by Kim Brooks
The officer, very tall and handsome, furrowed his brow. He was holding a chocolate chip cookie in one hand, a dollar in the other. “Does he have a license for this business?”
I stood without speaking.
Then he smiled, took a bite of cookie. “You two have a good day.”
* * *
Fear is a feeling, but it takes up space. We invent it, and it becomes an artifact of our penchant for telling stories about the future, stories that help us order a chaotic and unpredictable world. Because we inhabit the world with other people, fears do not exist in a bubble. Often, they are communal, passed along airwaves and the internet and overheard in bits of conversation. But do we choose our fears, or are we as individuals less implicated than that; are we mere particles of dust, moved this way and that way by currents of anxiety?
I have to believe that parents have always worried about their children—sociologists and anthropologists and historians write about the many and varied manifestations of this worry. To feel and express and act upon concern for one’s offspring seems as integral a part of what it means to be human as to live in groups or to look for food and shelter. I find it easier to imagine being a mollusk at the bottom of the ocean, waiting for nourishment to fall into my shell, than to imagine what life would be like as a species that does not concern itself with the well-being of its young. And yet, the objects of our worry, the unique frequency and pitch and intensity of our fears, vary across time and culture as much as the food we eat or the clothes we wear. Focusing on the history of parents in America gives a glimpse of the scope of parental anxiety. And one doesn’t have to look hard or long to see that parental fears do not always correspond to the most apparent and pressing dangers children face.
Over the course of a few hundred years, American children have been exposed to the stresses of child labor, neglect, malnutrition, deadly communicable diseases, indentured servitude, and slavery. In New England’s healthiest communities in the seventeenth century, around 10 percent of children died during their first year of life, and three of every nine children died before reaching their twenty-first birthdays. Puritan children regularly perished by smallpox, measles, mumps, diphtheria, scarlet fever, and whooping cough. Yet many child-rearing tracts written during that time show their parents to be more preoccupied with the perils of moral corruption, schooling, and spiritual well-being, than with physical health. Older children regularly suffered burns from candles or open hearths. They fell into rivers and wells, ingested poisons, broke bones, swallowed pins, and stuffed nutshells up their noses (that last one they still do). And yet Puritan parents did not ruminate on such dangers or babyproof their homes. They worried instead about the sinfulness of play and children’s lack of internal restraints. They worried that allowing small children to crawl would indulge their animal nature, and they dressed their children in clothing to restrict such movement. They worried about instilling in children an awareness of sin and divine judgment more than about protecting or sheltering them from the horrors of death, violence, and disease.
Puritan parents’ fearfulness about their children’s spiritual well-being led them to child-rearing so restrictive and so punishing that often children stolen during battles with Native American tribes, once inculcated into that freer, more indulgent style of rearing, would run into the bosom of their captors when rescue was attempted. Apparently, life among the “savages” was preferable to the fear and shame that characterized the upbringing of the average colonial child.
In the centuries that followed, American children saw little improvement in their quality of life. During the Civil War, children near the battlefront regularly witnessed the destruction of towns and villages, exploding shells, burning cities, mangled corpses, and stacks of human limbs. By the end of the nineteenth century, 20–30 percent of children lost a parent by the age of fifteen, and in the first decades of the twentieth century, more than 100,000 children resided in 1,200 orphanages throughout the United States. And yet, amid this cornucopia of childhood terror, terrors from which a modern, middle-class parent’s sensibility recoils, child-rearing manuals and parents’ writings from these times suggest that parents often turned their anxious gaze elsewhere, toward dangers that seem to us far less pressing. They worried over the development of psychological traits such as shyness, timidity, and bravado. They worried about how the comforts of urban life might render boys soft and effeminate. As American families experienced the most rapid period of social and technological change in the history of human civilization, parental anxiety attached not onto the profound effects these transformations were having on children and family life, but on issues such as posture, hygiene, neurasthenia, masturbation, sleeping arrangements of children, sibling rivalry, the corrupting effects of radio, the popularity of comic books, the depiction of violence in television and film, the threat of kidnapping, the problems of juvenile delinquency, ritual sadism, boredom, poor self-esteem, crib death, and bullying.
With each of these parental fixations, the object of fear correlates less to the level of risk than to parents’ ability (or perceived ability) to exert control over the outcome. If you are a Puritan parent, why fret over the very significant possibility that your children will perish by contagion when you lack any knowledge or medicine to manage this risk? Better to worry about moral corruption and spiritual goodness, outcomes one might hope to influence—it’s the college admissions thing with the hereafter in place of Stanford. Likewise, today’s parents and parenting experts tend not to focus on many of the very daunting problems facing our children when those problems are beyond the scope of an individual’s influence.
