Chicken Parents, or, Irrational Fear is not Love

From the NY Times, a piece on parents who are afraid to let their children walk to school:

It has been 30 years since the May morning when Julie Patz, a Manhattan mother, finally allowed her 6-year-old son, Etan, to walk by himself to the school-bus stop, two blocks away. She watched till he crossed the street — and never saw him again. Since that haunting case, a generation of parents and administrators have created dense rituals of supervision around what used to be a mere afterthought of childhood: taking yourself to and from school. . . .

Parents’ worst nightmares were inflamed recently by the re-emergence of Jaycee Dugard, the 11-year-old girl who was kidnapped on her way to the school bus 18 years ago in northern California.

Some people are nuts. Because of two (TWO!) cases over the past 30 years -- ok, so maybe they left out a couple and the real number is, say, ten -- some parents are afraid to let their kids out of their sight? This isn't parenting, it's insanity. Everyone who has ever taken a serious look at the problems says stranger abductions are vanishingly rare. But do facts have any impact on this fear? No:

In a study of San Francisco Bay Area parents who drove children ages 10 to 14 to school, published this summer in the Journal of the American Planning Association, half would not allow them to walk without supervision, and 30 percent said fear of strangers governed their decision.

And while there are certainly many parents who scoff at this crap, there are enough scaredy cats to have a real impact on how kids live:

In 1969, 41 percent of children either walked or biked to school; by 2001, only 13 percent still did, according to data from the National Household Travel Survey. . . During the same period, children either being driven or driving themselves to school rose to 55 percent from 20 percent.

And it isn't just parents:

And Mrs. Pierce faces another obstacle to becoming a free-range mother: public opinion.

Last spring, her son, 10, announced he wanted to walk to soccer practice rather than be driven, a distance of about a mile. Several people who saw the boy walking alone called 911. A police officer stopped him, drove him the rest of the way and then reprimanded Mrs. Pierce. According to local news reports, the officer told Mrs. Pierce that if anything untoward had happened to the boy, she could have been charged with child endangerment. Many felt the officer acted appropriately and that Mrs. Pierce had put her child at risk.

I think real harm is being done to kids by all this fear. First, they grow up thinking of the world as a dangerous place full of bad people, which it really is not. Psychopaths who kidnap and kill children exist, but there just aren't enough of them to comprise a real threat. This fear distorts how and where we live, how we think about crime and punishment, how we vote. Second, kids are being deprived of the chance to build their own lives outside their homes, roaming their neighborhoods with their friends. When I was 9 to 13 I lived on my bike, traveling miles, visiting friends' houses, playing pick-up soccer games, exploring the woods. Looking around my exceptionally safe neighborhood now I see none of that. Part of the difference is surely the spread of cable tv and video games, which give kids more reasons to stay inside, but part of it it wholly unreasonable parental fears.

My middle school kids walk to school.