Parenting Then and Now: A Just Precaution or a Paranoid Reaction?

After reading The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, I continued to reflect upon the way childhood has changed over the course of the last century. Last year I wrote an essay for Ms. Linder discussing the portrayal of a utopia in a certain novel, but I also touched on childhood and how it has developed to what it is in our society. While researching material for this essay I stumbled across an article from The Atlantic titled “The Overprotected Kid.” Although it’s very long, I would definitely recommend you read it (or at least watch the three minute video linked below this paragraph). In summary, Hanna Rosin observes and writes about how the preoccupation with safety has stripped childhood of independence, risk taking, and discovery. She writes, “Actions that would have been considered paranoid in the ’70s—walking third-graders to school, forbidding your kid to play ball in the street, going down the slide with your child in your lap—are now routine. In fact, they are the markers of good, responsible parenting." Now, I definitely think this is true. You never see children playing in a park these days without a parent supervising or walking home from school by themselves. In The Catcher in the Rye, written in the 1950’s, we see that kids are much less supervised in comparison to today. The young boy playing and singing while walking behind his parents next to a large road or Phoebe’s friend skating in the park by herself on a gloomy day are just a few examples of the independence young children are offered. When narrating, Holden even describes the skate park as “lousy” and full of “dog crap, and globs of spit, and cigar butts from old men, and the benches all looked like they’d be wet if you sat down on them. It made you depressed and every once in a while, for no reason, you got goose flesh while you walked.” This is not a place I would send my kid, alone or even with me. What changed throughout the 20th and 21st centuries that caused parents to become more protective?

I remember when I was younger my parents would let my siblings and I roam our apartment complex for hours at a time during the summer. I would say we lived on the border of “good Urbana” and “bad Urbana.” There was a decent amount of crime and rambunctious high school students walking through our yard area during the school year. For some reason, my parents were totally encouraging of the fact that we would disappear off with our friends literally for hours. I remember that one summer we created this secret lair in the space between our apartment’s wooden fence and the chain link fence of a private house. The space was about five feet wide and filled with prickly tree branches. We decorated the space with the items that our neighbors would throw out. Yes, we dumpster dove, but in my defense these items were really nice. All of our neighbors were from Turkey and basically had to throw out everything they couldn’t bring back with them. We scored an epic ceramic horse head statue once. To say the least, our lair was sketchy and I’m surprised we didn’t get tetanus. However, reading further in Hanna Rosin’s article I found out that this is exactly the type of environment that children should be encouraged to play in (well, minus the dumpster-diving and potential tetanus).

In the article, Hanna Rosin explores and discusses a newly built special park, ominously called “The Land.” It’s a junkyard-looking piece of land where children can create their own play structures using wooden pallets, tires, fire pits, and other material that would normally be considered hazardous. Children are supervised by only one parent and aren’t coddled or helped when they fall and start crying. Rosin writes in her article that children are less constrained and create their own games and groups using their imagination. Surprisingly, the amount of injuries in our normal safety oriented playgrounds is exactly the same as the number of injuries in more “dangerous” ones. This is the kind of environment that I see Holden, and porbably more lower-class individuals from The Catcher in the Rye, playing in. Phoebe seems to be more reigned in by her parents, but still walks by herself to school and the library.

Would you let your young sibling or future child wander “The Land?”

Were you raised in an overprotective household?

What do you think about overprotective parenting? Is it a just precaution or a paranoid reaction?