Reply to Why Do We Judge Parents For Putting Kids At Perceived — But Unreal

Forum Index » Elementary School-Aged Kids

Reply to "Why Do We Judge Parents For Putting Kids At Perceived — But Unreal — Risk?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Interesting article. Love articles that examine relative risks!

"So here's another possibility. It's not that risks to children have increased, provoking an increase in moral outrage when children are left unattended. Instead, it could be that moral attitudes toward parenting have changed, such that leaving children unsupervised is now judged morally wrong. And because it's judged morally wrong, people overestimate the risk."

http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2016/08/22/490847797/why-do-we-judge-parents-for-putting-kids-at-perceived-but-unreal-risk?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20160822[/quote]

First, I didn't click through all the links in the article, but the link to support "eight times more children are killed in parking lots than in parked cars" is completely bogus.  It's a 2014 NYPost article saying that 19 to 23 kids had died in hot cars during January-August 2014, as compared to an estimated 68 struck by cars.  That is not in any way support for saying that leaving your kid in the car is safer.  Actually very disappointing from NPR.

[b]That aside, I don't agree with the article's conclusions about moral attitudes toward parenting.  I think people consider the need to take the risk, and have negative views of unnecessary risk.  Driving is statistically really risky, but I need to get my child to school and we are not a society set up around walkable schools.  So, the driving risk is not seen as that bad, compared to other options.  Leaving your kid alone in a house so you can play Pokemon is an unnecessary risk, even if statistically unlikely to have a bad result.  The reason we're divided about a mom leaving her kid to play in the park while the mom works is that we disagree, culturally, about access to childcare and income for a person in that mom's situation -- i.e., about her choices and the need to do that.[/b]

People also consider perceived control.  Although it's false to believe you completely control your driving risk -- you can always be hit by someone else -- you do have the choice to drive safely.  When your child is unattended, you have no control over the events or the aftermath, e.g., getting your child to safety or medical help.

I do think there are "recent" factors, including the constant barrage of unlikely horror stories shared over media in a way they weren't previously.  I also think that culturally we (everyone, including moms) are uncomfortable with the tension between being a mother and a worker (and a person with hobbies, etc.) and so you see a lot of mommy-wars judgment and guilt over whether you are doing enough for your kid, including spending enough time supervising them and protecting them.  That's the negative side of control.

[/quote]

Interesting point, but why would people have a more negative view of "unnecessary risk" today than in the 70s?    [/quote]

I'm not sure if I agree that they they do.  I actually think some of this nostalgia is for experiences in the more distant past, that took place in a different cultural context. [b] I was born in 1979 and I never walked anywhere alone, played in the park alone, etc. [/b] I accept that some of my cohort must have, but I don't think it's really universal.  I think that people have this idealized idea of '50s or '60s culture -- which was one of the first generations to have a middle class where the kids didn't need to work within or outside the home -- that they are mentally moving that forward in time and applying it to the childhoods of people who are parents now.  But a lot of us who are parents now actually grew up in the '80s stranger-danger atmosphere.

So really, you're only talking about a short period of time (at most, '50s to early '70s) when childhood might have been like that.  If you go back past the Boomers, then kids were working, or their parents were working and there was limited childcare.  Pre-'50s you also saw larger families, correlated with higher death rates for children due to disease and injury.  Rather than modern parents moving away from some "timeless" hands-off approach to parenting, it's at least as likely that our current parenting attitudes developed in response to the pre-Boomer (pre-'50s) child raising approach not working well for the first generation of kids who were both healthy and idle.[/quote]

I was born in '79, too, and I did those things. Which is surprising, because my mother leans toward the anxious side. I think so much of it has to do with your neighborhood.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics