The Gravitational Pull of Supervising Kids All the Time
When so many people think hovering is what good parents do, how do you stop?
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Updated at 4:55 p.m. ET on July 13, 2023
Two Christmases ago, Anna Rollins, a writer based outside Huntington, West Virginia, went on a stroll with her then-5-year-old son. Always itching to do things himself, the boy announced that he wanted to walk alone. When Rollins refused, he countered with a compromise: He would walk on one side of the row of houses, she would walk on the other, and they’d meet at the far end. The trek was only four homes long, in a neighborhood with no through-traffic, so she relented and instructed him to stick to the grass. “This is a good start to independence,” Rollins thought to herself as she walked.
But when she arrived at the meeting spot, her son wasn’t there. She ran around to his side of the block and found it empty. Finally, she spotted him with an elderly couple across the road. “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.
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.
Many parents have legitimate reasons to worry about their kids wandering. Still, getting out from under close adult supervision is important for child development. Mariana Brussoni, a developmental psychologist and the director of the research center Human Early Learning Partnership, told me that when adults aren’t hovering, children are forced to solve problems and resolve disputes on their own—which can sharpen executive functioning and social-emotional learning, and bolster confidence and resilience.
Independence can also be important for mental health. Separation anxiety, a fear of heights, nervousness about the unknown—those are normal parts of development that serve an evolutionary purpose in keeping kids safe. They don’t dissipate on their own, though; they’re gradually allayed through experiences that draw kids further from parental oversight: spending an afternoon at a friend’s house, climbing a tree, walking to the bus stop by themselves. Learning to cope with the strong emotions that often attend these exploits is valuable. Some psychologists trace the ongoing decline in American children’s mental well-being directly to the constraints on their freedom.
And yet, the vigilant style of American parenting has become not only a norm, but an expectation that can be difficult to defy. In reporting this story, I heard from parents who said that other adults had threatened to call Child Protective Services when they didn’t hold their 3-year-old’s hand as they crossed the street, warned them that their 5- and 7-year-old kids had drifted a little too far from them at a playground, or scolded them for letting their teenage kids walk to school on their own. This social discomfort with childhood independence has become a barrier to it. “I often find myself worrying more about what other people think than I do about my children’s safety,” Rollins told me. “If my children’s safety was the sole thing guiding me, I would probably let them do a lot more.”
This is a common apprehension, Brussoni told me. Parents she speaks with tend to cite three main concerns about giving their children more freedom: cars, kidnapping, and what other people will think or do in response. That creates a vicious cycle: Now that helicopter parenting has become the standard, how does anyone stop?
The decline in children’s independence has complex roots, according to Brussoni. In the mid-to-late 20th century, rising economic inequality undermined parents’ confidence in their children’s future prosperity, spurring an intensive approach to parenting—first among wealthier families, but eventually across classes—in which kids spend more time in structured activities such as violin lessons and hockey practice and less time playing freely. Urbanization and car dominance have made it harder for kids to safely get around on their own, and left fewer opportunities for neighbors to get to know one another, weakening parents’ trust in strangers. The rise of smaller, two-earner families means fewer parents are at home to keep an eye out as kids roam the neighborhood, and fewer older siblings are watching over younger ones. And growing access to frequently fearmongering media has heightened perceptions of the risks that children face in public life.
The resulting encroachment of childhood freedom has had a snowball effect. As kids do less on their own, many of us have come to think of them as less capable of managing on their own, Brussoni said. And with each generation, it becomes harder to imagine that kids can do the sort of things they might have a century ago, because fewer and fewer parents have any memory of having done those things themselves. That’s resulted in a pervasive belief that children require constant supervision into at least their tweens. One recent survey found that more than two-thirds of parents think children should be 12 or older before being left home alone before or after school. Twelve is also the median age at which a kid will be allowed to walk or bike to school or a friend’s house on their own.
