A Nation Of Busybodies?
Posted by Rebecca Teti in Family on Thursday, September 25, 2008 7:00 AM
Case 1. Go read this post and come back ready to say what you think.
The gist of it is a woman calling the police because a neighbor allows her kids to climb a tree. Telling the kids to get down while it appeared no one was watching them I can understand and even admire. Calling the cops after you know the mother approves?
Persnickety neighbors we have always with us. My husband often refers to an elderly neighbor from his childhood who routinely called the cops on him and his friends. Their infraction? Roller skating. The noise irritated her. About once a week the cops would come and just wave the boys down the street a little bit.
So I’m open to the possibility that the Case of the Felonious Tree Climbers is one of those isolated incidents that gives us an opportunity to exercise our charity towards the grouches among us. Especially since the cops seemed to side with the mother.
But I’m also concerned about what I perceive as a growing public attitude that parents aren’t to be trusted.
Case 2. One of our local advice columnists recently ran a series of columns with suggestions for how to intervene if you see a mom yelling at her kids in a grocery store (a perennial topic of advice columnists). There ensued a flood of responses. Half were awful stories from adults abused as children who wished someone had intervened. The other half of the letters were full of thoroughly self-righteous speculation about mothers out of control and thoroughly self-congratulatory tales of how they’d intervened. Not one person objected to the premise.
We’ve all seen parents out of control in grocery stores and know how uncomfortable that is to witness. Nevertheless, the advice to be ever poised to come between a mother and her kids strikes me as utterly pernicious. You. Are. A Stranger! Not only do you have no idea whatsoever the context of the situation or the personalities involved, but more importantly, the last thing any young child needs in this day and age is the message that his parent may not know what is best for him, while refuge is to be found in strangers.
Case 3. Our middle son is sweet-natured, a good student, great at sports and easy to get along with. We call him “Low-Maintenance Joe.” He is also happy-go-lucky and absent-minded. He’s often lost in some world of his imagination and it can take a lot to get him to focus. I still get a panicky feeling in my gut recalling the day when he was three and let go of my hand in a crowded parking lot. He darted right in front of an oncoming car which came so close to hitting him I can only thank his guardian angel he’s still with us.
When I caught him, every bone in my body wanted to hug him and shower him with kisses and weep, I was so grateful he was alive. He, however, hadn’t the slightest notion of ever having been in danger. So duty had to overcome instinct. I deposited the other kids safely in the car, then gave this kid one swift, firm swat (a thing he’d never before experienced) to the behind and a loud talking to. I was not out of control; I was acting. I acted angry while feeling weak. I made a parental judgment about how to teach him that his safety depends on sticking close to me in public situations.
In fact, since my children outnumber my hands, our ability to go anywhere or do anything in public depends on my kids’ obedience to me. Right-away, voice command obedience. Not begging, pleading, chasing after them obedience. Joe has never run away like that again (and he’s about to turn 8). My lesson worked. Suppose some stranger had come up and “saved” him from his abusive mom and dressed me down—or called Child Protective Services on me? What then would have been the lesson learned?
You see my point? You may disapprove the swat. You may disapprove my having raised my voice. You may disapprove any number of things about the decisions I make as a parent. That it is your right and I respect it, but with my children it is my call. The woman who didn’t like kids climbing trees may have been right. Maybe the tree was too tall and the kids were too little. But it was not her place to second-guess the parent.
I am not saying there is never a cause to intervene. If I had a neighbor with small children and I could hear them being hit and yelled at every night and saw them bruised and withdrawn every day, of course I’d call the authorities. If we see unsupervised little ones in danger, we should try to protect them (generally by locating their parents).
But this idea—apparently widely accepted—that complete strangers can size up what is going on based on a single incident in one moment of time? I fear our concern for kids’ safety is creating a culture in which the default assumption is that all parents are neglectful, clueless and abusive, if not downright stupid. In fact such cases are still—thankfully—rare, and our presumption should be on behalf of parents.
Print Blog
Email a FriendPost a Comment
By submitting this form, you give Faith And Family Magazine permission to publish this comment. Comments will be published at our discretion, and may be edited for clarity and length. For best formatting, please limit your response to one paragraph and don't hit "enter" to force line breaks.
