This is such great framing. The reason I think is we don't have a shared understanding of how to correct kids or what is acceptable for kids to do anymore. I dont mind the little old ladies at the grocery store telling my kid to knock it off - they have empathy for both me and my kid. But people who hate children barking at my kid for being a kid, it's harder to deal with. Like sure, enforce your rules, but I feel like it's also my job to tell you your rules are stupid and ill-informed.
Then there's the question of race as well. Remember someone calling the cops on a bunch of mostly black kids having a pool party?
It feels like good-intentioned correcting children is still acceptable, especially when it's not implying the parents fucked up and reinforces their authority. But it feels more and more like there are meaner people who hate that children exist at all, which is why parents push back stronger.
It's definitely a tricky one. Calling the cops is cowardly and definitely not what I read Murray as advocating. I am also against yelling at kids just being kids and "get off my lawn" is definitely what we envision as communal discipline and I'm definitely against that.
I was at a picnic with a group of autistic children and two of them were having fun on the zipline at a playground when some old guy with no children just walking through the park told off the autistic 14 year old for being too violent with the zipline and claiming he was trying to "wreck" it. He was literally just pushing another kid on the zipline (who was enjoying the extra velocity!) It's a children's playground, the zipline is robust and designed for horseplay, and it was totally uncalled for. The boy told him to kindly fuck off and then this angry man came to a bunch of moms eating our lunch and told us off too. It was a very unpleasant experience.
But I have also "policed" kids in public. This reminds me of seeing some kids misbehaving near a fairground ride (doing something unsafe that could get them hurt) and I said, "that lady's probably going to tell you off" pointing to the fairground operator who was eyeing him. The kid said "I don't care about her" and I just shrugged. But then he stopped! I counted that as a success.
I probably also could have pointed out it was unsafe, but who knows! I think framing it like "I'm trying to stop you from getting in trouble" actually was very diplomatic in the end (which I don't, generally, tend to be.)
My point was people's perceptions of okay behavior, even for children, gets colored by race. Which makes parents and others extra protective of people telling kids off.
Had a recent experience I really appreciated. A guy from my neighborhood (didn't know him before the incident) caught my 12 yo son and his friends "ding dong ditching" and followed him home. When he rang our doorbell I expected him to be mad at me but he insisted on talking to my son. Wanted to tell him how much it scared his wife and how "they've been through a lot" and "he was young once too" but "it's not funny when you're hurting people." I saw the effect it had (remorse!) and was so grateful this guy took the time to teach my son a lesson. And so embarrassed but also relieved he didn't blame the incident on me. And most of all, relieved he didn't grab a gun 😰or call the police. He was an older guy and we live in the Midwest. Maybe that helps 🤷♀️
I was also thinking about the layer of volunteer youth coaching/mentorship that has been somewhat eroded with the more professionalized teen activity culture (club sports instead of rec leagues for example). You used to have more parent volunteers as coaches, refs, Boy Scout troop leaders, etc. Some of that has gone away due to everyone's general busyness, some due to liability fears (and well-publicized abuse cases), some due to the increased competitiveness of a lot of youth activities - but if feels like some of that "helper" culture has gotten lost.
Definitely, when practically every social relationship becomes commodified and contractualized in some way, rather than there being an organic overlap between social, academic, and extracurricular areas, it becomes very difficult to build a level of trust that this communal oversight would require.
Loved this all. Two thoughts: One is that it's interesting to watch the communal discipline thing break down even within extended families. When we hang out with my in laws, we're fine with them disciplining our kids. This is especially true if they're babysitting the kids for us, but even if we're all just in the same place, it makes sense in my mind for them to correct bad behavior as needed. But my wife's siblings do NOT have this attitude, and indeed are in some cases reluctant to lean on grandma and grandpa lest they do any sort of disciplining. In other words, the parents of young kids are actually resisting the village because they don't want even their closest relations (let alone neighbors or strangers) having a say. It reminds me of that Slate piece suggesting maybe people don't ~actually~ want a village.
