Here’s Reason magazine:
It was a little more than a year ago—right before Thanksgiving, as COVID-19 raged—that Jessica committed her crime: She let her 7-year-old son and his friend, age 5, play at the park while she went to buy a turkey.
For this, she faced criminal charges, as well as being listed for 25 years on Arizona’s Central Registry, a secret blacklist that functions similarly to the sex offender registry but is less publicly accessible.
I never knew that my parents were child abusers!
I’ve had many discussions with people about this issue, and heard numerous horror stories such as the one mentioned here. Parents who grew up in foreign countries (where kids are often still allowed our alone) are especially perturbed by our safety-obsessed culture. But even non-immigrant Americans seem to miss the old days when kids could roam free. Almost everyone I speak with believes we’ve become way too overprotective.
But that’s not what I wish to discuss today. Rather, I’m interested in another question. Why isn’t this a political issue? Lots of people have their lives damaged by this sort of overreaction. Yet I never see candidates in either party take sides on this issue, either pro or con.
Other restrictions on freedom quickly become political. When parks were closed due to Covid, lots of people (rightly) complained. Why isn’t there a big debate over whether parks should be closed to children playing alone?
One answer might be that the public is pretty content with the status quo. Based on numerous conversions I’ve had, however, just the opposite seems to be true. But people seem fatalistic, as if a cloud from outer space descended on our culture and changed our attitudes toward childhood. As if nothing can be done about it.
So what determines why some issues become political while others do not? Have you ever seen two candidates debate whether kidney donors should received monetary compensation? That regulation kills as many as 40,000 people a year. Maybe that’s because everyone is on one side. But not everyone is on the same side regarding pot legalization, and yet I almost never see two candidates argue over the issue in a political debate. Ditto for physician-assisted suicide. Other social issues pop up and quickly become political flash points, such as trans rights. But pot legalization remains mostly ignored by politicians on both sides. Gay rights were not an issue when gay sex was illegal (and why not?) Rather it become an issue when specific questions such as gays in the military and gay marriage became contentious.
I’m sure there’s a rational explanation for all of this. Presumably candidates do a cost/benefit calculation when considering which issues to discuss and which to ignore. I’m just not sure what that calculation involves.
PS. Note to commenters. This post is not about the best way to raise one’s children; it’s about what determines when an issue becomes political.
PPS. Photo from epSos.de
READER COMMENTS
Alan Goldhammer
Dec 26 2021 at 8:48am
AFAIK, the issue first surfaced in this area way back in 2015 in Silver Spring, MD. I share Scott’s view regarding the idiocy of this and am not sure that it’s political but rather a result of a society that has become incredibly risk averse so much so that they want to force views on others. The same thing applies to various ‘imposed’ restrictions resulting from Covid. There is a lengthy article in today’s WaPo about mask mandates in Enid OK and another about how states are passing legislation that curbs local public health officials ability to deal with disease outbreaks.
Much of the current fight centers around individual freedom versus societal responsibility. I am quite pessimistic that this will lead to a good outcome. Maybe it is “political” as Scott posits; I am not so sure, I think it is more tribal.
Komori
Dec 26 2021 at 9:48am
I would contend that it is a political issue, just not a campaign issue. There are a lot of things like that; the government is big and intrusive enough that just about everything is political.
Which is also why not everything is a campaign issue. Time is always going to be the limiting factor, and there’s never going to be enough of it to touch on everything. Politicians are as risk averse as anyone, so they’re mostly going to stick with what’s already been done.
At some point someone may come along to push against this kind of thing, and will probably gain some success as long they pick the correct issue, at which point there will be many imitators and whatever issue will become a campaign issue.
For that matter, this is part of why Trump was successful. He was willing to say things that many people were thinking but career politicians would not say. The incredibly vitriolic response he got is probably not going to do much to incentive politicians to follow this path…
john hare
Dec 26 2021 at 11:08am
It seems to me that the break point is when a politician can profit by it. “Looking out for your children” to get votes just as “cracking down on crime” gets them. If there’s no political profit, it doesn’t become political.
Peter Gerdes
Dec 26 2021 at 2:56pm
Short answer: politicians amplify messages that unify and galvanize their coalition while avoiding taking positions on emotional issues which split their coalition unless they are forced to do so. Well that, and no politician ever wishes to champion an unpopular issue nor and even raising the question of something like paying for organ donation is to imply that it’s at least a position worthy of consideration.
