When my father got sick, the insurance company sent him to Los Angeles. He was on the organ donor list and I guess the hospital there was better, or cheaper, even though living in Connecticut, we didn’t suffer for world-class hospitals. Like so much of life as a teenager, that decision seemed bewildering at the time; “why is this happening, right now?” was for me the constant refrain of my teenaged years, the feeling that life was directed by a series of remote and inscrutable decisions. But I suppose there was something comforting in the decision, too. To send him to the other side of the country meant that there had to be a good reason, that the place they were sending him to had to be a better place for him to get healthy. Surely Los Angeles was a place where people went to get well. I remember standing outside of Cedars-Sinai on a visit to see him and thinking, at the time, that no human beings could possibly die in such a vast, vastly expensive hospital. But it turns out that they do.
I was never there for long. My family, such as it was, was mostly heading to California – my father, sick and weak and as vast as ever; his wife, who I did not talk to then and will not talk about now; her children; and my younger brother, 12. My older sister was safely away at college. My older brother and I, though. For us, the timing was bad. 15 years old, I was about to start my sophomore year of high school, he at 17, his senior year. We had classes to take and credits to earn and college resumes to build. And for me, the transition from junior high to high school was a change from loneliness and misery to, eventually, social acceptance and friendship. This was not an ideal time to pack up and leave for the west coast. So we didn’t.
My father let us stay, at home. He gave my older brother an ATM card and the keys to the Mercury Sable. We stayed for most of that school year, alone, in the home he had bought to house our blended family, though the blending was and would remain aspirational more than actual. A couple adult friends of the family were told to keep an eye out and check in on us every once in awhile. Our life alone was probably illegal and technically a secret, but not one we much bothered to keep. We didn’t go telling any guidance counselors or principals, but our friends knew and I suspect some of our teachers knew too. They left it alone. There can be kindness in neglect.
My father knew we could handle it. His parenting style was built on the premise that freedom is a powerful teacher. We were allowed to watch any movie or show, read any book. We made most of our own decisions. Like a lot of kids in the 80s, we were free range. We had a beautiful little white house, surrounded by trees, fields, and a public housing project. We would wander for hours. The father of a friend of ours tells the story of the time he came to pick up his son, so my father simply stepped outside and shouted our names at the top of his lungs. We ran scampering back from deep in the woods. That was how it was. And sometimes it hurt; sometimes watching any movie meant lying awake at night, terrified. Sometimes running through the woods meant sprained ankles and bee stings. But if that made the world more painful, it also made it less scary. It taught us how to explore and how to play and how to fill time, and it also taught us how to be on our own. His choosing to let us be on our own helped prepare us for a time when being on our own was not a choice.
*****
Nowadays, that kind of parenting can get you thrown in jail. It seems like every day, there’s some news story about parents getting arrested for letting their children play alone in the park, or walk to school by themselves, or otherwise occupy any time free from the immediate anxious gaze of an adult. It’s as though we made a decision to fundamentally change our legal and cultural expectations about parenting, while no one was looking, and to enforce it with the power of the state. This panicky intrusion into parental rights does not exist in a vacuum, but rather reflects a broad cultural embrace of overparenting, the presumption that more parenting is always better and that a child left alone is a child waiting to be victimized.
The defense of this kind of aggressive enforcement of overparenting norms is as obvious as it is wrong: the notion that we live in a new world, a fallen world, one which is filled with far more dangers for children than the one I grew up in during the 80s and 90s. This notion is simply, factually false. As with all violent crime, violent crime against children has declined precipitously in the last several decades. The Crimes Against Children Research Center reports that in the period from 1990 to 2007, child sexual abuse declined 53%, physical abuse 52%, aggravated assault 69%, simple assault 59%, on and on. (Now, as in the past, children face vastly greater threat from their own parents than they do from strangers.) Add to this reduction in violent crime the remarkable advances in medical care of the last several decades, and across all causes, the mortality rate for American children dropped from over 140 out of every 100,000 in 1935 to under 30 by 2007. American children are safer now than they have ever been.
But the presumption of the imminent dangers of youth is not built on facts. Such feelings emerge from animal spirits, cultural drift, and vague convictions about the state of the world that are usually wrong. Those forces now compel many among us to imagine the duty of a parent as akin to that of a smiling, benevolent prison guard, and they are prepared to enforce that notion.
*****
The sad reality, for those who would keep their children on a leash and punish those who refuse to do the same, is that my younger brother, the one who lived in LA, with his father, with his family – he had it worse than my older brother and me. It’s true that my older brother and I were 2,886 miles from our surviving parent. It’s true that we lacked for guidance and support. It’s true we were alone. But my younger brother was also alone, in a different way, and friendless in a strange school in a strange city, at a time in life where kids are cruel even to those they’ve known their whole lives. That is not my story to tell. But I assure you: proximity and watchfulness were for him no balm. Your children can suffer while they are clutching your hand.
And that’s the real sob story: all of us are beyond saving. You can ward off a host of threats, petty and large, but in the end, your children will learn the meaning of human devastation. Anxious parents and those who aggressively enforce a culture of constant supervision are wrong in both ways at once. They overestimate the physical dangers they imagine, the boogeymen they believe hide in every alleyway, eager to drag children away. And at the same time, they underestimate the inevitability of pain, mistaking constant watchfulness for a panacea against the world’s ills. Loneliness, heartbreak, disease, disillusionment, the simple brute reality that you don’t get what you want in life – each will come to your children in turn, and if you raise them under glass, they will not be equipped to confront the world as it is.
My brother and I were on our own, in all the good and bad senses. It was a strange, exhilarating time, and it ended suddenly and with finality. Freedom had its virtues and its price. What we could not know, and what the culture of endless supervision cannot comprehend, was that the hardest times were yet to come, and would have come no matter how closely we were watched. Better, then, that we had for awhile a parent who recognized the inescapable brokenness of this harsh world, and let us come to know it too.