And then the second thought is that having kids myself completely changed the way I think about kids and parenting in public. I don't think I was really out there shaming parents before having kids, but I don't think I really thought of myself has having a role in helping strangers. And I did privately, in my mind, think “where the hell is the parent and why aren’t they helping out their child?” I also had kids beginning at 36, more than a decade later than my own parents started.
This makes me wonder: Perhaps being young and child-free tends to produce this attitude? And then as there are more and more people prolonging their "youth" and childfree years, it grows as a share of the collective consciousness?
Yeah great points. I find it absolutely baffling that some people don't want even family members correcting their kids. I feel like that just makes my life easier haha even if they do it in a slightly different manner than I would.
To your second point, I definitely think the stretching out of the time that people spend childless could exacerbate this phenomenon. But then I also think there's gotta be a way to get people to feel like they have a role in the lives of other people's kids BEFORE they have kids themselves. I suspect that the fact that they don't has to do with how stratified modern society is by both age and parenthood status. If kids grew up in more mixed age settings, and kids were more integrated in to adult life in general, I really think it would seem more natural to even people without kids to look out for them. Because "looking out for younger people" would have been something they did from an early age...
"If kids grew up in more mixed age settings, and kids were more integrated in to adult life in general, I really think it would seem more natural to even people without kids to look out for them."
I avoid putting my kid in situations where her grandparents have to discipline her, or at least not for too long. They discipline ineffectively, escalate things that don't need escalation, and end up in a higher-conflict situation than if they had said nothing, and this makes our kid want to avoid their company. They are just used to more compliance and more yelling. Not much wrong with it, but it creates difficult dynamics when we only see each other for about a week every quarter.
Yeah I feel that some of this dynamic is that we're in the middle of the biggest change in child rearing norms in tens of thousands of years of human history.
It's been building since birth rates collapsed in the mid 1900s but until just like 10-20 years ago we didn't have any actual, settled science even on basic things like "should babies sleep on their front or back"? Or "should you force a child to eat everything on their plate before they're allowed to leave the table"?
Not saying that's a complete excuse/explanation and lots of people go way overboard with their "boundaries".
hard relate to this. I have no problem with people correcting my kids, i do have a problem with grandparents yelling at them when I'm in the middle of handling the situation myself.
As a man (a black one too to add to the complexity), I imagine how it would look if I, a stranger, are seen to help/assist/talk to a child without the parents being nearby.
So even as a person who generally likes children, I am still always aware not to end up in situations that may arise suspicions in people.
Absolutely, as another man I am definitely hesitant to intervene with other kids especially if there is only a mom around. If there's a dad I feel a bit more comfortable going hey mate your kid is being a bit of a dickhead yeah? But, like, only a little bit.
Parents have a lot to answer for in this phenomenon though. Nowadays people flip out if you try to discipline their kid. For example, I force my kids to apologize. My acquaintance would flip her lid if I did, even if he did something she’d agree was wrong. She’s of the opinion that anyone who deviates from her view of parenting is a villain and her precious boy must never be made to utter words he doesn’t mean. She has a prosocial sounding reason like “I want him to FEEL it and say it for the right reasons”. But really, I think she bristles at anyone else daring to influence her son (up to and including her husband), especially if it’s in ways that trigger her childhood traumas. Honestly if he wasn’t such a good and easy kid I’d never have him over. Not worth triggering a maternal meltdown if I try to set any boundaries whatsoever.
I write at length about her but I don’t think she’s all that unique.
This is my feeling too. The other day we were at the playground and a kid there wasn't taking turns on the Flying Fox. The grandma (who was 2 metres away) wasn't saying anything. I intervened and forced taking turns. The grandma started squaking at me. There are various that made it easier for me in that situation to do that and I can easily imagine other people would feel it wasn't worth copping the squaking.
i feel like i've had the most negative experiences with stranger boomers making snide critical remarks because they feel like their grandchild is somehow getting short changed or not appropriately treated as the center of the universe. they are not helpful collectivists!
