He
didn’t die. He wasn’t kidnapped or assaulted or forgotten or dragged
across state lines by a carjacker. When I returned to the car, he was
still playing his game, smiling, or more likely smirking at having
gotten what he wanted from his spineless mama. I tossed the headphones
onto the passenger seat and put the keys in the ignition.
Over
the past two years, I’ve replayed this moment in my mind again and
again, approaching the car, getting in, looking in the rearview mirror,
pulling away. I replay it, trying to uncover something in the
recollection I hadn’t noticed at the time. A voice. A face. Sometimes I
feel like I can hear something. A woman? A man? “Bye now.” Something.
But I can’t be sure.
We flew home. My husband was
waiting for us beside the baggage claim with this terrible look on his
face. “Call your mom,” he said.
I called her, and she
was crying. When she’d arrived home from driving us to the airport,
there was a police car in her driveway.
* * *
Every
year, 30 to 40 children, usually under the age of 6, die after being
left alone in cars. Their deaths (usually by suffocation), are slow,
torturous, unspeakably tragic. In some instances, they are the result of
clear-cut neglect, but more often, they occur because of a change in
routine — usually the father drops off at daycare but today it’s the mom
and she is tired or harried and forgets the kid is with her and leaves
him there for hours. I was aware of these tragedies long before the day I
left my son, because, like most anxious, at times over-protective
mothers, I spend a not insignificant portion of my time reading about
and thinking about and worrying about all the terrible things that can
happen to the two little people I’ve devoted my life to protecting.
I
know that on a 75-degree day, a closed car can become an oven. I know
that a home with an unfenced swimming pool is as dangerous as one with a
loaded gun. I know how important it is to install car seats correctly,
to adjust and fasten the straps regularly. When my kids were babies I
always put them to sleep on their backs, though they hated it. I treated
small, chokeable objects like arsenic, put up gates on all our
stairways (not the tension-rod kind that can be pushed over, but the
kind you bolt into the wall). I immunized them against everything
immunizable, sliced their hotdogs lengthwise and removed the casing,
made sure their plates and cups were BPA free, limited their screen
time, slathered them in sunscreen on sunny days. When my more carefree
friends say things like, “What’s the worst that could happen?” I usually
have an answer. Sometimes I fantasized about moving with my family to a
sun-drenched island in the Mediterranean where my children could spend
their days frolicking freely on the beach without worry of speeding cars
or communicable diseases, but I never confuse this fantasy with the
reality we live in, the reality of risk and danger, the reality that
terrible things happen to good, well-meaning people every second of
every day.
And so, it came as more than a shock to me
when, on the way home from the airport, I listened to a voice mail from
an officer at my family’s local police department explaining that a
bystander had noticed me leaving my son in the car, had recorded the
incident using a phone’s camera, and had then contacted the police. By
the time the police arrived, I had already left the scene, and by the
time they looked up the license plate number of the minivan and traced
it to my parents, I was flying home.
I’d never been
charged with a crime before, so the weeks that followed were pure
improvisation. I hired a lawyer to talk to the police on my behalf. I
sought advice and support from those I loved and trusted. I tried to
stay calm. My lawyer told me he’d had a productive conversation with the
officer involved, that he’d explained I was a loving and responsible
mother who’d had a “lapse in judgment,” and that it seemed quite
possible charges would not be pressed. For a while, it looked like he
was right. But nine months later, a few minutes after dropping my kids
off at school, I was walking to a coffee shop when my cellphone rang.
Another officer asked if I was Kim Brooks and if I was aware there was a
warrant out for my arrest.
* * *
My
friends and I sometimes play this game, the
did-our-parents-really-let-us-do-that game. We recall bike ramps, model
rockets, videotaping ourselves setting toys on fire. Many remember
taking off on bikes alone, playing in the woods for hours without adult
supervision, crawling through storm drains to follow creek beds,
latchkey afternoons, monkey bars installed over slabs of concrete. My
husband recalls forts built in the trunk of the station wagon on long
road trips. I remember standing up in the back of my father’s LeBaron
convertible while he cruised around the neighborhood, or spending an
hour lying low on the seat of our station wagon, feet against the
window, daydreaming or reading in crowded parking lots while my mother
got groceries or ran other boring errands. One friend tells me how, from
7-Elevens, to Kroger, to various banks, schools and offices, he was
left alone in the front passenger seat of a convertible Mustang for a
good portion of his childhood, primarily because he was shy and wanted
to not have to meet new people. For people of our generation, living a
suburban childhood, the car was central to our lives, not simply a mode
of transportation but in many ways, an extension of our home.
