Who's Afraid to Let Their Kids Go Outside Alone?
What do you do when death is everywhere and your kids have to be...somewhere?
Let me start by saying that I am perpetually scared of my 10-year-old dying. No one is more expansive and imaginative when it comes to envisioning the many ways in which death might come for my beloved child. There are the completely valid and common concerns like a car accident or drowning; there are less common but still valid fears like school shootings and plane crashes; and then there are the objectively unlikely possibilities like “What if a terrorist blows up the Brooklyn Bridge right now, while we’re on it” that spring into my head because that’s just the wonderland of a brain I have. So a few weeks ago, when Curbed ran a story called “The Manhattan Parents Who Won’t Let Their Teens Outside Alone” about how more NYC parents are waiting longer to give their kids the little degrees of freedom that have historically defined growing up in the city, I could relate to a lot of what the parents in the story seemed to be feeling, even if I hated what they were doing to mollify their discomfort.
It’s not even that any of what the story depicted was altogether that damning. The parents in this piece were doing things like walking their teenagers to school and picking them up, a practice that largely used to expire by middle school for most kids in New York. The article mostly takes a passing look at the anxieties of parents who, post-pandemic, can’t seem to break the habits that keep their now-older kids closely tethered to home and to them. It’s a quick peek into helicopter parenting for the pandemic age. Whatever. But what interested me about this story is a question that I’ve been staring down—like fully squared off against, surprised and resentful to suddenly be at odds with this particular challenge—about how to proceed when your anxiety about your kid’s safety becomes irrational, consuming and larger perhaps than your clear-headed belief that it’s necessary and good for parents to support their kids’ developing independence? What do you do when you want to let your kid go off alone, but it goes beyond being uncomfortable and starts feeling like actual danger?
Unlike a lot of parents, I wasn’t this anxious about my kid’s well-being during the early months and years of his life. I can only speculate as to why this is, but my leading there involves a combination of two forces:
Being that I was 25 when he was born, I still retained an underlying belief that everything would generally work out fine for me, that the worst types of suffering in this world would not befall me personally, and that catastrophe and death were more theoretical concerns than immediate ones.
While I absolutely did suffer from postpartum anxiety in the year after he was born, it manifested more as worry about money and fixating on the ways I felt my boyfriend was failing to live up to my expectations of him. Instead of lying awake at night in fear that my baby would stop breathing, I tanked my relationship with his father (which ended up being for the best, but the truth there is my postpartum hormones absolutely took their shit out on him back then).
For years, my child felt so permanent and immovable in the world. He was a fact a concrete as gravity. Even during the few times we ended up in the ER during his first couple of years—once for a febrile seizure and twice for bad bumps to the head—I didn’t panic. I just existed at a resting place of knowing he would be fine.
And this was fortunately, since I always entered into parenting with a firm opinion that one chief job of parents is to prepare their kids to be suitably independent people in the world. As someone who was (especially in my 20s) quite attached to my own independence, I figured the sooner I could raise my kid to be autonomously functional, the sooner I would be able to recapture some of the bandwidth I’d surrendered (happily, but still) to his caretaking, and we would both be thriving. That was the plan.
Which is not to say that every new measure of independence my kid has reached hasn’t stressed me out at times. For instance, when he was ages 3 to 6, we lives in Carroll Gardens in Brooklyn, an almost irritatingly idyllic place to raise a kid. There was a corner market on our block, owned by a nice older couple, that had plants and flowers cascading out of its door onto the sidewalk, that glowed warmly all evening, that had a cat. All the things you’d want. All the things that made a kid feel safe and delighted. He loved it there. So one Saturday afternoon when he was 3 or 4, my friend and I were hanging out with him on our stoop, and he said he wanted Pringles, and we decided to send him up to the corner to buy them on his own. He didn’t have to cross any streets, the shop owners knew him, and we would be able to watch him the whole way, at least until he rounded the corner to enter the store. So we gave him some money, reminded him to say hello and thank you and all that, and send him on his way. (He was beyond thrilled.) It was like we were doing our own Old Enough (a perfect show in every way).
This is an unremarkable story. I watched him trot up to the corner, and held my breath the entire time he was out of view. I was immediately convinced he’d been out of sight for too long. I wasn’t panicking, but I was uncomfortable. And just when I thought I was unable to wait any longer—when I had to go run and see that he was okay—he came bounding back around the corner, headed in our direction, can of Pringles shaking in one hand, dollar bills poking out of the other. And that’s how it always was: me barely keeping my restless nerves in check while permitting calculated moments of risk for the sake of him learning how to be a person in the world; in support of the necessary progression towards independence. It was part of what has been a constant, challenging, ongoing practice of gradually expanding both of our capacities for tolerating more daylight between us as he grew older. And it always worked—until it didn’t.