Every day it seems there is less we can control about our kids’ future. The schools are failing, the middle class is vanishing, superbugs grow stronger, and health care is more expensive. The political landscape is unstable. The seasons are slipping, and we might not recognize the climate of the planet our kids will inherit. College education floats further out of reach. Guns are everywhere. People are often angry, suspicious, and judgmental. Americans turn on each other and search for scapegoats to punish and blame. Our food makes us fat and sick. As William Deresiewicz writes in Excellent Sheep, “Families are scared, and for good reason. Social mobility has stalled. The global playing field is getting ever more competitive.… The future since 2008, has looked more daunting, especially for young people, than at any other time in memory.” And yet, it feels as though nothing I do as an individual is going to have much of an impact on increasing class stratification or the melting ice caps or the rise of right-wing populism. Sure, I can donate and agitate, drive less, organize, and vote my conscience, but is this really going to make a difference? So much of what happens in the world falls beyond our narrow sphere of influence, and so our grip tightens on what we think we can control, on everything within reach. If one sees fear in this context, not as a passive state but as a thing we produce, a thing we do to soothe our feelings of helplessness in a largely indifferent world, the child-rearing style that Frank Furedi calls “paranoid parenting” begins to make sense.
* * *
My father told me a story once about a nightmare he had when I was small. He dreamed he was back in upstate New York, where he grew up, and he was driving in a snowstorm along a deserted highway, I a baby asleep in the back of the car. He pulled onto the shoulder to check on a tire. A minute later, when he tried to get back into the car, he realized he’d locked himself out and that I was trapped inside in my car seat. It was freezing. The snow swirled down around him in wild eddies. He banged on the window, trying to break it. He screamed for help, but there was no one near, no one to help, only empty fields and darkness.
In “Fatal Distraction,” Gene Weingarten describes how one father whose infant perished in his office’s parking lot as he went about his work relives the horror again and again in dreams. In reality, he could see his car that morning as he walked between office buildings only as a blinding glare of sun on chrome. In his dreams, he is
walking back and forth past the car and can see his child inside. He reassures the child that he’ll be right back. He’s coming back.
These nightmares speak to something deep inside us, our darkest fear as parents: the fear of failure, the fear that we can’t protect our children, or ourselves. But maybe this fear goes deeper than parents and children. Maybe it is what makes us suffer most as humans. Knowledge without power, foreseeing things we can’t forestall. We now live in a moment where it is infinitely easier to know than it is to do. We are living in an age of fear.
When I was a child, I believed that a wolf lived in the back of my closet, up near the black plastic bags of old clothes. The wolf was going to eat me, though I begged him not to. He could not be reasoned with. He could not be appeased. The wolf was clever and well-spoken, and one day, amused by my pleading, he told me that if I counted to fifty before I fell asleep every night, he would stay in the closet; he would not come out. I still remember how I lay in bed, tight beneath the covers, counting slowly in my head. It made no sense, but I believed it. I knew that if I counted, I’d be safe. One, two, three, four, I counted every night, all the way to fifty. I never doubted or wavered in my counting. I wanted to be safe.
4
NEGATIVE FEEDBACK
The lawyer my father-in-law put me in touch with said that all there was to do was wait. He had explained my “lapse in judgment” to the detective in Virginia and I was supposed to sit tight, wait for him to contact me and tell me if they planned on formally pressing charges or if they had decided to drop the case. But waiting is harder than it sounds. Late at night, after Pete and the kids were asleep, I’d go downstairs, sit at the dining room table, and open the browser on my computer, always looking for some information, some clue that would help me solve this puzzle. Leaving children in cars, I Googled. Letting children wait in cars? How long can a child wait in a car? Laws about children and cars? Mothers arrested for leaving kids in cars. Is it a crime to let a kid wait a car? I read of parents, usually women, arrested for letting a child wait in a car outside a coffee shop, a convenience store, a post office, or a Rite Aid. Sometimes they left babies or toddlers, sometimes older children, but almost always for a few minutes, a single errand. They ran in to get one thing, to drop off a letter, to grab a coffee, to pick up a shirt. They left children playing with an iPad, or reading, or studying their spelling words, sometimes with an older sibling in the car, and they came out to see a police car, an angry bystander, an officer holding up his badge. But the stories got even stranger. I read of parents arrested for letting children play alone in a park, or for allowing them to walk to a neighbor’s house or to soccer practice down the street, or for letting an older child babysit a younger one while a parent walked the dog. I read these stories and didn’t know what I was reading, if they were real or make-believe. I read late into the night, and as I read, my obsession grew. I felt myself falling into something, trying to orient myself, to figure out where I was and how and why this was happening.
There was a part of it that didn’t make sense. The moral panics surrounding children had peaked in the late eighties and early nineties. If policies and public sentiment about dangers to children were tied to these panics, then the laws regulating child supervision should have leveled off or even decreased over the past twenty years. Instead, it seemed, they’d escalated. Surveys suggested that children of each decade were afforded fewer freedoms than the one before, that the age in which parents allowed children unsupervised time continued to rise. The panics came and went, but the anxiety lingered, and there was no clear reason. At dinner one evening, another mother and I were discussing our children, the question of how much freedom to give our children came up, and she said that even though her kids were teenagers now, she still couldn’t bring herself to let them out of her sight in a store. She knew it was irrational. She knew it made no sense, and yet still, something stopped her. She couldn’t explain it.