We
all knew, of course, that cars were dangerous. Moving cars. Every few
years there would be a terrible accident. In the fourth grade, a local
mother and her three children were killed on their way to school. A few
years later, three teenagers were maimed and paralyzed by a head-on
collision with a tree behind our neighbor’s house. But these horror
stories never penetrated the inside of our own family car, which seemed
infinitely safe, cozy even.
In the months of fear and
shame that followed my being charged with contributing to the
delinquency of a minor, I continuously analyzed my own mind-set that
day, trying to understand how I did something that both a bystander and a
police officer considered criminally dangerous, and the best I could
come up with was the theory that I’d been lulled by nostalgia into a
false sense of security. So many of my childhood memories involved
unsupervised time in cars in parking lots just like the one where I’d
left my son. I wondered in the days after it happened if being back
home, out of the city, had given me a sort of momentary amnesia. I’d
forgotten that more than 25 years had passed since those unsupervised
childhood hours. And a lot could change in 25 years, I thought. People
were always saying how the world was a more dangerous place than it had
been when I was growing up. I had no reason not to believe them. I felt
guilty and ashamed. I felt I’d put my child at risk for my own momentary
convenience. I knew I wasn’t a terrible mother, but I’d done something
terrible, dangerous, and now I’d suffer the consequences, go to court,
pay legal fees, live with a criminal record. This was how I thought
about what had taken place.
At the same time, I didn’t really understand the legal context of what was happening
“I
don’t get it,” I said to the lawyer. “Contributing to the delinquency
of a minor? That makes no sense. It sounds like I was buying him beer.”
He
laughed. He told me he understood my confusion about the charge, but
that it wasn’t that unusual. A few years before, the state had tried to
pass an ordinance that would make it a misdemeanor to leave a child
under 6 alone in a vehicle if the conditions within the vehicle or in
the immediate vicinity of the vehicle presented a risk to the health or
safety of the child. The penalty for a first offense would be a $100
civil penalty, in other words, a ticket. But the legislation didn’t
pass, and so instead, the act of leaving a kid in a car would continue
to fall into a legal gray area. The lawyer explained that the crime of
contributing to the delinquency of a minor included “rendering a minor
in need of services.” So, for example, he said, “If you’d left him there
and not come back, someone from social services would have needed to
come, bring him in, make sure he was safe and such.”
“But I did come back. I came back after a few minutes.”
“A
gray area,” he repeated. Then he went on to remind me that in my case,
it wasn’t just that I’d left him, but that someone had seen me do it and
stood there and recorded it and called the cops and given them the
video.
“A good samaritan,” I said. “They couldn’t have just confronted me directly?”
He
laughed again, then grew serious. “Look,” he said. “Here’s how I look
at it. I’m glad we live in a world where people are watching out for
kids. I’m glad that when someone thinks they’re seeing something wrong
take place, they get involved. But in your case, what happened wasn’t
malicious. It wasn’t neglectful. It was a temporary lapse in judgment.
This is what we need to stress.”
I picture this
concerned someone standing beside my car, inches from my child, holding a
phone to the window, recording him as he played his game on the iPad. I
imagined the person backing away as I came out of the store, watching
me return to the car, recording it all, not stopping me, not saying
anything, but standing there and dialing 911 as I drove away. Bye now.
At this point, almost a year had passed since it happened. I could hear
my lawyer shuffling papers. I looked down and saw that my hands were
shaking. My hands were shaking, but unlike before, I wasn’t afraid. I
was enraged.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It doesn’t sound
to me like I committed the crime I’m being charged with. I didn’t render
him in need of services. He was fine. Maybe I should plead ‘not
guilty,’ go to trial.”
