How the Nanny State Destroys the Urge to Procreate

Glenn Reynolds sums it up justly:

Today's middle-class kids are always under the adult eye. It's not clear that the kids are better off for all this supervision -- and they're certainly fatter, perhaps because they get around less outside -- but the burden on parents is much, much higher. And it's exacted in a million tiny yet irritating other ways. Some are worthwhile -- car seats, for example, are probably a net gain in safety -- but even there the cost is high: I heard a radio host in Knoxville making fun of SUVs and minivans: When he was a kid, he boasted, his parents took their five children cross-country in an Impala sedan. Nowadays, you'd never make it without being cited for neglect. And you can't get five kids in a sedan if they all have to have car seats, which these days they seem to require until they're 18.

When I was a kid, I was frequently left alone at home from the age of nine forward, and no harm ever came to me. Or I ran all over the neighborhood, which is to say the street we lived on, without ever destroying the universe. Permission had to be asked, but was easily granted, to go around the corner to the library, or down the road a mile or two past the elementary school to the shopping center to buy sodas or squirt guns. And we did this often; my younger brother, younger sister, and myself, and we never violated these norms, because we if one of us did, one of us would tell, and that meant Getting In Trouble. Y'see, my parents managed to discipline us without the state finding out about it, so we learned that limits existed. Call me crazy, but I think such discipline a lot more handy for surviving unemployment (which I had to do), dropping out of college (my brother), or debt (all three of us).

Responsibility without authority is pointlessness. If we hold parents accountable for everything that happens to their kids, but restrain them from punishing misbehavior, then the message we send is "Don't have kids." And that isn't the message we want to be sending, if we want our nation to have a future (Yes, I said "nation". GASP! I'm JUST LIKE HITLER!)