Picket Fence Post

Well, if you ask columnist Paul Campos, the answer to that question would be a definitive, big fat, “Yes!”

In a recent piece, Campos highlighted the controversy sparked by a New York Sun columnist who admitted that she let her 9-year-old son take the subway by himself. (Her first mistake: Telling people about it. Many modern parents, or at least some of the ones I’ve encountered online, seem ill-equipped to deal with any description of parenting that falls in any way short of perfection.)

While describing the negative feedback the columnist received — attacks calling her a horrible and abusive mother, reckless and stupid . . . one woman asked if the columnist had checked her son’s intended route on the subway and street to see if any registered sex offenders lived along the way – Campos wrote, “All this reflects a more general problem: the many cultural and political forces pushing us to behave like a nation of hysterics.”

After her column ran, Lenore Skenazy, was interviewed on national television under the headline which asked whether she was the “World’s Worst Mom.” Using crime stats to back up her argument that it’s safe to let her son take the subway, Skenazy wrote: “Somehow, a whole lot of parents have become convinced that nothing outside the home is safe. At the same time, many also have become convinced that their children are helpless to fend for themselves. They write their kids off as ‘dreamers,’ when they’ve never given them a real chance to wake up and develop some self-sufficiency.”

Campos totally agreed, saying in his MetroWest Daily News column, “At the beginning of the 21st century, the typical American suburb is just about the safest place that has ever existed in the history of the world — yet it’s full of terrified people.”

Perhaps if we parents let loose our safety death grip that we have on our kids for a moment or two, let them play outside without us hovering around as long as we’ve issued firm instructions that there is to be no wilding or Girls Gone Wild antics or Wild Kingdom action involving killing or biting things, maybe it’ll be good for everyone, including our kids.

So what say you folks . . . do you think today’s parents are too overprotective of our kids?