His response was instant and
unequivocal. “I don’t think you want to do that. This is going to be
handled in juvenile court, and the juvenile courts are notorious for
erring on the side of protecting the child.” I can’t remember if he said
it or only implied it, but either way, the warning took root. You
don’t want to lose your kids over this. It was the first time the idea
had skulked out of the darkest, most anxious corners of my mind. My
lawyer and I said we’d talk later. I thought I was going to be sick.
* * *
When
I first began to process what had happened, I worried that, wrong or
right, guilty or innocent, what I’d done, what I’d let happen, would
seem abhorrent to anyone I told, that it was the moral equivalent of
driving drunk, not evil, maybe, but reckless and stupid. Unfortunately,
I’d never been much good at keeping secrets, particularly during periods
of stress (my husband once asked if I’d ever kept anything from
anyone). And so, as the months passed, I told people, and mostly, I was
relieved and surprised by how supportive my friends and family were.
My
parents felt the whole case was overblown and that I hadn’t done
anything any parent over 50 hadn’t done a hundred times. My husband’s
family helped us with the legal costs and put us in touch with friend
who was a lawyer and agreed to talk me through the process. As it turned
out, a similar thing had happened to his sister, and from what he’d
heard it wasn’t uncommon. “These people, I swear, I think they sit in
parking lots waiting for this to happen. If only you could put people in
jail for being jerks.”
Other friends in whom I confided
were equally supportive. One told of an acquaintance who’d had a
similar experience. She’d gone to walk the dog around the block while
her baby was napping and ended up with a year of weekly visits from
DCSF. Another was a high school drama teacher and, after someone
observed him fake-pushing a student in the fight scene of a school play
rehearsal, put him on paid leave until a social worker could interview
him in his home.
And even those friends who’d never had
these harrowing experiences had difficulty believing I had really gotten
into such big trouble. “I mean,” one friend said, comforting me, “were
those like your best five minutes of parenting? No. If you were
nominated for parent of the year and they needed a clip, would you
submit that one? Probably not. But that doesn’t mean you committed a
crime!” Other friends tried to soothe me with stories of their own
errors and oversights. Kids forgotten and then found seven grocery
aisles over, babies rolling off changing tables when Mom went to answer
the phone. And still others tried to make me feel better by reminding me
that regardless of what I had done on that single afternoon, most days I
was a typical, overprotective, over-anxious, neurotic,
independence-stifling, middle-class parent.
Who am I to
judge was, to my surprise and relief, the most common response when I
told people what had happened, though there were one or two exceptions.
When I asked one very close, very dear friend if she thought I’d done
something so terribly bad, she answered somberly,“Well, I think you made
a bad decision.” That was one extreme. At the other end of the
spectrum, a friend who writes and blogs about parenting issues asserted
that the whole thing was ridiculous. “Who in the world hasn’t left their
kid in the car for a minute while they run a quick errand. I’ve done
it!” She grew quiet for a moment, and I thought maybe she was
reconsidering this pronouncement. But when she spoke again it was to
say, “You know who you need to talk to about this? You need to talk to
Lenore Skenazy.”
* * *
I
reached out to Skenazy early this year through a Facebook message, and
she got back to me right away, saying she was happy to talk.
A
former columnist for the New York Daily News and New York Sun, she was
launched into the national spotlight in 2008 when she wrote a column
about her decision to let her 9-year-old son take the subway by himself.
The column resulted in a flood of both outrage and admiration, and
spurred Skenazy to found the Free Range Kids movement, a movement
dedicated to, in Skenazy’s words, “fighting the belief that our kids are
in constant danger.”
As a mother who has often felt as
though my kids are in constant danger, I wasn’t sure what to expect of
her, if I was going to end up talking to a fringe “expert” who would
tell me to forgo seat belts and bike helmets and vaccines to help my
kids toughen up. Instead, Skenazy comes across as calm, direct and
adamant in her ideas.
I asked if I could start by
telling her a little about my story, but I’d hardly finished the
sentence when she interrupted. “Don’t bother,” she said. “Instead, let
me tell you your story.” Apparently, she knew it by heart. “Just let me
close the office door first because my husband’s heard this spiel a
million times. OK, so, you were running errands with your kid when you
decided to leave her in the car for a couple minutes while you ran into a
store. The surrounding conditions were perfectly safe, mild weather and
such, but when you came out, you found yourself blocked in by a cop
car, being yelled at by a nosy, angry onlooker, being accused of child
neglect or endangering your chid. Is that about right?” Skenazy’s heard
it all before. But her demeanor suggested the outrage such charges
elicited in her hadn’t dissipated much over the years since, in response
to her son’s subway ride, news outlets dubbed her “the worst mom in
America.”
