Parenting culture hits rock bottom on TikTok

Parents' job is to teach their kids risk management

Noted risk management expert George Costanza

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I had a different post I was going to share this week, but then a parenting video went viral on TikTok and I wanted to respond. The video — which you can view here — comes from a mom who says she won’t return her shopping carts because doing so would mean leaving her kids alone for too long.

These kinds of posts seem to come from a place of anxiety and fear, and I empathize. But when you post online, you invite discourse, and unfortunately the attitude reflected in this video reflects parenting culture at its nadir. This form of extreme safetyism is neither based in reality, nor is it doing anyone any favors. Parents’ job is to teach their kids how to manage risk. Over-coddling does the opposite, leaving them at risk for an array of problems such as poor mental health. And, relevantly to this blog, fear-mongering and extreme helicopter parenting leaves kids unprepared to take their place as contributing members of their family community.

The video that prompted this post is only 16 seconds long, comes from a woman named Dr. Leslie Dobson, and is ostensibly about shopping carts. In its wake, a lot of people were dunking on Dobson because the premise is pretty ludicrous. Most of us have visited dozens or hundreds of grocery stories in our lifetimes, and it never takes any meaningful amount of time to return a grocery cart. Nevertheless, my first instinct was to defend Dobson because while not returning a cart is a jerk move, it’s also a pretty minor sin.

However, Dobson followed up with a second video that really gets at the heart of the issue. In this second video, she claims that 265 kids were abducted last year from parking lots. The video doesn’t cite a source for that number, and it immediately raised red flags in my mind. Who is tracking this, I wondered, and how are they doing that?

From what I could tell, the number comes from a blog post by an organization called the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. This organization appears to be the non-profit equivalent of a 1980s milk carton that has missing kids’ pictures on the side. But in any case, the blog post mentions that the organization reviewed news stories and concluded that 265 kids were abducted last year in car thefts. The blog post also mentions that law enforcement doesn’t track this phenomenon.

I could go on and on about the problems here. If law enforcement doesn’t track this data, that’s probably because it’s not a major crime. It also means we have no actual data. And the 265 number isn’t even about parking lots and kidnappings, it supposedly describes kids who happened to be in stolen cars. So this is mostly bogus.

But even if, for the sake of argument, I were to concede that the 265 number is real, it’s a minuscule figure. According to the US government, there were about 74.4 million kids in the country last year. If 265 kids are getting abducted from parking lots, that’s 0.000356 percent of all American children.

That’s basically zero. It means parking lot child abductions are not a thing. There is effectively no chance that your kid will get snatched from a parking lot while you turn away for a second. Nearly everything — walking down the street, riding in a car, using a slip-n-slide, eating steak, etc. — that parents and kids do is more risky. Hovering over kids at all times like this is nothing more than helicopter parenting run amok.

These videos are just one person’s take, and though they garnered millions of views this week, they’ll soon be forgotten. But I think it’s worth pushing back against this kind of content because while it may be extreme, it doesn’t exist in isolation. Helicopter parenting is both ubiquitous and militantly prescriptive.

For instance, when I argued a few months ago in the Deseret News that helicopter parenting is a scourge, plenty of people would have none of it. One particularly illuminative comment on the piece claimed that my “theory is great until it’s your unattended five year old that’s kidnapped by a pedophile. Thanks, but I’ll continue to ensure the safety of my young children.” Never mind that (as the article pointed out) child abductions by strangers are vanishingly rare.

Something similar happened when I also wrote about my frustration with car seats for the Deseret News, except that in this case readers were more unified in their condemnations. Most people were not interested in entertaining the idea that ever more safety equipment might come with negative tradeoffs.

Angry readers are fine. The purpose of pieces like these is to make pleasantly articulated but nonetheless intellectually provocative arguments, so I’m genuinely happy when people engage at all. I bring these articles up only as additional first-hand evidence that safetyism and helicoptering is deeply entrenched.

The problem is that unrelenting freak outs about the most minor of threats really doesn’t help anyone. I got into this a bit in my Deseret News piece on helicopter parenting, but there are also entire books — The Coddling of the American Mind and The Anxious Generation are just two — that show how overprotecting kids appears to, among other things, produce worse mental health.

Obviously hovering over kids in a parking lot is not, on its own, going to derail a child’s mental health. But what does that attitude broadly tell kids about risk? If parents think 0.000356 percent of kids getting abducted in parking lots¹ is too much danger to tolerate, how are their kids going to operate in a world where pretty much everything else is far riskier? How will those kids ever stand on their own when they’ve never been outside of their parents shadow, both figuratively but also literally?

After I wrote about helicopter parenting for the Deseret News, I followed the piece up with a Nuclear Meltdown post arguing that parents helicopter because they lack a village of wiser and more experienced peers to keep their worst impulses in check. The rise of helicopter parenting, in other words, is a result of increased parental isolation.

But I also think there’s another side of this story: Part of building a village of supportive people involves teaching newer members of the community the ropes. Which is to say, village-building involves an entirely different conception of parenthood.

In a village, the job of a parent isn’t to protect their kid from anything scary for 18 years, then cut them loose and move to Florida. Instead, the job of a parent is to guide kids into the real world, into the village community, by giving them independence and actual responsibilities². And I just cannot see how that process can take place for families that live in constant fear of imagined dangers.

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1. And again, that number is actually baseless.

2. This is a major theme of, and one of the things I really liked about, Hunt, Gather, Parent.