Round Table: Is there a culture of fear & shame around parenting?

We haven't done one of these in a while, so let's do one now. The topic for this one is based on this article in the New York Times: Motherhood in the Age of Fear . Read it and then come back to this post and let us know what you think!

Some of the topics touched on in the article:

- Are parents putting their own needs to feel their children are safe (e.g. the risk is not mitigated or can't be mitigated) over what is actually best for their children? 

- This quote: “I don’t know if I’m afraid for my kids, or if I’m afraid other people will be afraid and will judge me for my lack of fear.”

-Criminalizing leaving children unsupervised is another way of criminalizing poverty, as in the case of the woman who let her child play in a park across the street one day while she was at work, or the woman who left her children in a car (not babies, and not in danger from the heat) to go to a job interview. (This shocked me, because when I was a kid, which statistically more dangerous than today, I'd ride my bike to play a park a mile away from my parents' house all the time even at age 8 and 9 and no one thought twice about it.)

-A study demonstrated that people's views on how dangerous leaving a child alone was were based on their moral judgements of the reason why, even though the scenarios presented the exact same level of actual risk.

-People judge mothers much more harshly than fathers. People judge mothers, period:

"These women’s critics insist that it’s not mothers they hate; it’s just that kind of mother, the one who, because of affluence or poverty, education or ignorance, ambition or unemployment, allows her own needs to compromise (or appear to compromise) the needs of her child. We’re contemptuous of “lazy” poor mothers. We’re contemptuous of “distracted” working mothers. We’re contemptuous of “selfish” rich mothers. We’re contemptuous of mothers who have no choice but to work, but also of mothers who don’t need to work and still fail to fulfill an impossible ideal of selfless motherhood. You don’t have to look very hard to see the common denominator."

- Another quote from the article: "We read, in the news or on social media, about children who have been kidnapped, raped and killed, about children forgotten for hours in broiling cars. We do not think about the statistical probabilities or compare the likelihood of such events with far more present dangers, like increasing rates of childhood diabetes or depression. Statistically speaking, according to the writer Warwick Cairns, you would have to leave a child alone in a public place for 750,000 years before he would be snatched by a stranger. Statistically speaking, a child is far more likely to be killed in a car on the way to a store than waiting in one that is parked. But we have decided such reasoning is beside the point. We have decided to do whatever we have to do to feel safe from such horrors, no matter how rare they might be.

And so now children do not walk to school or play in a park on their own. They do not wait in cars. They do not take long walks through the woods or ride bikes along paths or build secret forts while we are inside working or cooking or leading our lives."