Perhaps I should’ve anticipated a rising tide of concern over my kid’s well-being as he got older. Sure, in theory, the smaller he is, the more fragile he is, but that innate vulnerability was always immediately tempered by his closeness and my ability to more tightly control what happened to him. I was never worried about him falling onto the subway tracks when he was 3 because I was always right there, holding his hand, making sure that he didn’t. With every year that passes, he gets further away, and soon he’ll be standing on subway platforms alone. The fact that he’ll be residing in a larger, heartier body at the time does nothing to soothe the part of me that doesn’t think he’ll ever be as safe as he was during the years I could move him through the world strapped to my chest.
This progressively worsening fear over my kid’s safety got supercharged last year when I suffered two early miscarriages. It seems like, in the absence of a more fully baked baby to mourn the loss of, my body—which was very much experiencing a loss, whether or not I cognitively went on that journey with it—decided that if one “baby” could die, then they could all die, or something like that. Without being able to perfectly trace the exact path that pregnancy loss took in my brain, I do know it ended up directly in “fear for the seemingly imminent demise of my living child.” And thus, after 10 years of enjoying a baseline assumption that my kid was fine and would always be fine, I was suddenly experiencing a fairly textbook case of postpartum anxiety.
I’m only 7 months out from the miscarriage that precipitated my newfound terror about the many ways I now realize death is coming for my 5th grader, so I certainly don’t have anything resembling meaningful perspective over the situation, let alone resolution. I can say that therapy has been helpful, if for no other reason than it gave me a framework to think about what was going on in my body and mind while I’ve impatiently waited for all systems to normalize, which they slowly but surely have been. At its worst, I felt acute, painful dread—like “the moon is falling out of the sky to crush us all at any moment” urgent dread—just being in the same room as my kid, which of course, felt catastrophic and heartbreaking unto itself. Up until that point, being near him was like snorting Xanax—it was just instantly relaxing and grounding. (OK, maybe that’s not exactly how I would describe snorting Xanax.) That feeling has also started to return, thank fucking god.
While I might be years away from having any true insight into the reproductive hellscape that was last year, I have still learned a few things during this time. One thing is about the body (and my extension, our emotional landscape) and how it’s always inclined to return to a regulated state, and our job, when we are dysregulated, is to, as much as we can, create conditions that help facilitate that return. This is much easier said than done. It is, in fact, wildly painful and excruciatingly slow. It wasn’t the first time I’d experienced feelings of being dysregulated by trauma and loss, and impatient about waiting for things to feel less intensely shitty in my body and brain, but this time the “intensely shitty” feeling was that my literal child was going to literally die any minute, and that I was literally powerless to stop it. It wasn’t just “hard to wait out”—it felt like someone has ripped my spine out through my throat, tied it around my waist, and told me to just hang out like that for a few months.
The second thing I’ve learned: you can’t just decide to stop worrying. This is probably true about any kind of worry, but it seems more pointedly true when it comes to worrying about your children. I have to think there’s something about the way that anxiety (an unhealthy type of worry) so closely resembles the type of vigilance that’s hardwired into every parent. Constantly running real-time risk assessments in your head is part of the deal and a not insignificant part of what makes parenting so exhausting in general. After so many years of calculating risk on your kids’ behalf, crossing the line into an unproductive—or even plainly damaging—degree of fear and rumination can happen quietly, without you realizing it at all. External conditions can subtly prompt your brain to double down on the worrying; they can add new and troubling data points that must be folded into the calculus of everyday safety, and there’s no clear way to know when all the input will simply become too much for our brains to hold without coming off the rails. We have a natural capacity to keep a lookout for natural threats and risks on behalf of our kids, but our natural capacity was just not designed with risks like school shootings and global pandemics in mind. Even if you don’t lose sleep every night over the possibility that your kid is going to get mowed down by an assault rifle during morning circle time, even the passing “god, I hope that doesn’t happen” floating across your mind, if it happens for enough days in a row, for enough years, is enough to accumulate into a corrosive little mass in your mind. Even low-level concerns, when they’re about the life of your child, will eat away at your energy and your sanity on a long enough timeline.
