I read about america’s worst mom when she became famous last year. She has a book out.

The media dubbed me “America’s Worst Mom.” (Go ahead—Google it.) But that’s not what I am.

I really think I’m a parent who is afraid of some things (bears, cars) and less afraid of others (subways, strangers). But mostly I’m afraid that I, too, have been swept up in the impossible obsession of our era: total safety for our children every second of every day. The idea that we should provide it and actually could provide it. It’s as if we don’t believe in fate anymore, or good luck or bad luck. No, it’s all up to us.

Childhood really has changed since today’s parents were kids, and not just in the United States. Australian children get stared at when they ride the bus alone. Canadian kids stay inside playing video­games. After I started a blog called Free Range Kids, I heard from a dad in Ireland who lets his 11-year-old play in the local park, unsupervised, and now a mom down the street won’t let her son go to their house. She thinks the dad is reckless.

What has changed in the English-speaking world that has made childhood independence taboo? The ground has not gradually gotten harder under the jungle gym. The bus stops have not crept farther from home. Crime is actually lower than it was when most of us were growing up. So there is no reality-based reason that children today should be treated as more helpless and vulnerable than we were when we were young.

If this is America’s worst mom, I had the worst mum in England. She made fun of me because I wouldn’t take a two mile bus ride to the doctor’s on my own when I was 10.

Lucky it wasn’t america because the police would’ve nabbed me.

I have to be honest, though: I write all this in a kind of shaky mood because I just got a call from the police. This morning, I put Izzy, now 10, on a half-hour train ride out to his friend’s house. It sounds like I’m a recidivist, but really: His friend’s family was waiting at the other end to pick him up, and he’s done this a dozen times already. It is a straight shot on a commuter railroad. This particular time, however, the conductor found it outrageous that a 10-year-old should be traveling alone, and summoned the police, who arrived as my son disembarked.

A couple of years ago an older couple accosted me in The Good Guys because I had left my kids watching the big screen TVs while I looked for a stereo. Who knows who might’ve snatched my urchins away in the 4 minutes that they were alone.

But…

Mostly, the world is safe. Mostly, people are good. To emphasize the opposite is to live in the world of tabloid TV. A world filled with worst-case scenarios, not the world we actually live in, which is factually, statistically, and, luckily for us, one of the safest periods for children in the history of the world.

Like the housewives of the 1950s, today’s children need to be liberated. Unlike the housewives of the ’50s, the children can’t do it themselves. Though I’d love to see hordes of kids gathering for meetings, staging protests, and burning their baby kneepads—and maybe they will—it is really up to us parents to start renormalizing childhood. That begins with us realizing how scared we’ve gotten, even of ridiculously remote dangers.

Locking children away is cruel.

Be free, little children! Be free!

This one might get me in trouble despite my best efforts to not offend.Sorry in advance.

If you read as many conservative blogs as I do, you may have seen the celebrations over the latest Gallup poll.

David Frum has a theory about that poll.

Charles Franklin of Pollster.com explains the poll’s big technical error. Gallup oversampled Republicans. At a time when only 1 in 5 Americans identifies as Republican, 32 percent of the respondents in Gallup’s survey group identified themselves as Republican.

[snip]

As the Republican Party shrinks, it becomes more conservative. Today’s shriveled GOP is much more pro-life than the robust GOP of years past. So if you oversample Republicans, you are oversampling pro-lifers. Sure enough, when you look at Gallup’s breakdown of its results, all the rise in anti-abortion feeling is concentrated among self-identified Republicans.

More interesting to me though is his analysis that

…Gallup’s poll is wrong in a far more important way. For all their vehement disagreement, pro-lifers and pro-choicers agree that the abortion debate is about rights: the woman’s right to choose, the unborn child’s right to life. Pro-choicers may sternly disapprove of the irresponsible woman who casually discards one pregnancy after another. Pro-lifers may feel tremendous sympathy for the woman considering abortion because she feels she cannot raise a child on her own. Both agree that the reason for the abortion is absolutely irrelevant.

The 55% of us who are neither absolutely pro-life or pro-choice (or both! Choose life!) frame it a little differently.

Frum talks through a couple of scenarios in the grey area

“Suppose a woman has two boyfriends at the same time, gets pregnant, and wants an abortion so she won’t have to admit to her two-timing. Is that okay?”

“Now suppose another woman is working her way through college. Her boyfriend dumps her when she tells him she’s pregnant. If she carries the baby, she’ll have to drop out and take any job she can find in this tough economy. She has decided abortion is her best choice—should the government stop her?”

but I am too much of a coward to go there so I’ll switch to an analogy.

The Straight Dope has a fascinating discussion about the ethics surrounding peeing in public places. Pretty much everyone agrees that peeing in public places is wrong…but sometimes it’s the least wrong option.

But it’s hard to encode that kind of moral calculus into law. The law wants things to be completely legal or completely illegal while morality is rarely so black and white.

And when the law does try address complex moral issues it ends up in tying itself up in knots - it’s illegal to pee in public unless you are with your mother, are under three and can’t make it to MacDonalds …or it’s after nightfall and there is a tree and no cars are passing by for at least 20 seconds.

How much better would the legal system be if there were a class of professionals trained in the law but given the discretion to judge whether something, though technically illegal, was merited because of extenuating circumstances (Jeff has suggested a name for this class of professionals - judgers).

My analogy breaks down though because we already have a class of professionals that is more than adequately equipped to make this kind of judgment in the case of abortion. They are called doctors. The law has nothing to add.