I Don't Care If You Correct My Kids

Part of parents stepping back is the community stepping forward.

The author at age four

In one of my earliest memories, I am running around an empty bocce court at the Italian Fraternal Hall Festival. I liked kicking up the dust and seeing it settle under the multicolored carnival lights (this was before iPads, I don’t know). As it got later, the adults were starting to shuffle outside and, fortified by a few beverages and some jukebox tunes, were ready to play a little bocce. The hall owner was a family friend, and he yelled at me— much more loudly and brusquely than I think my mom would have— to get off the court so people could play.

I was mortified, furious, all the emotions that a four-year-old could possibly feel. It wasn’t fair, and he was mean! I remember running to my mom and burying my face in her jeans. She patted my back and reminded me that we weren’t home, and that out of the house other adults helped make the rules. Seeing no audience for my grievances, I shook it off and went back to playing— albeit well clear of the bocce players. I was probably still nursing a toddler grudge (and just maybe swearing to write an essay about it in 34 years) but fundamentally undamaged. In fact, I probably listened better to a less familiar adult than I might have to my own parents.

Growing up it was normal— expected, even— for other adults to get me together from time to time. This included the obvious— my aunts, uncles, grandparents, and close family friends— and also the more peripheral, like neighbors, shop owners, and church busybodies. When we would run from house to house as kids, it was understood that whoever was nearby and over the age of, say, fifteen, was acting in loco parentis, and we would (mostly) listen to them.

When I became a parent at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I assumed the same rules were in play. When we finally felt comfortable going to the park with our pandemic baby, I was shocked when almost every parent was playing a bizarre, passive-aggressive game of telephone.

“No, Everly, even if other kids throw sand, we do not do that! It’s not our family plan!”

“Let’s move to the other side of the park where we can play more gently.”

Or, my favorite: “Hi, your little girl took our shovel— can you talk to her about it?” (Uh, ok? Lily, please give the shovel back?)

It was immediately clear to me that things had changed since I hustled off the bocce court in my OshKosh overalls. Other parents would now loudly hint, imply, or even approach an adult with a specific grievance but you were never, ever to simply tell another child to stop a bothersome or even dangerous behavior. I felt insane— what young child is particularly good at taking hints or reading tone? Clearly none of this was going to actually work, but the stubborn indirectness seemed entrenched anyway.

Similarly, I noticed that my parent friends and peers would agonize over what to do if an older child was bothering their toddler at the park (telling them to stop was beyond comprehension!) or if their child’s friend broke their house rules during a scheduled playdate. Mom friends would suggest we leave in defeat if some behavior was happening at the pool that made them uncomfortable (are you kidding? After I wrestled them into swim diapers and packed a snack cooler?). Others would seethe when recounting how someone dared tell their child to, say, stay inside the fence— not because it wasn’t a good idea to stay inside the fence but rather because they’d sidestepped first approaching the adult.

I didn’t get it, and I still don’t. When did we develop a fear of talking to children? If my kids are doing something out of pocket, I hope that someone will say something to them directly instead of casting about to find me, just from a pure efficiency standpoint. Perhaps more importantly, though, I think my kids can— and should— have to feel a little bit of healthy concern that they may be chastised by someone less familiar if they aren’t following the rules. The idea that only a child’s parents should tell them what to do doesn’t strike me as the best way to raise kids who think twice about the universe of people outside of their immediate family. Put simply, modern parents agonize over how to raise community-minded humans and then go out of their way to model for their kids that the opinions and concerns of others don’t really matter.

While it is, of course, important, to talk to kids about what kind of instructions they should always immediately disregard (keeping secrets from their parents, getting into an unfamiliar car), there are clear differences between keeping our kids safe from actual harm and keeping our kids safe from momentary embarrassment or frustration. While the statistics on things like stranger-abduction (it’s incredibly unlikely when compared to other risks) go well beyond the scope of this piece, we must resist the conclusion that the best way to keep our kids safe is to foster a climate of distrust, suspicion, and anxiety around all interactions with other adults. In fact, I feel safest when I talk to my kids with nuance about needing and respecting other grown-ups. For example, I want them to know that if we get separated, they need to talk to another adult, and I hope they’re not too afraid to ask for help.

The trend I am describing goes well beyond parents being a little precious about their children’s feelings or wary of strangers anyway. The idea that children are the responsibility of their parents— and only their parents, often specifically their mother— is relatively recent, but it’s common. In fact, it can’t be divorced from the sustained social backlash against kids simply existing in public. When I dig into the reasons behind the absolute vitriol about kids “running wild,” it often boils down to grown adults being terrified to tell a five-year-old to use an inside voice or stop climbing a bench. An increasing number of adults would rather be guaranteed that they will never have to see children (or mothers) at all— thus sidestepping the issue entirely— than ever have to talk to them and negotiate shared spaces. This strikes me as both wildly unreasonable and also genuinely disenfranchising for women and kids. Say it with me: We are not going to ban entire groups from public life because we’re too afraid to use our words. While it is uncomfortable to risk disapproval or even confrontation, I’ve found that the reality of these situations is often fairly mundane (“Can you turn down the iPad?” “Okay, sorry about that!”). In any case, if the alternative is that we simply hide from each other I prefer a little risk. What’s more, the more uncommon it becomes to actually negotiate public spaces in real-time, this will only get more difficult, not less.

As our social safety net frays to breaking, it seems obvious to me that a renewed sense of community around kids that aren’t our own is a necessary corrective. We are living in a society that simultaneously defunds all childcare while also calling the police if they see anyone under the age of eighteen walking to the library alone or sitting in a locked, air-conditioned car while their caregivers pop into the gas station. What would happen if, before searching breathlessly for a child’s parents the moment they entered our vision, we paused and thought first about children as people versus something more akin to pets or hobbies? Children are members of the community in their own right and their well-being depends on us acknowledging that fact. We don’t need to treat children like little adults, but we must interrogate our actual concern at seeing a kid more than five feet from a hovering caregiver— is it about their safety or our convenience?

Parents can’t be everything to their children, no matter how they try (we’ve seen this experiment fail over and over again)— and what’s more, kids can only learn independence if their parents step back a little bit. Part of parents stepping back is the community stepping forward, but also it’s embracing the discomfort that comes from not always being able to curate our kids’ every moment. We need to trust that our children will be okay if they encounter different parenting styles, cultures, house rules, and ideas. In my experience, even very little kids can handle the idea that expectations can differ from place to place and person to person— in fact, this is a big part of developing their own unique point of view. You don’t have to stop at correcting kids, by the way. The flip side of this— greeting them warmly, listening to their little stories, and otherwise showing them the same courtesy you would anyone else— is an important piece of the deal.

The weather is getting warmer, and I’m looking forward to my kids running from yard to yard with their neighborhood friends, taking trips to the park, and heading to the pool. If you see us there, I hope you’ll say hi— to me and to my kids. If they’re splashing you, you don’t need to check in with me before reminding them that the water stays in the pool. If they come running to me, I’ll let them know it’s okay— and I’ll remind them that this is just a part of leaving the house.

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