And then, of course, there’s the persistent concern that’s defined this era of parenting. After several years of wondering what the least-damaging path to take in the pandemic—remote learning, which sucks ass by every measure, versus returning to school and risking unknown consequences from covid; continuing to have my kid wear a mask after his classmates stopped; the risk of the isolation that comes with taking precautions versus the risk of the virus that comes with loosening precautions; the stakes feeling impossibly high during the developmentally critical years for my kid, who was 7 when lockdown started—it was no more a mystery to me why parents everywhere might be a little fried, a little instinctively operating in a state of quiet alarm, inclined to keep their kids closer and more protected. It is not a mystery why, last August, I was one miscarriage away from being pushed over some brutal, unseen edge when it came to how I perceived my kid’s safety; that it’s taken months of trying to re-implant into my body and brain the notion that it doesn’t have to be in a permanent state of high alert, looking for the insidious force that’s coming to stomp out the brightest light in my life; that after losing two pregnancies, my animal brain no longer thought of me as someone who had the ability to protect my children. There’s no mystery to any of it. The world actually is so random and so mean, and after the last few years, we parents have less room than before to delude ourselves into thinking it’s within our power to control any of it or to protect our kids from any of it. And so—because what else can we do?—we tighten our grip.
I’m not going to even make an attempt as assuaging anyone’s fears about their kid’s safety. Talking about how crime in cities isn’t actually worse like we’re being made to feel it is, because that ultimately is not what matters here. We’re not contending with the difficult task of shepherding our kids through a world that’s significantly more dangerous now than it used to be (at least not in the ways we think—it might not be more dangerous for your kid to walk home from school unless they happen to be on social media while they’re walking, in which case, yes you have every reason to fear for their wellbeing or even their life). What we’re really up against is our own fear of the unknown, our inability to control everything, to protect our kids from every potential vector of harm. It’s not really a new thing to be a parent and experience this anxiety. It might actually be one of the most timeless conditions of parenting. What is perhaps unique to parenting at this moment—the thing that makes it all feel so much more dangerous—is two things, I would guess:
The pandemic (hate to mention her, but I must!) has been an undeniable reminder that sometimes, the rare and unlikely catastrophes do happen, and they can happen to us. With its unprecedentedly high body count, the pandemic has also been a reminder that death is very fucking real and indiscriminate. It’s hard for any of us to come out of 3 years of covid without a significantly elevated awareness that the worst things do happen and could very well happen to us and our loved ones. It’s a plain, horrible, irrevocably perspective-shifting change. And the more innately fragile someone is—or feels to us—the more this condition becomes amplified. Of course parental anxiety about our kids’ wellbeing feels jacked up now. How could it not?
Time to blame the media! I mean, there’s no sidestepping the fact that massive, sprawling infrastructure exists every day to keep all of us compulsively consuming news, and the traffic numbers don’t lie: the more upsetting the news is, the more we can’t tear ourselves away from it. For parents (for everyone, but I think especially for parents), consuming news that validated and expands our sense of fear (of anything and everything, real and imagined) is perhaps our most common form of self-harm. It’s bad for us, it helps nothing, and we are surrounded by sources of this content, served up in a steady stream by people who profit of our perpetually escalating sense of fear.
The fact is, I don’t know how to navigate the tension between my child’s inherent vulnerability, the ever-increasing amount of independence that his mercilessly increasing age begs for, that I would never deny him, and my strong need for him to live forever and be harmed as little as possible along the way. The tension between these competing realities is, at times, so intense that I think it will rip me apart. And I don’t mean that metaphorically; I literally think I’ll die from it sometimes, that my physical body will be unable to withstand the sensation of watching him grow up (which seems to happen all at once, every day) and having to let him wander further and further from my protective gaze, beyond the reach of my hand, for longer periods at a time. It requires a steady practice of learning to tolerate decreasing amounts of control and increasing potential for fear, which I’m admittedly still at the beginning stages of. This is just another way in which parenting kids requires the constant management of your own growth as well: As he’s learning to be more of a whole person who doesn’t require my guidance or protection all the time, I’m also learning to let him do that; learning to not prioritize my own need to feel in control of his safety over his need to develop into an autonomous person in the world. It sucks and is absolutely necessary.
So in the meantime, until I get better at comfortably letting him go off on his own, I let him go anyway, and I watch the space where he was, hold my breath, and wait for him to come back around the corner.