Children need risk — it’s not abuse

A news story this week brought back a memory of my early boyhood. I was 7 years old when my father woke me one morning and told me I’d be joining him when he left for work.As we got into the car, he said I should keep an eye out for landmarks along the way. We drove through our village to about a mile out the other side, then my father stopped the car and asked if I could remember the way home. When I answered yes, he said he wanted me to walk back.The shuttlecock journey seemed pointless to me, but I was untroubled. My father told me I hadn’t done anything wrong — he and my mother just wanted me to be able to do this sort of thing, to be aware of where I was, to develop self-reliance. If I lost my way, I should use my initiative and ask directions from an adult, for I knew my address. After half an hour of an uneventful walk, I stepped back into my house where my brothers and sister were in the usual throes of our morning routine, breakfasting and getting ready for school.Today, my father and mother would probably be prosecuted for such parenting — at least if they lived in Virginia. A young mother named Karyann Parkinson has just been convicted of child abuse in the commonwealth for allowing her 5-year-old son, Samuel, to walk outside alone.The boy collects goose feathers, which is charming, and his mother gave him permission to walk half a mile through their gated community to a pond where he would find what he was looking for. But he didn’t get there because a security guard — one of a team paid to keep the community safe — intercepted him, escorted him home, and reported Mrs. Parkinson to the police.She was charged by Child Protective Services with contributing to the delinquency of a minor, received a six-month suspended sentence, and will be on the state’s child abuse and neglect registry for seven years.Parkinson will appeal, and one hopes her ridiculous conviction will be thrown out, for the incident is symptomatic of a malaise in our society, which forces children to live cramped, coddled, incurious, and unadventurous lives. We aren’t making them more secure, fulfilled, and happy — not if the rising incidence of emotional and behavioral disorders is anything to go by.At the turn of the millennium, 5% to 10% of 4–to 10-year-olds were diagnosed with such problems. Over the past generation, this has doubled to between 15% and 18%.DISASTROUS REALITY Children gain nothing and lose much if their mothers and fathers hover over them constantly. The term “helicopter parents” is not a compliment. If children are allowed no freedom (especially, surely, in a gated community with security guards), they are much more likely to be anxious and grow up incapable. To say so is not a counsel of recklessness. But children need adventure and risk.What really produces delinquency, plus incompetence, neediness, entitlement, dependency, and boredom, is a society that encourages or forces adults to protect children excessively and to deny them independence, agency, and challenges. The iron link between risk and reward is not confined to the world of finance and politics. It is hard at work just as surely in the business of growing up.