The Conversation

Responses and reverberations

THE OVERPROTECTED KID

For the April cover story, Hanna Rosin described a new, less constrictive playground style to highlight a societal shift: the rising preoccupation with children’s safety has stripped childhood of independence, risk taking, and discovery. The overwhelming majority of parents who responded to the article agreed. The Huffington Post’s Philip K. Howard said the article “should be required reading for all parents.”

I grew up in the 1960s, and played in the woods. So when my 10-year-old daughter asked me whether she could play in the woods near our house, I said yes. One day she was invited to a birthday party at a house not far from ours. She walked to the party with a friend, and I gave them permission to stop off in the woods on their way home, provided they called me when they left. This did not sit well with the birthday-party hostess, who called me in distress to tell me that my daughter and her friend had left on their own. “I know,” I said. “They were going to play in the woods,” she said, her voice rising. “I know,” I said. Over my objections, she dispatched several adults to search the woods, and she called the police. My daughter and her friend emerged from their detour to find two cop cars, a gaggle of curious classmates, and half a dozen semi-hysterical mothers. My daughter was terrified that she’d done something wrong, even though we assured her she hadn’t. After that, she rarely ventured into what had been her childhood kingdom.

Sanity cannot return soon enough.

Tracy Thompson
Bowie, Md.

One problem is that even if you don’t overschedule your kids and instead allow them freedom to run around the neighborhood, no other parent is doing the same thing, so your kid has no one to run around the neighborhood with.

Your choice as a parent comes down to either watching your kid mope around the house because all the other kids are busy with karate, soccer, tutoring, etc., or signing him up for stuff so he won’t be alone.

missjay
TheAtlantic.com comment

No matter what you do as a parent, you’re doing it wrong. It’s either overprotection or gross negligence. There’s nothing in between. If you don’t discipline your kids every time they’re loud or misbehave, you’re spoiling them for life and letting them become selfish anarchists; but if you tell them what to do, you’re killing their self-esteem and/or their sense of right and wrong. And whatever you do (or don’t do), it’ll permanently damage your child.

Matthias
TheAtlantic.com comment

The questions that Hanna Rosin raises are not as simple as she makes them out to be.

In the neighborhood where I grew up, there was an undeveloped wooded area where bands of boys congregated, built paths and forts, took risks, and tested ourselves. In many ways it was a glorious place. But also in those woods, far from the prying eyes of the adults, I was sexually molested by several of the older boys. I never told my parents, or any other adult, about this experience. It had happened in the woods; it did not seem at the time to translate to the adult world.

As a parent and a psychotherapist, I understand now that the degree and nature of parental involvement in children’s lives is always a moving target, always a matter of balance. But in the end it is not really that much of a mystery. Attachment theory (which is oddly absent from the article) makes it clear that healthy exploration in children is made possible by the presence of the safe base that comes with a secure attachment.

Andrew Peterson
Missoula, Mont.

The number of children we have today may play a role. In my parents’ generation, kids had half a dozen to a dozen siblings. Parents provided food and shelter, but playtime was something the kids had to figure out for themselves. Now there are fewer eggs in the basket, and all our attention as parents is on them.

Jayanth Raman, Ph.D.
Mountain View, Calif.

Hanna Rosin says, “The real cultural shift has to come from parents.” In one sense that’s right—it’s unlikely that the culture will change if the bulk of parents are against it. But it is wrong to frame the issue as solely a matter of parental choices. Many of the underlying causes of the decline in childhood freedoms—traffic growth, media scaremongering, institutional risk aversion, breakdowns in levels of trust and neighborliness—are beyond the influence of individuals. Children’s freedoms need to be part of a collective vision of a “good enough” childhood. And we need a broad movement—including educators, community leaders, and decision makers, as well as parents—to put that vision into practice.

Tim Gill
TheAtlantic.com comment

IS STOP-AND-FRISK WORTH IT?

