'Stranger Danger' is Bullshit

I was out with a group of mom friends recently when the conversation turned to how much we have to schlep our kids around—driving/walking them to school, to sports practice, to lessons and day camps. There was broad consensus that: * we hate it* it feels mandatory as “good moms” AND* we wonder whether our kids could…just maybe…be a little more independent? This last point was uttered cautiously, as if everyone was reading the room, terrified of being judged. And with good reason. All too often maternal suffering feels like a competition; if you’re not having a bad time, you must not be doing enough. And don’t your precious little babies deserve EVERYTHING?Moms are expected to make sacrifices to our careers, personal interests, and even our health in order to ensure that our offspring are protected from every imaginable risk AND maintain dominance in the extracurricular arms race. The end goal of this is… unclear. Harvard, I guess? Some magical career that will guarantee a comfortable, middle-class life with zero upheaval? Heretic Hereafter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Arrested for Leaving Her Kid Alone in a CarAuthor Kim Brooks knows firsthand the consequences of being judged a “bad mom”—after leaving her preschooler in the car for 5 minutes while she ran into a store, Virginia police put out a warrant for her arrest. This led to a two-year legal tussle, which she admits, could’ve been much worse if she weren’t white and middle-class.At first, Brooks kept her legal problems a secret. She felt weirdly ashamed even as she recognized, logically, that her son had been perfectly safe. It was a cool day; she’d cracked the windows. She could see the car from the checkout counter, for crying out loud!But when she began sharing the issue with friends, the mommy judgment machine went into high gear. Again and again, people told her she should never have left her son alone, not even for a minute, because of the risk of STRANGER DANGER, “anything could have happened” was a common refrain.Reality CheckBrooks chronicles this saga and the wider panic around American childhood in her book, Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear. In it, Brooks interrogates many of our modern parenting fears, including the obsession with Stranger Danger. She notes that stranger abductions make up a mere 3% of all child disappearances (many of which are parental abductions, runaways, or simply kids who are lost for a few hours.) In fact, a child is more likely to become president than be abducted by a stranger.American historian Steven Mintz has called Stranger Danger a moral panic, saying that, following economic upheaval in the 70s,“Focusing concern on threats to children may have provided a solution to this psychological dilemma [of job insecurity and growing wealth inequality.] Anxiety about the future could be expressed in terms of concerns for children’s safety.” Brooks adds that focusing all one’s energy on children’s safety rather than an uncertain economy, “feels more manageable.”How Stranger Danger Harms KidsThe practical effects of the Stranger Danger moral panic were a vast reduction in childhood independence. Whereas kids in previous generations often walked or biked themselves places and organized their own games and pastimes with other neighborhood kids, nowadays there seem to be two options available to children: overscheduling hell or screen zombiedom. Case in point: my 11-year-old wants to learn to skateboard. If he were living in a different country or a different era, I’d drop him off at the local skatepark (or, even better, tell him to bus there himself) and let him hang out with older kids who could show him the ropes. But the skateparks near us sit empty most of the time, unless someone is being directly supervised (and, let’s be honest, nitpicked) by a parent or there’s a skateboard day camp ($$$) in session. Today’s kids are rarely unsupervised.This lack of independence hurts kids. It makes them more anxious and worse at handling interpersonal conflicts. And having adults hovering nearby prevents kids from gaining self-efficacy (a feeling that they can handle challenges and influence their environment.) And self-efficacy, it turns out, is one of the biggest preventive factors for kids developing drug and alcohol addiction. How Stranger Danger Harms AdultsIt’s not just kids who suffer the effects of this moral panic, I think it’s a huge contributor to what I call the “Parenting Misery Spiral”: the more that