“Is it superstition?” I asked her.
“Not exactly,” she said.
“Are you afraid someone will hurt them?” I asked.
She lifted her fork, paused for a moment, seemed to be considering. “No,” she said. “Well … I don’t know. I guess it’s other people. I worry that if I let them out of my sight, other people will see us and think I’m doing something wrong. I feel like it doesn’t matter what I think; that if other people think I’m doing something dangerous, then it’s dangerous. I suppose I can’t quite tell where my own anxieties end and other people’s begin. I don’t know if I’m afraid for my kids, or if I’m afraid other people will be afraid and will judge me for my lack of fear.”
It took me a moment to understand what she was suggesting—that for her, risk assessment and fear of moral judgment are intertwined. I didn’t know it at the time, but it turns out that she is not alone. According to a 2016 study by a team of social scientists at the University of California–Irvine, fear and judgment go hand in hand.
* * *
Barbara W. Sarnecka is a cognitive scientist and a professor of logic and philosophy of science at the University of California–Irvine. She has spent much of her career studying the way young children learn and the development of numerical cognition. Sarnecka is a researcher, a teacher, and an author, but she’s also a mom, and like most other moms, she loves her children and strives to listen to and treat them like people worthy of consideration and respect. And so when Sarnecka’s son came to her at the beginning of the third grade and told her that he hated being in the school’s after-care program, that it was boring and not at all fun; that after a long day at school, he didn’t want to spend another two hours sitting in a classroom but wanted to be outside to see his friends and play, she listened. She paid attention and tried to make a change.
Her son was enrolled in the third grade of an elementary school in a quiet neighborhood, and each afternoon at 2:30 the school would dismiss its students to their parents, and when the weather was pleasant (not so uncommon in Orange County), many of the parents would take their children to play in an adjacent park. An assistant professor at the time, Sarnecka had a schedule that was full but flexible, so she made some space in her afternoons and withdrew her son from the school’s after-care program. Each day, she would pick him up with the other parents, walk him to the park, then sit on a bench and watch him play for an hour before taking him home. She continued to do this for a number of weeks, rushing to finish her work and arrive at the school in time for dismissal. Then one day, struggling to get through everything in her office, she began to wonder why she was hurrying; she saw how absurd it was. The park was literally next to the school. There was no street to cross, only a grassy field. Normally there were dozens of kids there, always adults within calling distance. Wasn’t it a bit ridiculous for Sarnecka to leave work early to walk her son across a small field and watch him play with other children? She might not have afternoon classes, but she certainly had plenty of work to do. She decided to try something new. She told her son that after school he should simply walk to the park with his friends and play there for forty-five minutes. She’d pick him up at 3:15.
For around a month, that was what he did. Then one evening, Sarnecka’s husband received an email from another parent who was concerned. The mom had seen their son playing at the park, and at one point he had been throwing pinecones with a couple of other boys. The parent asked Sarnecka’s husband if he was aware that his wife was leaving their son unsupervised after school. When she heard about the email, Sarnecka was astounded. “It was like she was tattling on me or ratting me out to my husband.”
A few days later, Sarnecka herself received a call from the school principal, who asked Sarnecka if she realized that the school did not provide childcare in the park after hours. Sarnecka said yes, she understood, but that in her view, her son was responsible and capable enough to have an hour of unsupervised play with other children in a safe, public space. The principal disagreed, and after a brief back-and-forth, Sarneck
a relented. She still thought it was ridiculous. She still believed that she wasn’t putting her son in any real danger by allowing him a tiny bit of freedom, but she also recognized that there’s a social cost to conflict within a tight-knit community, that this was her son’s principal and that this was his school. And so she let it go, doing her best to put it out of mind.
The story might have ended there, but in the years that followed, as Sarnecka came across more stories like mine, she kept recalling her son’s time in the park, turning it around in her mind, feeling exasperated and confused, but also curious. She was still thinking about it when her son turned fourteen and began driver’s ed: “It seemed amazing,” Sarnecka told me, “that not one person said, ‘Are you crazy? You’re letting him drive? Do you know what the accident rate for sixteen-year-old drivers is?’ I thought, He’s in much greater danger driving a car at sixteen than he was playing in a park at nine, in the middle of the day, next to his school, in the safest big city in America.” That was when it occurred to her that maybe what had happened, and what was happening around the country, stemmed not from fear or risk, but from something else.
Sarnecka teamed up with two colleagues at Irvine, Ashley Jo Thomas, a PhD student in the Department of Cognitive Sciences, and P. Kyle Stanford, a professor and chair in the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science. In a group of experiments, the researchers presented subjects with a series of vignettes in which a parent left a child unattended for a period of time, and participants indicated their estimation of risk of harm to the child during that period. For example, in one vignette, a ten-month-old was left alone for fifteen minutes, asleep in the car in a cool, underground parking garage. In another vignette, an eight-year-old was left for forty-five minutes at a Starbucks, one block away from her mother’s location.
