1 Mother 2 Another

Earlier this month a mom was arrested in
Texas for allegedly allowing her kids to play on scooters
unsupervised outside; the charge was child endangerment. Her two
kids, aged 6 and 9, were scootering on their cul-de-sac while she
says she was watching from a lawn chair. After being taken to jail
– her kids clinging to her legs and sobbing – she was
held overnight before the charges were dropped.


Apparently an anonymous neighbor made the phone call.

I don’t know the details here
– just href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/20/tammy-cooper-texas-mom-arrested-kids-unsupervised-video_n_1900113.html"
target="_blank">read about the story last week. And it
continues to develop, as the mom contemplates suing the city, her
neighbor whoever she can think of. The neighbor might have seen
those kids completely unsupervised, wandering out into dangerous
traffic. Or perhaps the buzzing from the kids’ motorized
scooters was annoying and the neighbor was feeling peevish.


Whatever. Regardless of the details here, it’s clear that we
are no longer living in the world of our childhoods, where kids ran
off to play after breakfast and came home, exhausted and dirty, for
dinner. Have we truly come this far in helicopter parenting? Or is
the world truly this different, this scary?


I’ll confess, I fall more in the helicopter parenting camp
than I’d probably want to admit. When my daughter walks next
door to ask a friend to play, I stand at my front door to see what
the outcome is, whether she disappears inside the neighbor’s
house or comes back home. If Cora walks out to get mail I stand at
the window and watch her the whole way: it only takes a second for
someone to drive by and drag her into a car. At 5 and 7, my girls
are still, I feel, too young to walk the half-mile to school by
themselves or play “somewhere in the neighborhood” by
themselves.


But I like to think that in a couple of years, I’ll be ok
with it. Because the truth is that I’ll HAVE to be ok with it
eventually, won’t I? Or do I plan on anxiously walking Maddie
to her first job interview?


Was the Texas mom being criminally negligent, letting her kids play
outside “unsupervised” on their own street? Or was she,
perhaps, giving them space for some undirected, unstructured
have-fun-and-learn-to-deal-with-your-own-stuff time? I honestly
don’t know the answer.


But I know we have to start giving our kids the tools to stand on
their own at some point, and perhaps a quiet, friendly cul-de-sac
is a safe place to start.