The Evolution of the American Village

We've gone from supervising other people's kids to policing their parents

A note for newcomers: Welcome to Family Stuff! My name is Stephanie Murray. I’m a freelance journalist and contributing writer for The Atlantic. Here on Substack, I publish a weekly round-up of newly published research on demography, family policy, and other family stuff. I also publish essays, like this one. If you like my work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber so that I can keep it up! I’m currently running a 50% off sale on annual subscriptions, so if you are considering upgrading, now is the time!

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Last month, I had a piece go up at The Atlantic in which I made the case for bringing back “communal kid discipline.” It used to be quite common in America for people to correct or instruct other people’s children, even kids they didn’t personally know. This sort of direct adult-to-child feedback is still a bit (or much) more of a thing in certain subcultures in America and plenty of other countries—I’ve certainly witnessed it far more outside the United States than in it. But basically, I argue that it has major advantages (for parents!) and that we should be trying to restore it. As I write in the piece, “if the goal is to steadily acquaint children with the conventions of polite society, it isn’t clear that filtering all guidance through parents is the most effective approach.”

Do you see the irony here?

If you are tempted to say that I’m naive and point out that there are a bunch of reasons why this sort of social contract isn’t feasible, please do read the piece first: I get into all that. Modern American society is not well set-up for communal surveillance of kids. That said, I do think some Americans (and Brits, tbh) have taken the whole “leave it to parents to do the correcting in public” thing to an extreme. Even when a child is invading someone’s personal space, some people seem to feel the invaded person should wait for the parents to intervene rather than just tell the kid to please stop. When one of my kids is breaking the rules of a store or some other establishment, I find that, often enough, staff will hesitate to correct them and, at most, tell me to do so. Anytime that happens, I’m like: sure happy to, thank you for explaining the rules to me. But also: babe, this is your store, not mine! You make the rules! Go ahead and enforce them.

Reactions to this piece were pretty mixed. I got a lot of enthusiastic “YES, PLEASE JUST TELL MY KID TO KNOCK IT OFF IF YOU SEE THEM ACTING UP” responses. I also got a lot of “Absolutely not, I do not want strangers talking to my children.” And then I got some replies from the perspective on nonparents. I will admit, some (not all!) of those made me nervous, even though they generally liked the idea of restoring collective discipline. A few of them seemed to harbor such contempt for both parents and children that it was hard not to be like, yea, maybe this just can’t work in America. Unfortunately, many people these days are so unused to having kids around that they truly resent their presence in public life, and any deviation from the most orderly adult behavior is regarded as a violation of the social contract. As I’ve written about before, it is not possible to welcome children in public under the expectation that they act like adults. Allowances must be made for the fact that they are children. If you are under the impression that for most of human history, kids were aggressively disciplined such that they behaved like little adults, you are wrong.

But I digress. The point of today’s post is to reflect on this piece alongside my other recent piece for Slate about people judging parents for, say, eating dinner in hotel restaurant while monitoring their kids sleeping a few floors up via baby monitor. That piece traced the rise of what the historian Janet Golden called a certain “policing culture,” in which everyone feels entitled to police other people’s parenting—sometimes by literally calling the cops.

At first blush, it might seem like these two pieces contradict each other. In one, I am lamenting the fact that busy bodies will hear about a couple monitoring their sleeping kids via iphone while at dinner on a cruise ship and leap to say that they shouldn’t do that—indeed that they ought to be arrested or investigated for child neglect. In the other, I am actually encouraging people to involve themselves more in the rearing of other people’s kids. So which is it, Stephanie, should I be more of a busybody or less of one?

But the thing is: I am not actually contradicting myself. It makes perfect sense that these trends—the decline of communal kid discipline and the rise of a culture obsessed with policing parents—have coincided with one another. It used to be that people viewed themselves as having a role in helping parents monitor and guide their children. As that role has dwindled, and people have increasingly come to see childrearing as solely a parent’s job, people concerned for the welfare of a nearby child have resorted to the only remaining method of expressing that concern: policing the parent.

I don’t think anyone has more succinctly summed up this shift than

Darby Saxbe

(you’ll want to check out her Substack, Natal Gazing). In response to the primer I did on my Slate piece, in which I made the case that many of us are simply “pretending to be helicopter parents,” Saxbe commented that my analysis seemed to align with her “hunch that a lot of what we consider helicopter parenting is really performative parenting—giving a performance of what a good parent is supposed to do, even when it circumvents our own instincts or beliefs.” She went on to observe that this is “a weird inversion of alloparenting or cooperative breeding; the community still shapes our parenting, but through judgement rather than support.”

I think she is dead on. If you don’t see a role for yourself in looking out for a kid, when you see a child that needs help, your first thought will not be, “I should help that child out,” but “where the hell is the parent and why aren’t they helping out their child?” Take, for example, the phenomenon of people calling the cops or CPS after witnessing an “unsupervised child” walking home from school or to a store. Consider how strange it is for an adult to be literally looking at a child in their physical presence and conclude that the child is unsupervised? That only makes sense if the adult is starting from the assumption that supervising that child is not his or her job.

In other words, the social role that adults play in the lives of kids that aren’t theirs hasn’t exactly disappeared, but evolved: no longer responsible for supervising other people’s kids, they’ve resorted to policing their parents. It sucks.