We talked for about an hour, and what stuck
with me and surprised me most was not her sympathy, but her certainty,
her utter lack of equivocation or doubt. “Listen,” she said at one
point. “Let’s put aside for the moment that by far, the most dangerous
thing you did to your child that day was put him in a car and drive
someplace with him. About 300 children are injured in traffic accidents
every day — and about two die. That’s a real risk. So if you truly
wanted to protect your kid, you’d never drive anywhere with him. But
let’s put that aside. So you take him, and you get to the store where
you need to run in for a minute and you’re faced with a decision. Now,
people will say you committed a crime because you put your kid ‘at
risk.’ But the truth is, there’s some risk to either decision you make.”
She stopped at this point to emphasize, as she does in much of her
analysis, how shockingly rare the abduction or injury of children in
non-moving, non-overheated vehicles really is. For example, she insists
that statistically speaking, it would likely take 750,000 years for a
child left alone in a public space to be snatched by a stranger. “So
there is some risk to leaving your kid in a car,” she argues. It might
not be statistically meaningful but it’s not nonexistent. The problem
is,” she goes on, “there’s some risk to every choice you make. So, say
you take the kid inside with you. There’s some risk you’ll both be hit
by a crazy driver in the parking lot. There’s some risk someone in the
store will go on a shooting spree and shoot your kid. There’s some risk
he’ll slip on the ice on the sidewalk outside the store and fracture his
skull. There’s some risk no matter what you do. So why is one choice
illegal and one is OK? Could it be because the one choice inconveniences
you, makes your life a little harder, makes parenting a little harder,
gives you a little less time or energy than you would have otherwise
had?”
Later on in the conversation, Skenazy boils it
down to this. “There’s been this huge cultural shift. We now live in a
society where most people believe a child can not be out of your sight
for one second, where people think children need constant, total adult
supervision. This shift is not rooted in fact. It’s not rooted in any
true change. It’s imaginary. It’s rooted in irrational fear.”
The
problem is, I understand irrational fear. In fact, irrational fear and I
are old friends. Some things seem dangerous and others don’t, and
often, it has little to do with statistics or data. No matter how many
people reassure me that flying is the safest form of travel, so much
safer than driving, I will always be more nervous at 30,000 feet than en
route to the airport. Likewise, it won’t matter how many statistics or
how much analysis on low crime rates or the importance of fostering
independence Skenazy or people like her spout; for many parents at this
moment in our culture, leaving kids unsupervised just doesn’t feel safe.
Anything could happen, is a common refrain voiced by such parents. And I
know what they mean. We’ve seen the television movies about abducted
children. We’ve heard the heart-rending stories of kids injured in
carjackings, or forgotten in sweltering cars. And once you imagine
something, imagine what it must have been like for that parent or child
who suffered it, it’s not a great leap to imagine it happening to you or
your child, and then, if you’re like most parents, you will do anything
in your power to prevent it. It’s not a matter of likelihood or
statistical significance, but the terrible power of our imagination.
* * *
The
juvenile courthouse was a long corridor of windows and leather benches
filled with wandering, waiting, quietly agitated families. I went with
both my parents and found the courtroom to which I’d been assigned. In
the courtroom, I kept my legs and arms crossed to keep them from
shaking. My stomach seemed to have its own pulse. But in the end, it all
went as we’d hoped it would. My lawyer had persuaded the prosecutor to
issue a continuance in the case, and he had agreed not to pursue the
charge if, over the course of nine months, I completed 100 hours of
community service and attended parenting education. They presented this
agreement to the judge, who accepted the proposal, and then it was over,
and the next day I flew home, feeling very, very lucky.
The
punishment, in some ways, turned out to be a blessing. I was allowed to
complete my community service at nonprofits I cared about deeply, and
while it made my life a little more hectic, it was overall a positive
experience. For the education I worked privately with a social worker
who always had great ideas about how to incorporate positive discipline
and adopt better strategies for setting limits. The only thing, in fact,
that really bothered me during these probationary months was the impact
the case had on my son.
