I was blessed to be born about a decade before the internet hit. My formative years weren't spent cruising the web. I was often outside, roaming the neighborhood with other children. We walked to school, which was a few blocks away, and oftentimes, we would take our bikes down to the hike n' bike trail. Pflugerville, Texas, was a small, quiet town back then, and it was even quieter in the homes because children weren't in them.
Yet, after my fellow elder millennials and I got into high school, something changed. The helicopter parent went from being a bug in the system to a feature. Kids were cooped up inside and under 24-hour supervision. "Get out and don't come home till the street lights come on" became "Don't go anywhere without me, and if you want to go somewhere, I'll take you."
What was with the sudden shift?
I could blame the internet, but that'd be only talking to you about the soil, not the weed that it grew. Yes, thanks to the internet, horror stories about kidnappings became easier to see, and concerned parents would click, read, and be horrified, causing them to become overly protective. But, in truth, child abductions are actually kind of rare. According to the FBI, while around 30,000 children are reported missing a year, 90 percent of the cases are resolved, and most just turn out to be runaways, not kidnappings.
And honestly, high-profile abductions have been occurring since the late 1970s to early 1980s, which certainly had parents on edge, but not to the point where they were imprisoning their own children. I was proof of that. At most, we had a serious talk about what to do if we were approached by a stranger, both by our parents and our teachers.
So what's really to blame for the wave of children being kept in the home and barred from experiencing independence? I bet some of you already narrowed it down without me telling you.
It's Karen.
The greatest threat to parents isn't kidnappers, migrants, or serial killers; it's the nosy neighbor or moral busybody who poses the greatest threat to children, because these people keep Child Protective Services on speed dial and will call them the moment they see a child without their parent attached to their hip.
According to the Administration for Children and Families, a branch of the Department of Health and Human Services, CPS receives a staggering 4.3 million referrals, less than half of which are screened, of which only 18-20 percent turn out to be true. This means that around 80 percent of the time, the nosey societal tyrant was wrong and CPS wasn't needed at all.
According to a study published in the National Library of Medicine, the number one neglect allegation is "inadequate supervision," comprising around half of all cases.
If you have a child capable of playing independently and let them out to explore, the chances of a CPS call reporting you for not adequately supervising your child are ridiculously high, and even if it turns out you're not doing anything wrong and your child is just fine, you'll still have to endure CPS investigations which may range in severity depending on the person doing the investigating.
And these horror stories are piling up.
In 2015, a 10 and a six-year-old were walking home from a park when CPS was called on "free-range" parents in Maryland (free-range parenting now being the fringe parenting type where it used to be the standard), and after a battle with the legal system were found guilty of "unsubstantiated" child neglect.
Yeah, wrap your head around that one.
In Illinois, an eight-year-old was walking her dog when a nosy neighbor called the police, claiming a five-year-old was walking alone. The neighbor even called the Department of Children and Family Services. Luckily, once it was clear the neighbor was exaggerating, they closed the case. Still, it shows you that the most likely predator in your neighborhood is the busybody who has no problem using the legal system to disrupt your family.
In La Porte, Texas, a mother was arrested for letting her kids play in the quiet neighborhood cul-de-sac after a nosy neighbor reported the parents for neglect. Police showed up and arrested the mother, who had been watching them from the porch the entire time. She spent 18 hours in jail for child endangerment.
You can find a million more stories just like these with a simple Google search. Garbage calls on good parents for letting their kids do what they should be doing naturally. Families are being threatened and sometimes ripped apart because some ridiculous person with a chip on their shoulder thought they would take it upon themselves to get authorities involved over children simply being children.
But it gets worse.
According to some sources, the intensity parents are required to have with their children nowadays is actually part of what's tanking our birth rate. As reported by the New York Times, parents are more exhausted and burned out than ever because today's parents (namely millennials) are being pressured to spend more time and put more focus on their children than previous generations:
So why has parental stress risen to the level of a rare surgeon general’s warning about an urgent public health issue — putting it in the same category as cigarettes and AIDS?
It’s because today’s parents face something different and more demanding: the expectation that they spend ever more time and money educating and enriching their children. These pressures, researchers say, are driven in part by fears about the modern-day economy — that if parents don’t equip their children with every possible advantage, their children could fail to achieve a secure, middle-class life.
This parenting style is known as intensive parenting, as the sociologist Sharon Hays described it in the late 1990s. It involves “painstakingly and methodically cultivating children’s talents, academics and futures through everyday interactions and activities,” the sociologists Melissa Milkie and Kei Nomaguchi have written.
But we may have reached a point, the surgeon general and other experts suggest, where intensive parenting has become too intense for parents.
The numbers back this up. According to Pew Research, today's mothers spend 40 percent more hours per week on active childcare than in 1965.
Kicking kids out of the house to go play was good for everyone. It gave parents a break, it allowed children to explore and practice independence, learning at their own pace and through their own interests, learning how to socialize without supervision, and more. Parents are getting less done, getting fewer breathers, and children aren't learning in a way that fosters self-reliance and independent problem-solving.
And it's all thanks to society's greatest villain, the AWFLs, the busybodies, and the helicopter neighbor. The threat of your child being kidnapped by some sick stranger is relatively low, but being kidnapped by the government at the whim of someone who thinks they should have a say over how you parent is uncomfortably high. They've helped make parenting look exhausting and overly complicated, and thus, we see fewer and fewer women wanting to have children.
The norm of helicopter parenting is actually killing society by playing a part in decreasing the birth rate, and it's being reinforced by none other than Karen, the first-world supervillain.
(Author's note: With all apologies to good women named Karen.)
