Leave Baby Alone in a Hotel Room with a Monitor?

Would you leave your sleeping child in a hotel room with the baby monitor on and go eat at a nearby restaurant?

That’s the question posed by Stephanie Murray in this engrossing Slate piece. Murray was inspired by two things:

1 – The viral mob attacking parenting influencers Matt and Abby Howard for leaving their babies in their room, visible via FaceTime, while they ate in their cruise’s dining room.

2 – The fact that Murray and her husband do the same thing on vacations: Take the baby monitor with them and head out to eat nearby.

It never occurred to Murray that this was taboo. But when she started asking other people if they did this parenting hack too, almost no one would admit it publically for fear of parent shaming. They feared being shamed for putting a child in “danger,” no matter how remote the threat. And they feared being shamed for putting their own needs first – no matter that a sleeping child’s needs are extremely minimal.

The 20th century pundit H.L. Mencken once defined Puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” That’s what today’s parenting has become: a religion steeped in pointless, joyless self-sacrifice to appease the gods of excess safety.

In the end, the Howards’ – the influencer couple – told fans that oh, of course an adult had been in the room watching the kids the whole time! They just forgot to mention that! True or not, that’s not what matters. What matters is that society’s safety demands are untethered to reality.

And yet, beholden to them nonetheless, parents across America are waiting at the bus stop every afternoon because many schools won’t let kids get off the bus unless an adult is there to walk them home. This is true even if they live two houses away.

I was talking to a dad yesterday who let his 6-year-old scooter home from a party literally around the corner from their house. The other parents were appalled.

Isn’t it more appalling to treat 6-year-olds as if they CAN’T scooter home?

And then there’s the “safety information” parents get bombarded with. Last week I got a parenting newsletter with a six-point guide to preparing your kid for a sleepover. Not enough? They were also selling a 9-page booklet. NINE PAGES ON PREPARING YOUR KID FOR A SLEEPOVER.

Then I got a notice from the Consumer Product Safety Commission regarding the recall of a Fisher Price “activity center.” Was it  spontaneously exploding? Slathered in anthrax? No. But the toy tissue box COULD become detached from the rest of the unit. “Fisher-Price has received one report of the tissue box toy coming apart and an infant placing the small support bracket in their mouth. No injuries have been reported.”

Nonetheless, it’s officially hazardous, a victim of the fantasy dangers that parents (and Fisher Price!) are expected to pretend are real.

These fantasies can be weaponized against anyone who dares to be rational and ignore them. This is why one of our missions at Let Grow is changing the neglect laws. Currently, most states say something like, “Parents must provide proper supervision.”

But “proper” is pretty open-ended. And if you live in a culture where the slightest POSSIBILITY of danger is considered no different from the PROBABILITY of danger, then anytime a parent isn’t sitting right next to their kid, they could be considered neglectful. So parents have been investigated when their 8-year-old walked home half a mile, or their 5-year-old wandered next door to visit a friend.

Our Reasonable Childhood Independence law puts things back into perspective: Neglect is when you put your kid in OBVIOUS and LIKELY danger – not anytime you take your eyes off them. Not anytime a cop or caseworker can IMAGINE something terrible, however unlikely, happening.

The real danger parents face today is the race to shame, blame and sometimes even arrest those of us who dare to live in reality.