After all, in a two party system, you are far more likely to convince some members of your party to stay home or throw away their vote than you are to persuade some of the other guys to cross party lines. The cases you mention all tend to be things that cross cut (conservatives are anti-regulation but also tend to be relatively judgemental about improper child rearing) , places where one side is *far* more popular (sadly paying people for organs) so
Rajat
Dec 26 2021 at 9:19pm
What makes an issue political clearly depends on the country. Abortion and gun rights/regulation is highly political in the US but barely so in other western countries. Australia has compulsory voting and I read somewhere the median/ swing voter here is a white 30-something woman with young children. Hence, open playgrounds, subsidised childcare and school funding are important; kidney transplants and pot legalisation not so much. I think gay marriage became political as these women progressively found themselves working alongside gay men in stereotypically female professions such as teaching, nursing and hospitality and were struck by the injustice. Helicopter parenting has become a form of middle-class virtue-signalling, so just as no one wants to be ‘called out’ for second-guessing other forms of virtue-signalling, no one is particularly keen to stick their necks out by pushing hard for old free-range norms. A more benign, demographic reason might be people have fewer children these days and spend huge amounts more time with them, so the value of those they do have is higher and therefore parents are prepared to take fewer risks with them.
Scott Sumner
Dec 26 2021 at 11:14pm
“A more benign, demographic reason might be people have fewer children these days and spend huge amounts more time with them, so the value of those they do have is higher and therefore parents are prepared to take fewer risks with them.”
This is based on the premise that people agree with the restrictions. But almost everyone I speak with seems opposed to the current rules. That’s why I’m confused about the politics.
Rajat
Dec 27 2021 at 5:00pm
This was the bit of your post I was least convinced by. How old are the people you’re talking to? The most relevant opinions are those of mothers with 5-9 year old children. These women in the US (now in their early-mid 30s) were themselves mostly born in the mid-late 1980s and were at outdoor playing age in the early-mid ’90s. I think attitudes had already changed a fair bit by then.
Rajat
Dec 27 2021 at 5:05pm
…Which is not to say a sizeable minority of such women (10-20%) may favour free-range parenting, but my point is that the median mother is not for turning and so the free-rangers don’t push hard because they don’t want to signal ‘bad mother’.
Scott Sumner
Dec 27 2021 at 6:40pm
I’d guess that at least 50% of parents have not vaccinated their kids. Do they think playing in a park is more dangerous (at the margin) than Covid?
Rajat
Dec 27 2021 at 7:59pm
Then maybe where I live is quite different to Orange County. In Australia, 12-15 yo were only allowed to get vaccinated from September 13; yet 83.5% in my state of Victoria and 78.3% in New South Wales (the most-affected states) have already been fully vaccinated: https://twitter.com/covidbaseau/status/1475425644137779202
In Victoria’s case, a higher rate of 12-15s have been vaccinated than people in their 20s, even though 20-somethings have been eligible for longer.
Matthias
Dec 26 2021 at 9:49pm
Skatestarcodex had a few pieces touching on this. Eg the Toxoplasmosis of Rage.
A big part of politics is signaling, and reasonable issues make for weak signalling?
Monte
Dec 26 2021 at 10:07pm
It’s all very circular, isn’t it? Cultural conflict causes social activism, and social activism causes an issue to become political. People on both sides of any conflict believe they’re right, so politics (the art of compromise) is required to resolve it. But compromise usually means sacrificing one right in the hope of retaining another, often ending in the loss of both (Tryon Edwards), which brings us full circle back to cultural conflict.
Media bias and congressional deadlock has resulted in a growing distrust of the government and each other. Further, Paul Craig Roberts maintains that the Biden Administration will be America’s first totalitarian government. And under totalitarian regimes, everything becomes political. Is there anything that hasn’t been politicized in America today?
Unfortunately, most Americans aren’t ready to embrace libertarianism, which Prof. Sumner sees as the ideology that tries to make fewer things political.(When the Personal Becomes Political: Scott Sumner).
Scott Sumner
Dec 26 2021 at 11:16pm
“Further, Paul Craig Roberts maintains that the Biden Administration will be America’s first totalitarian government.”
This might be a good reason to spend less time reading Paul Craig Roberts?
Monte
Dec 27 2021 at 9:56am
This might be a good reason to spend less time reading Paul Craig Roberts?
I don’t, usually. But I think the anti-semitic, cynical old conspiracy theorist just may have stumbled onto something here. Regardless, as a fellow economist, don’t you think he deserves a little professional courtesy?
Scott Sumner
Dec 27 2021 at 6:36pm
Given the views that you said are hold by Roberts, my response was relatively polite. If someone makes an absurd claim, how am I supposed to respond?
Monte
Dec 27 2021 at 8:06pm
Just a little sarcasm. No offense meant. But I’m not sure I would dismiss PCR’s view as absurd that this administration is (at least behaving) totalitarian.
Phil H
Dec 26 2021 at 10:10pm
I don’t know if this is right, but one possibility is: An issue will not become political as long as there is no good solution, because a politician needs to be able to stand up and say: X is the problem, and I will do Y. Y needs to be something that could just about work, and sounds OK to most people.
With the child neglect thing, it just seems fiendishly difficult to devise a definition of neglect that you can stand up and say on TV, and not immediately attract a cascade of “what-ifs”. Similarly for kidney transplants.