Given that so many children are now being accompanied, plenty of adults—parent or not—just aren’t used to seeing young kids on their own anymore; when they encounter a lone child, they often assume, like the elderly couple who pulled Rollins’s son aside, that something’s gone wrong. “We sort of drank the Kool-Aid that anytime a child is unsupervised, they’re ipso facto in danger,” Lenore Skenazy, the president of Let Grow, a nonprofit promoting childhood independence, told me.
More and more, this reality is reflected in America’s infrastructure for safeguarding children against abuse and neglect, Diane Redleaf, a civil-rights lawyer and legal consultant for Let Grow, told me. Reports of child neglect make up the majority of child-maltreatment cases in America. But laws defining neglect in the U.S. are typically broad and vague. Many reports of neglect involve children who have been left without direct supervision for any length of time. Parents have been reported, investigated, and even charged for letting their kids play outside their apartment, walk the dog, or run laps around their block, or for leaving their kid in the car for a few minutes with the windows rolled down on a cool day. The threat of sanction is ever present—especially for Black parents, who are much more likely to get caught up in the CPS system—and it frequently plays into people’s parenting decisions, Redleaf said.
The helicopter-parenting norm is exacerbated, too, by a common uncertainty about the role we should play in the life of a child we don’t personally know. Even capable kids are still learning. For them to participate in society without a chaperone requires some buy-in from everyone else, not only in the form of tolerance for childlike behavior or confusion, but also in a readiness to help or direct a child if need be. Tim Gill, an advocate for children’s play and the author of No Fear: Growing Up in a Risk Averse Society, suspects that many of us aren’t accustomed to this sort of social contract, given how absent children are from much of public life. “We’re in danger of giving up the notion that it takes a village to raise a child,” Gill told me.
Dixie Dillon Lane, a writer and historian based in Front Royal, Virginia, told me that when she moved to Paris at 11 years old, her parents allowed her to roam the city as she pleased, which was common among her peers there. Lane thinks such autonomy was possible in part because, at least at the time, Parisian adults seemed to have few qualms about instructing an unfamiliar child. On one occasion, when Lane slid into a seat that opened up on a crowded bus, a man standing nearby told her to let an elderly lady sit down instead. In Lane’s experience, many Americans are less certain about the authority they have over a child that isn’t their own. Brussoni said something similar: Bystanders, and especially men, are often wary of interacting with children they don’t know, lest they be suspected of ill intentions. Parents don’t trust strangers, and strangers know it.
This “social anxiety about children and their place in society,” as Gill put it, is tricky to walk back. But improving urban infrastructure—narrowing streets to slow down cars, placing family-oriented spaces within walking distance of homes—can make the public realm more child-friendly, Brussoni said. Revising ambiguous child-neglect laws to allow for a reasonable measure of free rein, as eight states have now done, can help ease parents’ hesitation about giving their children some room to roam. Messaging from public-health associations about the importance of childhood independence can influence decisions in schools, libraries, parks, and other public places.
Parents can also try to encourage child autonomy in their own circles. Brussoni, together with several other neighborhood parents, decided to let their children play as they might have in the past. As a result, her kids, who are now in their teens, had much the same childhood she had—spent running around their neighborhood, to the park with their friends, and in and out of one another’s houses. Such a pact can’t encompass everyone who might cross a child’s path, so parents can coach their kids on how to talk to adults they don’t know. This is where Rollins thinks she messed up—she advised her child to avoid the street but didn’t tell him what to say if he encountered a stranger.
Then again, Rollins couldn’t have controlled how other people reacted to her child walking alone. Her experience is part of a larger cultural phenomenon, and cultures don’t shift overnight. For now, giving your child room to take risks might mean taking a risk yourself.
This article originally stated that when someone reports neglect, they typically mean that a child—most commonly between the ages of 5 and 9—has been left without direct supervision. In fact, “lack of supervision” claims do not make up the clear majority of neglect cases, and the most common age range for lack of supervision claims is unclear.
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