Have you read Kim Brooks's Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear? She does such a good job investigating the surveillance culture you're talking about--that it's better to call the police on the parents of a kid who seems unsupervised than to just uh check with the kid and see if they're okay--and how that kind of constant supervision is really bad for kids' developing independence.
I'm so glad you wrote about this more! It is such a dispiriting shift but I think it explains a lot about how parents' experiences of childrearing have changed.
“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.”
I'm ambivalent about this because one of my kids is autistic. Random strangers policing him can and has gone extremely wrong, which is unpleasant for literally everyone. If it's a kid you know - fine. If it's some strange kid? Definitely has a potential to go wrong. Why would a random adult risk it? I definitely don't want random strangers correcting him in public- it makes him less safe, not more.
The reason we don't have "the village" anymore is precisely because we don't have literal villages. In a literal village you have a small number of people and everyone knows everyone. Communal policing works because everyone knows which children you can police and which ones aren't "quite right in the head".
This does not scale to big cities and sprawling suburbs. Most interactions are between total strangers rather than people you've known for years. Ergo, no village. This is, I think, people's preference.
I'm not a parent but have worked as a nanny. I feel like having other people discipline your kids can sometimes be really effective, because the kids sometimes take it more seriously than they would from their parents. Suddenly they become aware that strangers may not be ok with what they're doing. A bit of embarrassment can be useful!
Obviously this is entirely dependent on the parents agreeing that whatever the kid is being disciplined for warrants discipline, which I think is less likely to be the case nowadays because there is more variance in parenting approaches.
Agree about helicopter parenting being more performative. I’ve caught myself from time to time parenting out of fear of being judged rather than what I think is right. In regard to other people’s kids, my fear would be I’d be seen as weird/overstepping if I were to speak up or enforce boundaries. If we’re with friends who have kids and we’re all hanging out, I’ll tell kids to share, be kind, etc., but I’m more than likely to leave everyone else’s kids (strangers) alone. But I’m also not the kind who would call the police if I saw a kid taking a walk. It’s a shame society has grown so weird in this regard.
It absolutely sucks. I think a lot of it is, as Lila says below, a lack of a shared understanding that becomes a feedback loop. Plenty of people grow up with very little to do with small children, which means they lack confidence in situations where they might offer supervision and guidance and mentoring, and hence avoid it more ...
The first child I had much to do with at all was my own. I didn't recognise the loss, and lack, and sadness of this. I didn't know what kids respond well to, what it looks like when they need help, how to talk to them, how to use fair firmness in the way they respond well to (I am still working on this, I'm about 30 years behind where I'd be if I grew up communally).
I found on Brooklyn playgrounds most parents allow me to say something to their kid if they’re doing something dangerous and the parents are not stepping in, but then they kind of bristle at me afterward. Drives me nuts, basically you know your kids acting unsafely and you’re unwilling to upset them, but you’re totally fine with a stranger doing it and then being like they yelled at you not me don’t be mad at me! I really hate how my generation parents.
I've noticed this too - and thanks for putting it into words so nicely. Do you (or any other commentators) have a sense of when this shift may have begun in the US, specifically around kids and whose responsibility they are, beyond e.g. Putnam's story?
We just have so little social capital left. I am acquainted with most of my immediate neighbors, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable with them watching out for or disciplining my kid. I just don’t know them well enough. I don’t know what they think about corporal punishment. I don’t know if they have a decent handle on their own emotions. We don’t have any shared history, shared family, or shared culture (like a religious or civic group) that would give me an idea of the kinds of values they have and make me comfortable with their style of dealing with children.
I also can’t help but think about what is at this point a societal meme: “don’t talk to strangers, kids!”
This is such great framing. The reason I think is we don't have a shared understanding of how to correct kids or what is acceptable for kids to do anymore. I dont mind the little old ladies at the grocery store telling my kid to knock it off - they have empathy for both me and my kid. But people who hate children barking at my kid for being a kid, it's harder to deal with. Like sure, enforce your rules, but I feel like it's also my job to tell you your rules are stupid and ill-informed.
