This trend toward punitive attacks on mothering styles has a lot to do with lost ground in women’s rights, to the point where a female parent’s decisions are open to criticism and criminal charges from everyone else:
I grew up in the ’70s, when we kids were expected to entertain ourselves, which meant, largely, that we were left on our own. I sometimes walked home from elementary school by myself; when my mother was pursuing her undergraduate degree at the same time, we were often left for long periods under the supervision of my teenaged brother. Being home alone after school was routine for my latchkey friends. The tiny county jail would not have been able to fit all the moms who left kids napping in the car while they ran into the grocery store.
A beloved professor told me that in order to get her PhD while being the mother of five, she had to take her youngest to school with her — and she let him play in the halloutside the lecture room while she attended class. “What else was I supposed to do?” she said. She laughed, also, surveying the no-trimester-is-too-early-to-start-the-Baby-Einstein-tapes of women of my generation. “We didn’t even talk to babies back then — we thought they wouldn’t understand!” Her children survived and even went to Harvard. Her parenting strategy 20 years ago showed pluck, can-do-ness, and other admirable traits, not unlike my mother’s letting my brother cook us no-bake cheesecake for all our meals for weeks at a time.
Now, the same things are seen as a crime — “neglecting” or “endangering” your child. No matter if it’s in service for something necessary like a job, more education, or to put food on the table. Or that affluent white people fudge on their addresses to jockey for a better school district, and while they do sometimes get caught, I’ve yet to hear of a case where someone’s been forced to pay restitution, never mind been arrested as happened to Tanya McDowell.
And where are these so-called arbiters of correct parenting coming from? It seems all one has to do is add a little race or class difference to a dollop of self-righteousness (I’m doing it for the children!), and you’re off to the races in the 9-1-1 race. Did the so-called good Samaritan who came across Debra Harrell’s daughter in the park — she’d been happily playing there without incident for three days — think to have a little talk with the mother, to express her misgivings? Maybe help her find a babysitter, or replace the daughter’s laptop, which had been stolen, and was the whole reason she had asked to play in the park instead of playing on the computer inside her mother’s workplace? Or, did all this woman see was a child of a black mother, a poor mother (her job was at McDonald’s) and whatever smorgasbord of stereotypes she wished to attach to that?
Shanesha Taylor was summoned for an interview for a promising job; with no childcare, she felt the potential benefit of this job was worth the risk to leave her kids in her car during the interview, the kind of risk/reward calculation that mothers make every second of the day. She did a great job at the interview, won the job, and her children were fine. This could have been a happy ending to a story of struggle for this embattled family had the woman who saw the kids in the car alone talked to the mother instead of immediately calling the cops.
Make no mistake, this behavior is not about the children, it is about punishment — for being poor, for being of color, for having children at all, for not living up to the accuser’s standards of perfect parenting. Many of these child protection laws have no guidelines, which leaves them open for interpretation and unequal and unjust application. On a purely empirical level, the thought of Debra Harrell’s daughter playing alone at the park might be unnerving and seemingly at risk of stranger abduction, but it is statistically safe, actually much safer than an affluent mom driving her kid to summer camp — ergo, it’s the rich mom driving to camp whose daughter should be in the custody of social services at least as much as Harrell’s.
The Onion said it best with their headline, “Woman A Leading Authority On What Shouldn’t Be In Poor People’s Grocery Carts.”
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On my accuser’s face at Whole Foods, I saw an “I care so much about the children” mask — it was not concern about my son the individual. He was not being physically abused or kidnapped or endangered in any way. If we had been in the privacy of our own home, this is how we would have escorted our son to his room for a time-out. Thus, how would he have been “helped” by this lady if indeed the cop had arrested us? J would have been left alone, needing his pain medicine for his gut and confused and stressed. It would have taken a difficult but stable everyday situation and made it terrible for all parties — and for no reason. For us, we had the luck of the draw — an autism-savvy cop, the positive-parenting visuals of Whole Foods, Volvo, college professors — and the fact our son had calmed down.
If you’re worried about something going on between a parent and her child, by all means, get involved if you think it necessary. But short of a child being kidnapped or injured in front of your face, you might want to start from a place of openness, empathy and concern. Don’t stand far away, launch an emotional drone via police to search-and-destroy. You think you might be helping, but remember, sometimes what you see as a crime is just a parent doing the best that she can, and even a false, disproved accusation inflicts lasting damage.