At the time of the incident, he
never mentioned what had happened, and I assumed that he was unaware,
that the best thing would be not to bring it up. But, of course, kids
are astute observers and somewhere along the line, he figured it out.
I
got out of the car one day to feed the parking meter next to the driver
side window. “Don’t, Mommy. Don’t. The police will come.” I went to let
the dog into our front yard while he was watching his morning cartoon.
“Mommy, no!!! The police.”
One afternoon after his swim
lesson, he came out of the bathroom and for a second didn’t see me — I’d
kneeled down to get his shoes from their cubby. When I looked up he was
crying. “Mommy, mommy, I thought someone was going to steal me.”
That
evening I sat him down and tried to explain it. I told him that he was
right, that mommy had left him in the car for a few minutes one time and
that was a mistake. I wasn’t supposed to do that. But it was all going
to be fine now. Mommy wasn’t going to jail. And no one was going to
kidnap him!
“Most people,” I told him, “are not trying
to hurt you. Most people are good people. Do you understand? You don’t
have to be afraid?”
He nodded slowly, but I could see
from his face that he only half believed me. And as I thought about it, I
questioned if this belief I had in the basic decency of strangers was
part of the problem. Certainly, many of my fellow parents didn’t seem to
share it. We live in a country of gated communities and home security
systems. My sister has both, though she lives in a subdivision with
about a dozen neighbors. We’re told to warn our children not to talk to
strangers. We walk them to school and hover over them as they play and
some of us even put GPS systems on them, confident, I guess, that should
they get lost, no one will help them. Gone are the days of letting kids
roam the neighborhood, assuming that at least one responsible adult
will be nearby to keep an eye out. I’m told there are still things like
carpools and babysitting co-ops, but I’ve never found one. In place of
“It takes a village,” our parenting mantra seems to be “every man for
himself.” Faced with this gulf between my own childhood and the
environment in which I was raising my kids, I couldn’t help but wonder
if it was good that I’d been taught a lesson, reprimanded for something
stubbornly naive or careless in my nature.
In the three
years since it happened, it seems like more and more people are talking
about the crisis of helicopter parenting. In an essay in the Atlantic,
“The Overprotected Kid,” Hanna Rosin writes how “In all [her] years as a
parent, [she’s] mostly met children who take it for granted that they
are always being watched.”
Other publications and
websites and social media outlets and message boards are awash in eight
ways to know if you’re over-parenting, or how to give your kid the
freedom he needs and deserves. Psychologists and social scientists
wonder if we’re not instilling children with a sense of learned
helplessness that makes them into subfunctional, narcissistic young
adults who have an overinflated sense of worth and sensitivity and, more
recently, require trigger warnings on college syllabi.
But
what I always find lacking in these warnings is some explanation, not
only of how expectations have shifted so radically for parents, but of
why they have shifted. The tip-of-the-tongue answer is often that the
world is a more dangerous place than it was a generation ago. But it
doesn’t take much research to debunk this myth and find that nationally,
violent crime rates are lower than they were in the ’70s and ’80s. So
how do we explain that activities that once seemed harmless — letting a
kid play at the park without supervision or sitting in a car for a few
minutes — have now become not only socially taboo but grounds for
prosecution?
A friend and former classmate of mine,
Julia Fierro, spent so much time thinking about these questions of
parental anxiety, she ended up writing a novel on the subject. When I
asked her what answers she came up with, she wonders if everyone doesn’t
have “too much information — parenting books, birthing classes, a
gazillion blogs and parenting sites and magazines, and anonymous online
sites where parents are very judgmental, even when trying to help or
give advice. I think all that info, all the conflicting extreme
philosophies of parenting (attachment parenting vs. cry-it-out and few
moderate philosophies being promoted) makes us not trust
ourselves. Also, most of us who are ambitious young professionals move
far from our families and so have little support or solid community.”
And
maybe because we’re both so isolated and so “ambitious” in our
parenting, we sabotage ourselves with impossible standards, live with a
chronic fear of not measuring up in what’s supposed to be our most
important calling. It’s almost as though, in the course of a few
decades, we’ve all developed a cultural anxiety disorder around our
children, and when I mull over this idea, I don’t feel anger or
indignation over what’s happening, but an awful sort of sympathy.