Then there's the question of race as well. Remember someone calling the cops on a bunch of mostly black kids having a pool party?
It feels like good-intentioned correcting children is still acceptable, especially when it's not implying the parents fucked up and reinforces their authority. But it feels more and more like there are meaner people who hate that children exist at all, which is why parents push back stronger.
Yeah we're pretty far from having the sort of open orientation to kids as kids to make this sorta thing work...makes me really sad...
It's definitely a tricky one. Calling the cops is cowardly and definitely not what I read Murray as advocating. I am also against yelling at kids just being kids and "get off my lawn" is definitely what we envision as communal discipline and I'm definitely against that.
I was at a picnic with a group of autistic children and two of them were having fun on the zipline at a playground when some old guy with no children just walking through the park told off the autistic 14 year old for being too violent with the zipline and claiming he was trying to "wreck" it. He was literally just pushing another kid on the zipline (who was enjoying the extra velocity!) It's a children's playground, the zipline is robust and designed for horseplay, and it was totally uncalled for. The boy told him to kindly fuck off and then this angry man came to a bunch of moms eating our lunch and told us off too. It was a very unpleasant experience.
But I have also "policed" kids in public. This reminds me of seeing some kids misbehaving near a fairground ride (doing something unsafe that could get them hurt) and I said, "that lady's probably going to tell you off" pointing to the fairground operator who was eyeing him. The kid said "I don't care about her" and I just shrugged. But then he stopped! I counted that as a success.
I probably also could have pointed out it was unsafe, but who knows! I think framing it like "I'm trying to stop you from getting in trouble" actually was very diplomatic in the end (which I don't, generally, tend to be.)
My point was people's perceptions of okay behavior, even for children, gets colored by race. Which makes parents and others extra protective of people telling kids off.
Had a recent experience I really appreciated. A guy from my neighborhood (didn't know him before the incident) caught my 12 yo son and his friends "ding dong ditching" and followed him home. When he rang our doorbell I expected him to be mad at me but he insisted on talking to my son. Wanted to tell him how much it scared his wife and how "they've been through a lot" and "he was young once too" but "it's not funny when you're hurting people." I saw the effect it had (remorse!) and was so grateful this guy took the time to teach my son a lesson. And so embarrassed but also relieved he didn't blame the incident on me. And most of all, relieved he didn't grab a gun 😰or call the police. He was an older guy and we live in the Midwest. Maybe that helps 🤷♀️
I was also thinking about the layer of volunteer youth coaching/mentorship that has been somewhat eroded with the more professionalized teen activity culture (club sports instead of rec leagues for example). You used to have more parent volunteers as coaches, refs, Boy Scout troop leaders, etc. Some of that has gone away due to everyone's general busyness, some due to liability fears (and well-publicized abuse cases), some due to the increased competitiveness of a lot of youth activities - but if feels like some of that "helper" culture has gotten lost.
Definitely, when practically every social relationship becomes commodified and contractualized in some way, rather than there being an organic overlap between social, academic, and extracurricular areas, it becomes very difficult to build a level of trust that this communal oversight would require.
Loved this all. Two thoughts: One is that it's interesting to watch the communal discipline thing break down even within extended families. When we hang out with my in laws, we're fine with them disciplining our kids. This is especially true if they're babysitting the kids for us, but even if we're all just in the same place, it makes sense in my mind for them to correct bad behavior as needed. But my wife's siblings do NOT have this attitude, and indeed are in some cases reluctant to lean on grandma and grandpa lest they do any sort of disciplining. In other words, the parents of young kids are actually resisting the village because they don't want even their closest relations (let alone neighbors or strangers) having a say. It reminds me of that Slate piece suggesting maybe people don't ~actually~ want a village.