Minority rights become political because the majority is not much affected by most of the issues, so there are majority-acceptable solutions on both sides.
Mark Z
Dec 27 2021 at 11:32pm
I don’t think that it’s so much that it’s difficult to come up with a solution, so much as that the solution is too close to a ‘third rail’ that uninformed voters, even those that agree with the consensus solution, would still punish a politician who took the position. Nearly everyone may agree that certain types of ‘neglect’ should not be considered neglect, but once a politician enacts that policy, and inevitably some one-in-a-billion incident where a kid dies and their opponent leverages it, even the voter that thought it was a good idea will punish them.
I think reforming sex offender registries is actually the best example of an issue like this that will never become political. Everyone agrees that are certain kinds of offenses for which people are unfairly put on the registry. The fix would be fairly easy. But any politician who pursues the obvious reform opens himself up to being accused of going easy on sex offenders (technically correct), and enough voters won’t even bother to discover that the policy is perfectly reasonable to make the issue poisonous. In short I think these are issues where there’s actually a pretty clear solution, but they sit uncomfortably close to issues that elicit such strong responses.
BC
Dec 27 2021 at 2:55am
Perhaps, there is no natural constituency with a concentrated interest in letting kids play alone in parks. Although one might point to parents of young children, their children don’t stay young for long. Most college kids are probably opposed to the 21-yr-old drinking age but lose interest in the issue once they turn 21, long before they gain enough know-how about how to be politically effective.
Park closings (along with other Covid restrictions), gay rights, and trans rights are hot-button issues because they are all special instances of a broader pre-existing progressive effort, and conservative opposition, to redesign mainstream life, which progressives believe damages the environment, spreads disease, and perpetuates privilege and systemic discrimination. Conservatives would care a lot more about letting children play alone in parks if progressives started lecturing parents not to let their guards down because The Science says that they need to do their part in hovering over their kids not just for their kids’ benefit but for everyone else’s too. Progressives would advocate for paid kidney donations if it turned out that, historically, slave owners were allowed to sell kidneys but slaves weren’t and bans on kidney sales were just a way to perpetuate white supremacy. (As it is, progressives are probably more likely to view paid kidney donations as benefiting wealthy recipients and “exploitive” of donors. The Spontaneous Order emerging from voluntary exchange is, by definition, too mainstream.)
steve
Dec 27 2021 at 1:44pm
I think you are close. I would say things get political when there are clear tribal lines. In this case you dont have that. There are some do gooder lefties that would support the legal action against this woman. There also some religious conservatives who would support the legal action against her. Without clear tribal lines it doesn’t get political.
Which is not to say it cant become political. If all of a sudden some prominent celebrity from one tribe made a big deal out of this and suggested even stricter punishment I think that you could easily see pushback from the other side and find people giving up their principles to support their own tribe.
Steve
Patrick Tehan
Dec 27 2021 at 8:18am
No one wants to go out on that limb alone. Your kids might not have anyone to play with. We all have to fumble around until we realize there are enough like-minded people willing to speak. It’s a bit like the left finally realizing that they’re not the only ones in their tribe who have discovered that cloth masks don’t help much.
Joe
Dec 29 2021 at 2:47pm
I would suggest 2 reasons
1. People get so embarrassed that they don’t want want publicly out themselves. A large percentage of people basically judge things by what an authority has said about them.
2. Even though technically it could happen to anyone it is a freak and rare occurrence
3. The type of people likely to get caught up in this absurdity are likely not able to fight back.
I would suspect mostly 1.
Interestingly, I would say we are bother overprotective and underprotective of children at the same time, just looking at abuse statistics…
MikeDC
Dec 30 2021 at 9:45am
The fact that this is such an unasked question is interesting and perhaps telling itself. I’d make a couple observations:
1. The specifics of the cited problem are with respect to “child neglect” but the more general frame is police and prosecutorial discretion. It’s the age-old story of misapplication of a generally agreed upon law. I’d argue that these sorts of things are always problems, but the only possible politically imposed solution is to remove discretion. Which would likely lead to more horror-story cases.
2. The other aspect of this which merits attention is the power (or lack thereof) of supervisors to push back on the poor or stupid use of this discretion. In a sane world, the woman in this story would have reached the police station, the sergeant or police captain would have vigorously apologized for the stupidity of his officers, and never let this come to the attention of a DA. And the DA would obviously never charge this woman.
So what’s really going on here is that the institutional interests… the interests of the police and the DA are served by screwing this woman over and processing her through the “administration of justice” rather than by simply doing the right thing. To them, she’s another arrest and another successful child neglect conviction.
What sort of political solution is there to that? I don’t think there is one, except, broadly speaking, to encourage politicians to use their discretion weigh in on bureaucrats in favor of leniency and common sense in using their own discretion. But of course, that’s not an issue anyone can run on, because it’s an issue that every politician would readily assent to.
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