Disposable Children

Things are going slow on my camper build, since my wife has been out of town caring for a sick relative, but I was able to do the first test camp Saturday night a few miles from town. On my way back home (around 7 AM Sunday) I was driving across the long bridge near town when I saw a person walking and looking down at the water. There is no pedestrian walkway on this bridge, but you do see people walking on it, and it’s dangerous. My expectation was that I’d be wrangling an intoxicated person into the truck so they wouldn’t get run over.

I stopped and offered a ride. It turned out that the person was a young woman, maybe 16 years old, dressed nicely, seemed sober, and had her “I’m going out on Saturday night” makeup on. She explained that “those guys” were still drinking but she had to get home so she could go to work. She rattled off her address and I knew the place — it’s a low income apartment complex a couple of blocks from my dad’s house. She noted that cars would pass going “really fast” and didn’t stop, so I don’t think walking on the highway was a life habit of hers. When I dropped her off, I advised her to get better friends.

I thought about this encounter for a while. This young woman didn’t have a purse, and I’m pretty sure she didn’t have a cell phone. Did she have someone to call if she had one? Unknown. But, she was clean, her clothes were nice and she wanted to get to her job. So, by standards of what I’ve seen around this town, I’m guessing that her parents (probably single parent) are not great but not awful. I’ll bet she bought the clothes and makeup herself with earnings from her job.

This town is kind of a “free range parent” paradise — Lenore Skenazy would approve. But the kids here are free range not because their middle-class parents want to be sure they get some exposure to the real world so they can become even better, stronger achievers. There’s a lot of benign neglect. Kids are allowed to make their own mistakes just because people here don’t consider the town a dangerous place. It’s fairly unremarkable for a kid here to accept a ride from a total stranger. I don’t know of a single case of stranger child abduction here. Kids walk and ride their bikes (mainly without helmets) without parental supervision from a fairly young age.

In a sense, this is what a lot of social commenters, especially including MAGA types, think that childhood should be like. Parents shouldn’t hover, kids should have jobs that aren’t paid as well as adults but give them some spending money, etc. I felt that the childhood offered to kids in the middle-class suburb where we raised our kid was richer in experiences, but poorer in freedom, than the one offered to kids here. But the children in our suburb got good public education and were expected to go on to higher education and get a well-paying job. Here, they don’t get a good high school education so it’s much rarer to go to college.

MAGA wants what this small town offers, for the kids that aren’t part of the elite. What the kids get here is good enough for MAGA, because they’re supposed to grow up to become low-paid, compliant workers. All the cutting of childhood benefits is part of that worldview — what’s the point of Headstart if all that kid will end up doing is putting screws into iPhones? In a sense, kids in MAGA world are disposable, so they don’t feel much of a need to invest in them.