And then the second thought is that having kids myself completely changed the way I think about kids and parenting in public. I don't think I was really out there shaming parents before having kids, but I don't think I really thought of myself has having a role in helping strangers. And I did privately, in my mind, think “where the hell is the parent and why aren’t they helping out their child?” I also had kids beginning at 36, more than a decade later than my own parents started.
This makes me wonder: Perhaps being young and child-free tends to produce this attitude? And then as there are more and more people prolonging their "youth" and childfree years, it grows as a share of the collective consciousness?
Yeah great points. I find it absolutely baffling that some people don't want even family members correcting their kids. I feel like that just makes my life easier haha even if they do it in a slightly different manner than I would.
To your second point, I definitely think the stretching out of the time that people spend childless could exacerbate this phenomenon. But then I also think there's gotta be a way to get people to feel like they have a role in the lives of other people's kids BEFORE they have kids themselves. I suspect that the fact that they don't has to do with how stratified modern society is by both age and parenthood status. If kids grew up in more mixed age settings, and kids were more integrated in to adult life in general, I really think it would seem more natural to even people without kids to look out for them. Because "looking out for younger people" would have been something they did from an early age...
"If kids grew up in more mixed age settings, and kids were more integrated in to adult life in general, I really think it would seem more natural to even people without kids to look out for them."
Agreed 100%.
I avoid putting my kid in situations where her grandparents have to discipline her, or at least not for too long. They discipline ineffectively, escalate things that don't need escalation, and end up in a higher-conflict situation than if they had said nothing, and this makes our kid want to avoid their company. They are just used to more compliance and more yelling. Not much wrong with it, but it creates difficult dynamics when we only see each other for about a week every quarter.
Yeah I feel that some of this dynamic is that we're in the middle of the biggest change in child rearing norms in tens of thousands of years of human history.
It's been building since birth rates collapsed in the mid 1900s but until just like 10-20 years ago we didn't have any actual, settled science even on basic things like "should babies sleep on their front or back"? Or "should you force a child to eat everything on their plate before they're allowed to leave the table"?
Not saying that's a complete excuse/explanation and lots of people go way overboard with their "boundaries".
hard relate to this. I have no problem with people correcting my kids, i do have a problem with grandparents yelling at them when I'm in the middle of handling the situation myself.
I wonder if there's a bit of a gendered lens too.
As a man (a black one too to add to the complexity), I imagine how it would look if I, a stranger, are seen to help/assist/talk to a child without the parents being nearby.
So even as a person who generally likes children, I am still always aware not to end up in situations that may arise suspicions in people.
Definitely. I hear this a lot when interviewing men on this subject, which I find it really disturbing and sad!
Absolutely, as another man I am definitely hesitant to intervene with other kids especially if there is only a mom around. If there's a dad I feel a bit more comfortable going hey mate your kid is being a bit of a dickhead yeah? But, like, only a little bit.
Parents have a lot to answer for in this phenomenon though. Nowadays people flip out if you try to discipline their kid. For example, I force my kids to apologize. My acquaintance would flip her lid if I did, even if he did something she’d agree was wrong. She’s of the opinion that anyone who deviates from her view of parenting is a villain and her precious boy must never be made to utter words he doesn’t mean. She has a prosocial sounding reason like “I want him to FEEL it and say it for the right reasons”. But really, I think she bristles at anyone else daring to influence her son (up to and including her husband), especially if it’s in ways that trigger her childhood traumas. Honestly if he wasn’t such a good and easy kid I’d never have him over. Not worth triggering a maternal meltdown if I try to set any boundaries whatsoever.
I write at length about her but I don’t think she’s all that unique.
This is my feeling too. The other day we were at the playground and a kid there wasn't taking turns on the Flying Fox. The grandma (who was 2 metres away) wasn't saying anything. I intervened and forced taking turns. The grandma started squaking at me. There are various that made it easier for me in that situation to do that and I can easily imagine other people would feel it wasn't worth copping the squaking.
i feel like i've had the most negative experiences with stranger boomers making snide critical remarks because they feel like their grandchild is somehow getting short changed or not appropriately treated as the center of the universe. they are not helpful collectivists!
