Risk Management

Once a business practice, now it's a standard parenting strategy.

While reading Kim Brooks’ excellent book, Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear, I came across an analogy for overprotective parenting that I haven’t been able to get out of my mind. Brooks interviewed Barbara Sarnecka, professor of cognitive science at University of California, Irvine, and Sarnecka warned against trying to mitigate every possible danger that a child could encounter in the world.

Sarnecka said, “Let’s imagine that you’re so terrified of your kid falling down and getting a concussion that you decide it’s just too dangerous to even let them stand up. So you eliminate all danger of them ever falling down by keeping them in a wheelchair… There’s 74.2 million kids in America. Somebody fell down and hit their head and died this year.”

Now, imagine that the media talks about it constantly, and Law and Order made shows about it, and pictures of children who fell and died were plastered on the products we buy. It is easy to see how parents would become so terrified that they’d strive to protect their child, no matter what.

“Eventually, you have a bunch of kids who aren’t disabled being confined to wheelchairs, and at some point you can imagine schools and cops saying, well, a lot of the kids are in wheelchairs anyway, so if a kid falls down and gets hurt on our premises, they’re going to ask why we didn’t have all of them in wheelchairs, so from now on, during the school day, all the kids have to be in wheelchairs.”

Things could then progress to the point where, upon seeing a child not in a wheelchair, someone might call the police and say, “I saw a parent walking down the street with a child. That child might fall down and die at any moment.” Authorities intervene and tell the parent, “Be grateful we protected your child from possible death.”

Sarnecka says, “This is a fantasy.” We don’t do this because we understand that kids need to move around for optimal physical development, and we view falling as an acceptable risk for the benefits conferred; however, she continued:

“As a developmental psychologist, I think the benefits of kids having age-appropriate amounts of independence and unsupervised time is just as important as the physical benefits of letting them walk around… I think we are grossly underestimating the benefits of independence and overestimating the risks.” (emphasis mine)

This sent a chill through my body, as I thought about the modern parental tendency to restrict kids’ movement in the world under the guise of “safety” and to surveil them constantly. There is a pervasive cultural sense in North America that if you don’t have eyes on your child at all times, then you are a bad parent. You are leaving them open to potential risk, and it seems that any amount of risk is too much risk. We parents embark on an impossible quest to monitor our children every minute of the day, in addition to trying to live our own very full lives, which is exhausting.

Parents are scared by statistics about kidnapping and injury, and because these facts are so prevalent, amplified by social media and 24/7 online news (a.k.a. the availability heuristic), we develop outsized fears about them. We lose perspective on what is actually dangerous and what’s not.

For a long time, and often still now, we hired people or asked neighbours for help or paid for extracurricular activities to keep our kids occupied and supervised because we didn’t want to leave them alone, not even for a minute. It didn’t matter if our kids wanted or needed solitude or were capable of independence—safety was more important!

Frank Furedi, author of Paranoid Parenting, described how American parents manage to supervise in absentia, by “liaising with a trusted adult who knows what the youngster is up to. The message is clear: if you’re going to shirk your responsibility towards your child, even for a few hours, you must at least make sure that somebody else is doing the job for you.”

But then, it occurred to me—along came smartphones and tablets, and parental fears became more entrenched than ever.

Suddenly, it became possible for kids of all ages to stay occupied and entertained (and not bored), while adults were able to surveil them from afar and track their whereabouts, which most of the time was in their bedroom or living room, the device having quelled the desire to go anywhere else. Parents could rest assured knowing their child was looked after (by a device), not getting into trouble (in real life), and safely ensconced at home, i.e., no risk of in-person encounters with the big scary outside world.

Parents could also avoid feeling judged by other parents for letting their children roam too freely—something that is not only frowned upon, but even prosecuted as neglect. In far too many parts of the U.S. and Canada, a stranger’s (or a police officer’s) perception of a child’s level of capability is deemed more accurate than that of the child’s own parent, which is an appalling fact. (See Brooks’ book for a powerful commentary on that.)

So, in a way, digital devices have become the wheelchairs from Sarnecka’s terrifying analogy. They are digital pacifiers that we now hand over unthinkingly to kids of all ages to “keep them safe” and “prevent risk.” They restrain children physically, by making them more sedentary. They impede children developmentally, by preventing them from challenging themselves in the broader world. And they spare parents from having to engage with and confront their own fears about the outside world. It is easier to believe that the outside world is dangerous and terrifying when it justifies regular or excessive screen use.

(The great irony, of course, is that screens open up a whole new world of risk, but I’m not getting into that here. Read my Globe and Mail column about that.)

I do believe that digital devices, such as tablets and smartphones and video games, have played a huge role in shaping parental perceptions of the world outside our homes. The mere existence of these devices provides parents with an appealing alternative to outdoor, independent, free play; whereas, if they did not exist, I don’t think most parents could last more than a few hours without sending their kids outside to play.

These devices pacify, distract, consume, subdue, and sedate. They create an illusion of calm. They make it possible for a child to stay quiet in their room for 9 hours a day, which is an entirely unnatural state. This is a profound effect, and it cannot help but shape family dynamics.

When you do not have these devices at your disposal, everything shifts. Parents simply must find something else for their children to do. They can’t put up with them indoors for prolonged periods of time. They are forced to grapple with their fears of the outside world and acknowledge that, for example, the risk of kidnapping isn’t so bad if it means their kid can burn off some energy. (Fun fact: You’d have to loiter in public for 750,000 years before getting kidnapped by a stranger.)

Smartphones and tablets have been called many things, from “the world’s longest umbilical cord” to “digital pacifiers” to “experience blockers.” But I think it’s helpful to think of them as metaphorical wheelchairs that pin kids down, limit their movement, and keep them in place. Of course, there is a time and place for a wheelchair; it is a powerful, liberating tool in the right situation, but that does not mean it is universally useful.

What is good for one child in a very specific situation can harm another. To take one more line from Furedi, “Is there not a danger that if we so desperately try to protect children from every possible risk we may end up causing more harm?”

We as parents need to ask how much of the time we’re giving our kids these devices for our own sake, not for theirs; how often we’re settling into our own illogical fears about the world and letting them play video games or scroll on TikTok for hours because we don’t want to have to worry about where they are. These are uncomfortable questions—but necessary ones.

You Might Also Like:

• Screen-Free Road Trips

• Tablets and Tantrums

• Phones Make Us Worse Parents

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A Small Reminder:

I am able to write this newsletter twice a week, thanks to generous readers who enjoy my words enough to sign up for a paid subscription! Substack is not exactly a money-maker, if I’m honest, but every bit helps—perhaps most of all by validating my belief that I’m on the right track with this quest to reclaim childhood from digital devices. Thank you for your support!

Exciting News:

The Italian translation of my book is coming out next month, titled Bimbi Offline: Consigli pratici per tenere i bambini lontani dagli schermi e farli crescere più equilibrati e felici. So, if you speak Italian or have family there, please order them a copy! It has been a long time since my year in Sardinia, but I’m looking forward to brushing off my rusty Italian and reading my own words in another language, which is sure to be an eerie experience.

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