In April, Daniel Bergner examined stop-and-frisk, asking whether the law-enforcement practice is effective, whether it’s fair, and how it could be improved. One former New York City police lieutenant wrote in, “This is an important article that should be read by mayors and police chiefs everywhere.” A debate at theatlantic.com/stopandfrisk covered everything from racial discrimination to the effect of lead-based-paint exposure on crime rates.

Frank Zimring’s comment about removing testosterone from these stops is an important point. There is no reason these stops cannot be done in a polite, respectful way. Police need to be trained in tone of voice, body language, and, as one of the teenagers interviewed says, “people skills” in general.

I rode with our city’s police and taught in our local police academy. My impression was that the most-effective officers were those who treated everybody in the public domain with respect. I think many of the objections to stop-and-frisk would diminish in direct proportion to a decrease in officers’ engaging in “ceremonies of dominance.”

Charles Croll
Binghamton, N.Y.

Good police departments can conduct searches without violating the Constitu-tion when they don’t have reasonable, articulable suspicion: just ask! Consent is one of policing’s most powerful and least utilized tools.

As noted in his article, Bergner found lots of evidence that people will comply if they are just treated decently; police would have the added advantage of not alienating the law-abiding population.

The war on crime/drugs/terror/etc. has unnecessarily eroded many important Fourth Amendment protections in this age of government overreach. It is time to put the genie back in the bottle.

Tristan Bonn
Former Omaha Public-Safety Auditor
Omaha, Neb.

The first time I was stopped, two friends and I were sitting in a car talking. A police car pulled up, and the officers told us to get out of the car. They started to frisk us; when I protested, I was roughed up. All three of us were arrested and held overnight but never charged. This was 1976 in suburban Boston. I was a junior in high school, on the honor roll and a National Merit finalist.

The second time, in 1984, I was a clean-cut, neatly dressed Ph.D. student at the University of California at Berkeley. I was taking a walk in a wooded area of the campus to get away from my lab for a while when I was approached by a campus policeman, who asked what I was doing. When I explained, he gave me a strange look, then suddenly threw me against a fence, handcuffed me, and shoved me into the back of his car. At the station, I demanded that my research director be called to identify me, and was soon released with no charges.

Incidentally, I am white.

Stop-and-frisk seems to be a lot older than this article suggests, and much more widespread. Perhaps the real imperative is to curtail stops that are sadistic or stupid in origin.

Daniel F. Milam
Augusta, Maine

Though I’m glad that crime rates have dropped, when I try to imagine myself, a middle-class white male, being randomly stopped by the police and told to put my hands on a squad car, spread my legs, empty my pockets, and allow a cop to search me—in front of my friends and neighbors—well, I would stop caring so much about falling crime rates. The humiliation felt by the victims of stop-and-frisk must be unbearable.

If this practice is going to continue, my suggestion would be, first, in agreement with one of the victims quoted at the end of the article, to be nicer and more civil during the searching process. Develop a mandatory protocol that includes an introduction such as “My name is Officer Jones”; a respectful “May we please ask you to allow us to search your person?”; and “We’re sorry for the inconvenience and we thank you for your cooperation.”

That, and start searching more white guys like me.

Scott Durkee
Vashon Island, Wash.

IN DEFENSE OF EMPIRE

Robert D. Kaplan argued in April that empires “ensure stability and protect minorities better than any other form of order.”

Robert D. Kaplan makes some valid observations about the ethnic and nationalistic strife following the dismantling of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. It can be argued, though, that the instability of the Middle East is traceable to the artificial boundaries of the nation-states created by the colonialist British and French. We should remember the comment of the great Roman historian Tacitus on the much vaunted Pax Romana: “To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.” Kaplan ignores the disastrous effects on native peoples caused by the European colonization of the Americas, the intentional transformation of India by British tariff policies from a wealthy civilization exporting fine textiles into a deindustrialized plantation economy, and the unmitigated impoverishment of the Irish people caused by centuries of British subjugation. History is seldom a case of black and white, but imperialism’s shade of gray is a very dark one.