Have you read Kim Brooks's Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear? She does such a good job investigating the surveillance culture you're talking about--that it's better to call the police on the parents of a kid who seems unsupervised than to just uh check with the kid and see if they're okay--and how that kind of constant supervision is really bad for kids' developing independence.
Ugh I am so ashamed to say that I have not but it's been on my TBR list for so long. I'm bumping it to the top since you mentioned it!!
It's really excellent! I read it years ago and still think about it often!
I'm so glad you wrote about this more! It is such a dispiriting shift but I think it explains a lot about how parents' experiences of childrearing have changed.
“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.”
My favorite point! Wow! Thanks for this.
I'm ambivalent about this because one of my kids is autistic. Random strangers policing him can and has gone extremely wrong, which is unpleasant for literally everyone. If it's a kid you know - fine. If it's some strange kid? Definitely has a potential to go wrong. Why would a random adult risk it? I definitely don't want random strangers correcting him in public- it makes him less safe, not more.
The reason we don't have "the village" anymore is precisely because we don't have literal villages. In a literal village you have a small number of people and everyone knows everyone. Communal policing works because everyone knows which children you can police and which ones aren't "quite right in the head".
This does not scale to big cities and sprawling suburbs. Most interactions are between total strangers rather than people you've known for years. Ergo, no village. This is, I think, people's preference.
I'm not a parent but have worked as a nanny. I feel like having other people discipline your kids can sometimes be really effective, because the kids sometimes take it more seriously than they would from their parents. Suddenly they become aware that strangers may not be ok with what they're doing. A bit of embarrassment can be useful!
Obviously this is entirely dependent on the parents agreeing that whatever the kid is being disciplined for warrants discipline, which I think is less likely to be the case nowadays because there is more variance in parenting approaches.
Agree about helicopter parenting being more performative. I’ve caught myself from time to time parenting out of fear of being judged rather than what I think is right. In regard to other people’s kids, my fear would be I’d be seen as weird/overstepping if I were to speak up or enforce boundaries. If we’re with friends who have kids and we’re all hanging out, I’ll tell kids to share, be kind, etc., but I’m more than likely to leave everyone else’s kids (strangers) alone. But I’m also not the kind who would call the police if I saw a kid taking a walk. It’s a shame society has grown so weird in this regard.
It absolutely sucks. I think a lot of it is, as Lila says below, a lack of a shared understanding that becomes a feedback loop. Plenty of people grow up with very little to do with small children, which means they lack confidence in situations where they might offer supervision and guidance and mentoring, and hence avoid it more ...
The first child I had much to do with at all was my own. I didn't recognise the loss, and lack, and sadness of this. I didn't know what kids respond well to, what it looks like when they need help, how to talk to them, how to use fair firmness in the way they respond well to (I am still working on this, I'm about 30 years behind where I'd be if I grew up communally).
I found on Brooklyn playgrounds most parents allow me to say something to their kid if they’re doing something dangerous and the parents are not stepping in, but then they kind of bristle at me afterward. Drives me nuts, basically you know your kids acting unsafely and you’re unwilling to upset them, but you’re totally fine with a stranger doing it and then being like they yelled at you not me don’t be mad at me! I really hate how my generation parents.
I've noticed this too - and thanks for putting it into words so nicely. Do you (or any other commentators) have a sense of when this shift may have begun in the US, specifically around kids and whose responsibility they are, beyond e.g. Putnam's story?
We just have so little social capital left. I am acquainted with most of my immediate neighbors, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable with them watching out for or disciplining my kid. I just don’t know them well enough. I don’t know what they think about corporal punishment. I don’t know if they have a decent handle on their own emotions. We don’t have any shared history, shared family, or shared culture (like a religious or civic group) that would give me an idea of the kinds of values they have and make me comfortable with their style of dealing with children.
I also can’t help but think about what is at this point a societal meme: “don’t talk to strangers, kids!”