Danger and Parenting

A study regarding the psychology of political inclination made AVI's place last week. It draws into question what has now become a standard idea in the field, to whit, that conservatives are especially those who think the world a dangerous place, whereas liberals tend to think of it as safe. The research suggests -- as I read what I've been able to read of it -- that conservatives are instead those to whom it seems intuitively proper to read a natural order into the world, and to accept that order as basically just and acceptable. Liberals are more likely to reject both the notion that it is proper to read a natural law out of nature, and that any one that might be read out of it is either decent or acceptable.

Some anecdotal support of that can be found in this article about letting (or even forcing) children to play outside unsupervised, which many a conservative parent I've known regards as the sin qua non of good parenting. This author in fact appears to regard a protective attitude from parents as dangerous precisely because it might lead the children to become conservatives (which, I think, misstates the findings: the issue is that these political divisions are often primal, pre-political, and pre-rational, and thus not very subject to change by any sort of external influence).

You can see the effects of all this worrying in modern parenting behavior. According to a 2015 report from the Pew Research Center, on average, parents say children should be at least 10 years old to play unsupervised in their own front yard, 12 years old to stay home alone for an hour, and 14 to be unsupervised at a public park. It also shows up in what parents teach their kids about the world: Writing in The Journal of Positive Psychology in 2021, the psychologists Jeremy D. W. Clifton and Peter Meindl found that 53 percent of respondents preferred “dangerous world” beliefs for their children.

No doubt these beliefs come from the best of intentions. If you want children to be safe (and thus, happy), you should teach them that the world is dangerous—that way, they will be more vigilant and careful. But in fact, teaching them that the world is dangerous is bad for their health, happiness, and success.

Once they digest that this is not actually going to make the children into conservatives I suppose it will seem less unsafe to keep them safe. In the meantime I have known some quite progressive parents who would never dream of letting their children just wander away unsupervised into the forest with their dogs and a Buck knife, as mine used to do in the brave old days of yore. They'd think of that no more than they'd let their children ride bikes on the road, and without helmets; nor drink out of a water hose on a sunny day; nor ride in the back of a station wagon without seat belts, all piled together with the dogs as we go down the road.

7 comments:

J Melcher said...

It's a perspective thing. I remember a day when my wife, toddler-daughter, and I all went to a meadow. And I commented how relaxing it was, not to have to worry about traffic, and "stranger-danger" and broken glass and other urban hazards. And my wife looked at me funny and started ticking her fingers off saying "Snakes, spiders, tarantulas, ( I wanted to interrupt and object to double-counting, but husbandly good sense kicked in at just the last half-second) scorpions, ticks, thistles, poison ivy, rabid rodents..."

We let the little girl run. She came home with a modest sunburn.

raven said...

That is a depressing report. At 7 or 8 we walked to school, about a mile, often cutting through the swamp on an old trail. Played in the woods till dinner time. Got cut and bruised and poison ivy and every once in a while someone would break an arm.
Helmet? On a bike? SISSY! Seriously, if someone had suggested that to us in 1965, we would have thought they barking mad.
I have probably mentioned this before, but there was an interesting article in the Daily Mail a few years back, about how childrens roaming was increasingly restricted.
Here it is.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children-lost-right-roam-generations.html

Mike Guenther said...

In the neighborhood in San Diego where we grew up, there was a large canyon and bluff behind our house. To get to our friend's house, we had to ride our bikes across the top of the bluff, down the embankment on a narrow trail and cross a four lane road to get to their house.

When riding in the canyon, we would ride our bikes into the flood control tunnels, (square concrete tubes about seven feet square), sometimes riding for miles up various branches. To figure out where we were, we'd find a ladder going up to the street curb above and look for a street sign to see where we were.

We also walked to little league practice, and our games, walked to school and also to the store. I was 9 and my brothers were 8 and 7.

As far as going places, me and my brothers rode in the back of the pickup truck and held on for dear life. This was mid 60's.

Anonymous said...

Late 1970s-early90s. Walked all over the place, spent all day in summer with a herd of other age 7-11 year olds playing in a gully system that linked our houses together. "Be back by supper." No helmets while on bikes.Got stung by nettles, mosquito bites, sunburns (OK, not me because I bathed in sunscreen), scrapes and bruises and so on. I'm still here.

LittleRed1

james said...

AVI pointed out before that there's a survivor's bias--kids who were badly hurt w/o helmet wound up in special care somewhere out of sight.

FWIW, nobody I knew wound up hurt except a classmate who died in an auto accident. I stepped on a mamba in our back yard, but it was sluggish.

raven said...

Everything incurs a cost. Freedom is no exception. Life is not safe.

I would argue the unseen damage done to independence and responsibility, to all, far outweighs the crippling damage or death incurred by the very,very few.

Maybe we need shirts.
"Toxic male."
"Safety second."

Assistant Village Idiot said...

I was a mill-city urban, not rural or suburban child. We were told after supper to "come back when the street lights come on." I walked down to the mid-twon Y after school for swimming or games as early as second grade or to the library unsupervised of a Saturday as early as third. One learned to assess a neighborhood or a distant threat intuitively and reroute or prepare to charm/brazen it out.

It only partly translates to larger-city neighborhood dangers, but it at least alerts one to the idea that wariness is a good idea the closer one gets to bad neighborhoods. These are not race-identifying skills, BTW, and those who try to make that accusation have the mill towns of New England as counter-evidence. There were no black or hispanic people to speak of, yet one could still size up from three blocks away that a particular three teenagers together were looking for trouble. You just knew.