Of
all the difficult parts of parenting, the hardest for me (and for many
people, I think) is not the fatigue or time drain or chaos of family
life, but the inability to ensure that nothing terrible will ever happen
to my children. This desire to prevent suffering in one’s kids is
stronger than the desire to breathe, stronger than my most basic human
instincts. And yet, no matter how strong the desire, none of us can do
it. We just can’t.
Every day it seems there is less we
can control about their future. The schools are failing, the middle
class is vanishing, super-bugs grow stronger and antibiotics weaker. The
seasons are slipping and I might not recognize the climate of the
planet my kids will come of age in. College education floats further out
of reach. Guns are everywhere. People are often angry and suspicious.
Our food makes us fat and sick.
I can’t control any of
this, so my grip tightens on what I think I can control, on everything
within reach. And yet no matter how firmly I grasp, nothing anyone does
can change the fact that sometimes, children get sick and die, or are
killed in car accidents, or drowned in swimming pools when our backs are
turned for just a second. Sometimes they go to the doctor with a cut on
the leg and expire a few days later of blood poisoning. Sometimes
they’re shot in schools, or become addicted to drugs or take their own
lives. These occurrences are not common, but they happen, and we hear of
them, and because we cannot imagine anything worse, we say, not to me,
not to my child. It’s not going to happen to me.
* * *
My
father told me a story once about a nightmare he had when I was small.
He dreamed he was back in upstate New York where he grew up, and he was
driving in a snowstorm along a deserted highway, me in the back of the
car. He pulled onto the shoulder to check on a tire. A minute later,
when he tried to get back into the car, he realized he’d locked himself
out, and that I was trapped inside in my carseat. It was freezing. The
snow swirled down around him in wild eddies. He banged on the window,
trying to break it. He screamed for help, but there was no one near, no
one to help, only empty fields and darkness.
I never
leave my kids in a car now when I run into a store, and so I know
nothing bad will ever happen to them in a non-moving vehicle. I suppose
every little peace of mind helps. Still, I worry. I worry that when my
husband and I decide our kids are old enough to walk alone to school, be
that in two years or in five, some good samaritan will disapprove and
call the police. I worry what the other parents will think if I hang
back on the bench while my kids are playing at the park, reading a book
instead of hovering over them. I worry that if I let my son play in the
alley with the other kids and don’t follow him down because there are
already eight responsible adults standing around, I’ll be thought of as
the slacker mom who’s not pulling her own. And so I accompany when I
probably don’t need to. I supervise and hover and interfere. And at
least half of the other parents are probably doing it for exactly the
same reason. This is America and parenting is now a competitive sport,
just like everything else.
What do we get if we win? A
kid who will never be hurt of frightened or alone? The promise and
assurance of safety? I’m not that naive.
When I was
little, I believed there was a wolf that lived in my closet, up near the
black plastic bags of old clothes. The wolf spoke perfect English and
told me that if I didn’t count to 20 before I fell asleep he would come
out of the closet and eat my feet. I used to lie in bed, tight beneath
the covers, and count. I knew that if I counted, I’d be safe. It made
sense. One, two, three, four. I counted every night. I never doubted.
As
I was beginning to write this essay, my son, now almost 7, had an
accident. I was cooking dinner while he and my daughter played in the
living room. I had just put a bunch of vegetables into a pan when I
heard him laughing and shouting at his sister, “I’m a ghost, I’m a
ghost.” What I couldn’t see from the kitchen was that he’d tossed the
sofa throw blanket over his head in service of his role play and was
wandering around the room like this, trying to scare his sister. I
didn’t realize until I heard the terrible sound, a sound like a suitcase
tumbling down the stairs. My husband and I both ran to the top. There
was a second, maybe two, when he was lying there under the blanket. Not
me. Not him. I called out his name, ran down the steps. “Oh, my baby.”
He sat up, pulled down the blanket, bruised and shaken but otherwise
fine. More than anything, it was our fear that frightened him. He
started crying. “I’m OK?” he said, a question at first, and then
emphatic. “I’m OK!”
