable, and so are unlikely to draw legal attention.
How did we get here? How did we get to the point where having your own children climbing your own trees in your own yard in the middle of the day is good enough reason for the police to show up at your door? Or where a group of children can’t be left in a safe place without their mother being charged with criminal neglect? There was a time when people in communities talked to each other about these things instead of raising the threat of jail time (actual jail time!) over cases of perceived lapsed judgment.
The answer, of course, is that community has been replaced with institutions. We trust strangers with badges and credentials more than we trust the children’s own parents because we seek the surety of set rules in the absence of the cohesion communities used to have. We don’t trust or even know each other well enough to knock on doors and make sure everything is alright when we see a child with a broken arm. It’s only natural (deplorable, but natural) that government agencies should have to take over those functions that communities used to handle for themselves.
But, as the paper makes clear, laws governing child welfare are so vague that even good parents can end up on the wrong side of the law, just for being different.
Having removed social censure as a means of setting standards of care and behavior, our society has professionalized both caregiving and busybodying in the form of family courts and social services. We don’t, after all, want to dirty our hands with the child next door, whose mother needs some tough words spoken to her about buying cigarettes while her child needs shoes, so we’ve erected social service agencies to come in and do the job for us. We’ve replaced community and common social standards with vague laws designed to make it possible for officials of the state to arbitrarily decide what is or isn’t within the bounds of “good parenting”, and in the process violated the rights of many, many innocent families.
The definition of criminal conduct has been expanded to include basically anybody who doesn’t adhere to whatever the current popular standard of parenting is, regardless of actual risk or harm to the child involved. We’ve reached the point where family decisions are made based, not on what families believe to be in the best interests of their children, but on how likely it is that people who don’t even know them will hassle them with expensive and stressful legal threats.
Homeschoolers, especially, tend to be overly cautious about what the neighbors and passersby might think. And rightly so, in my opinion. Homeschool culture (both Christian and secular) has a largely Free Range Parenting model. We’ve rejected the culture’s assumptions about childrearing, and—as Prof. Pimentel makes clear in his paper—the legal regime isn’t set up to deal with these cultural differences.
Should I keep my kids indoors even when their work is finished, just because a neighbor might misunderstand the situation and call social services? Should I avoid shopping on school days? Should I find a church where the majority are homeschoolers so my kids don’t experience unfair scrutiny in Sunday School? Should I refrain from corporal punishment because popping an unruly child on the rear with the flat of my hand might invite a social services visit? I’ve struggled with these questions myself.
In the end, the answer to these questions is always “no”. I won’t change what I judge to be good decisions just because some neighbor with social services on speed dial disagrees with me. As long as I am well inside the law (and I am), I won’t tailor my parenting to legal pressures. I send my children outside to play during “school” hours, in the mud, even when it’s kind of chilly outside, and largely unsupervised (the ones who can be trusted, anyway), because I judge inactivity and obesity to be a greater risk than “stranger danger”. I shop on regular school days because that’s what fits my family’s schedule. I don’t attempt to associate only with homeschoolers out of fear of my children being judged by standards not our own. And the consequences for misbehavior remain the same no matter how many cameras Wal-Mart might have trained on me. (Hit that link. Amy’s a hoot.)
I do understand the temptation to hide away our differences to keep from getting that dreadful knock at the door, but I refuse to live my life worrying about it. The chance of actually having to deal with legal harassment (which is what many of these cases amount to) is, for me, not compelling enough to stop me from doing what is right for my kids.
And now, you, readers: Do you change your parenting choices based on who is watching? Do you think you may have done so without even realizing it? I know I have!
Overparenting to Avoid Prosecution? is a post from: Get Along Home