This year, minors won't be allowed into the State Fair of Texas after 5 p.m. without a chaperone. This is a sad sign of the times. Kids are losing places to...
Marla Calico, president and CEO of the International Association of Fairs and Expositions, told us there was a spate of similar incidents across the country when fairs started to reopen after COVID-19. Most involved teens. Many involved attempts to incite panic, she said. In March, several people were injured when kids started a stampede at theWe certainly can’t blame the fair for wanting to keep visitors safe. That’s what good hosts do.
But we can’t help lament the loss of another unsupervised space young people desperately need to learn how to become mature adults.Much research has been done in recent years about the effects of limiting kids’ agency and unsupervised play. Books likeThe Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure
by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have challenged assumptions about parents’ duties to protect kids from reasonable harm and failure, especially older children and teens.Haidt, who spoke recently at the Tate Lecture Series at Southern Methodist University, has a practice of asking his audiences what age they were when their parents let them leave home unattended. It’s interesting to see the responses.
These days, kids are not left unsupervised very often, and, if they are, there is an electronic babysitter from a phone to a video game that keeps them occupied. There have been cases where leaving kids without chaperones has been grounds for harassment and even arrest.And while serious neglect certainly damages and endangers kids, so does overprotectiveness.
That’s even more salient when considered in the context of steadily improving child safety. Rates of child mortality, missing children and vehicle-pedestrian accidents have all been on a decadeslong decline, according to reporting byBut it’s hard to convince parents of that when they also see reports of school shootings and
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