Philip Kuttner
San Francisco, Calif.

Kaplan’s claim that empires “protect minorities better than any other form of order” is breathtaking in its audacity and horrifying in its implications.

We should check with the Ukrainians under Stalin’s Soviet Union on just how much protection that empire afforded them; we might ask the Australian Aborigines, the Irish, or the Scottish Gaels how well they feel they were protected by the British Empire; perhaps Native Americans would have a kind word for the protection offered by the nascent American or the burgeoning Spanish empires; the Armenians might lend a word in support of the imperial protection they received at the hands of the Ottomans.

And this is supposed to be an improvement upon what? Some vague unpredictability “beyond their borders”? We should not wish to confer these benefits of predictability upon any people, nor should we wish to engage in such an immoral, evil enterprise.

Michael McIntyre
Crestline, Calif.

I read “In Defense of Empire” and wondered whether Robert D. Kaplan might have sent an advance copy to Vladimir Putin.

Steve Mosley
Cape Girardeau, Mo.

Robert D. Kaplan replies:

“Largely under the relative peace assured by the great empires that were built following the Axial Age … came the beginnings of a series of movements which are spoken of as the great historical religions.” So writes Marshall G. S. Hodgson, the mid-20th-century University of Chicago historian of the Middle East.

Indeed, the undeniable fact is that empires have dominated much of political history going back to early antiquity, and they did so because they offered, in relative terms, a more practical means of geographical organization than any other. Most civilizational advancements occurred under empires. The Golden Age of Islam was an imperial one, primarily under the Abbasids, and later in reduced measure under empires like those of the Fatamids and Hafsids. The Mongols were cruel, but who did they subjugate or destroy: other empires—the Abbasid, Khwarazmian, Bulgarian, Song, and so on. Before the European empires in Africa there were indigenous African ones of the Mali, Songhai, Akan, and others, complete with their own cultural achievements.

So, as I wrote, to call empires going back thousands of years merely “evil and nothing more is, broadly speaking, lazy and ahistorical.” In my 2010 book, Monsoon, I write thousands of words about the cruelties of the Portuguese and the Dutch in the Greater Indian Ocean. But the polities they overtook were often empires and imperial-like city-states themselves: only indigenous Eastern ones. The serious question is, Was there a viable, identifiable, and—in recent centuries—modernizing political alternative to empires for much of that history? For even the Dutch and Portuguese brought the navigable rimland of Eurasia in stages to greater unity and coherence, from which globalization under the British later emerged. You must judge empires by the standards of their time; not by our own. Rome, as I indicated, was “cruel beyond measure,” but offered civilizational advancements unequaled in the Greater Europe of antiquity.

Given the alternatives, the Hapsburgs and Ottomans provided a measure of protection for minorities consistent with the values of their eras. The Armenian genocide did not occur under the Ottoman Empire per se, but under the Young Turk nationalists who were in the process of superseding the Ottomans. Monoethnic nationalism more than multiethnic imperialism led to that event.

As for the world we inhabit today, it is still in significant measure an American imperial one. With all the turmoil, the stability that does exist is largely because of an American air and naval armature that, by any historical standards, is imperial in its breadth. Thus, what I am proposing in the essay is a cautiously expansive foreign policy that finds broad public support.

CORRECTIONS

“Hitler’s Airport,” by Nathaniel Rich (April), stated that the Lido movie theater was in East Berlin. In fact, the Lido was in West Berlin. The article also stated that the Tempelhof airport was slated for demolition in 2008. The airport had been designated a historic landmark, which means it could not have been slated for demolition.

“Big in … Lebanon,” by William Brennan (May), stated that Sandra Hassan is working with International Crisis Group to develop a new version of her app. In fact, she is working with International Crisis Watch.