"Stranger Danger" and the decline of free childhood.

We've brainwashed generations of kids to be petrified of the world. Great job everyone!

Prospect Park in Brooklyn is majestic. There’s a giant lake, where swans and ducks placidly drift by. There’s a dog beach, where mongrels splash in the water and shake themselves dry in the sun. There are 30,000 trees, more than 175 species. The ancient, gnarly ones look like they’re about to dispense wisdom in a fairy tale.

Park Slope is also famously full of children. If Tucker Carlson is worried about the “Great Replacement,” of whites by over-breeding foreigners, he should come here and see how many fucking kids white people are having. Armies of strollers parade around like tanks.

But you never see kids playing in the trees. Once, on a run, I saw a little girl in a tree and it was so odd I commented, “Cool, great job, you never see kids climbing trees!!” Her dad was on the very next branch in case she fell.

The “helicopter parent” discourse has turned from a cottage industry to a real industry like auto-manufacturing, with an assembly line of story after story after story fretting that US kids are overprotected and micromanaged. The intentions are noble: it’s to guarantee their safety and bolster future success. But the downside is that overprotected kids are growing up into anxious, depressed adults, terrified of a world they’d been cosseted from growing up.

The latest iteration, in The Atlantic, asks if it’s even possible, in our current climate, to just leave kids alone to be kids. “The Gravitational Pull of Supervising Kids All the Time.” When so many people think hovering is what good parents do, how do you stop?” asks Stephanie H. Murray.

Compared with children of generations past, modern American kids tend to live under a high degree of surveillance. That’s not to say they have no autonomy. If anything, children today have more say over what they eat and wear than kids have had through much of history—just very few opportunities for “some degree of risk and personal responsibility away from adults,” as a trio of researchers recently put it.

Murray deftly lays out the underlying reasons parents deprive their kids of freedom and independence. A shaky economy puts pressure on them to place their kids in planned activities that might look good on a college (or a pre-school, in New York) application. In US cities and suburbs, cars pose a real danger—most parts of the US are barely walkable, so where would kids go play alone? Frayed (or nonexistent) community ties make people—men especially—too paranoid to interact with someone else’s kid, so it all falls to the parents, rather than the proverbial village.

She points out that even if parents want to raise so-called “free-range” kids, the social opprobrium is too great. And that’s not to mention the criminal penalties of perceived “neglect.”

Murray cites a woman who let her 5-year-old son walk just a block or so alone. He’d demanded it and the distance was the length of four houses. Plus, she trailed him from the other side. When she got to the end of the brief walk he wasn’t there. Parental Good Samaritans had “rescued” him:

“Is this your little boy?” the woman asked as Rollins hurried over. “He was out by himself.” Rollins tried to explain—the boy’s request, the plan, independence—to little avail. “Merry Christmas,” the woman said icily as she handed the boy back. To Rollins, it sounded more like You’re welcome that I rescued your child from your negligent parenting.

For the purposes of this blog, I’d like to add the brain-rotting power of crime coverage.

“If it bleeds it leads,” has been the defining feature of US media since, I don’t know, Edward Murrow hung up his hat. There are many harms that come with rabid crime obsession, chief among them the stigmatization of homeless people and people of color. But another casualty is, well, a free childhood of the kind I—being fully aware of the irony—had in 1980s Communist Bulgaria.

See, an “upside” to totalitarian societies is that the media’s job is to tell the public everything is going great, not that their kids might be abused by Satanists, as American parents were told in the 1980s. Bulgarian adults worried a lot: About the regime, about saying the wrong thing to the wrong person, about surveillance, about being seen in Church—but as far as I can recall, no one was petrified of “Stranger Danger,” the idea that a stranger with ill intent would steal or abuse your child.

And so I had a stereotypical Eastern European childhood, the kind where parents might ask the kids to fetch them cigarettes and then send them off to play outside until it was time to eat or go to bed. My best friend and I hung out, by ourselves, in the playground, wandered around the city, went sledding. We threw rocks at a neighbor working in his basement. One day he’d had enough, and ran out chasing us, screaming “I’ll get you little girl!”

In the summers I was shipped off to the small town of Kostinbrod to stay with my great-grandmother and great-aunt. There, my friends and I lived in trees, picking fruit and throwing them at each other, with few to no adults around. Once when my Dad saw me teetering on the tallest branches he said, “Be careful” through gritted teeth, but then just went back into the house. My friends and I started a fire in a neighbor’s cornfield (not a big one!) and he chased us all the way back home. Ears were boxed.

So it’s not like adults never watched us—Eastern European parents are very neurotic— but the idea that a grown-up would spend their whole day, every day, with a six-year-old just didn’t make sense, for the adult or 6-year-old.

When my friend and I started first grade, we had a presentation in class about street safety, and from then on, we walked to school by ourselves. Our parents worked, but I had retired grandparents. Still, it didn’t even occur to anyone that 7-year-olds couldn’t walk to school without familial supervision (The Atlantic article notes that the norm is now for kids in the US to be escorted to school until the age of 12).

This is a crime blog, not a parenting blog (wtf do I know?), so bear with me.

When we came to the US in 1990 my “free range,” (aka normal) childhood came to an abrupt end. We moved in with another set of grandparents, who’d immigrated to the U.S. in the 1970s. They watched the nightly news religiously . Therefor, like many Americans, they thought that if you left a child unattended, a pedophile would snatch them away or they’d suffer any other number of dark fates. In the previous decade, actual adults had believed in Satanic ritual/pedophile rings in daycares, thanks to the idiotic media (come to think of it it’s a bit reminiscent of the drag queen “groomer” obsession). You had the missing child pictures on milk. The idea that life in America is so dangerous to children they can’t do anything alone was all-pervasive.

“When can I go out alone?” I’d whine. “When you’re 20,” my grandparents would respond.

Anyway, it sucked. Instead of roaming the streets with my friends, I spent my time with 70-year-olds watching Soap operas (though a solid way to learn English) and learning to crochet (seriously). Plus, no one was ever on the streets anyway in their California suburb, everyone being encased in air-conditioned cars.

At least they had a giant oak tree I could climb.

Now it’s arguably worse, with a whole new crime panic sweeping the nation, a backlash to the brief moment, post-George Floyd’s death, when America actually considered sane crime policy. How can a parent send their kids on the subway when every tabloid rag, and the Mayor of New York, are panicking about subway crime?