Last month I couldn’t stop thinking about a case I read about in the Washington Post. A mother in Virginia got slammed by local authorities for allowing her five-year-old son to walk by himself to a pond within their gated community. The boy had visited the pond, accompanied by an adult, countless times and liked to collect goose feathers there. After returning from that walk one day, the boy asked his mother if he could go back to look for more feathers. The mom said yes.
The boy came home upset, in the company of a security guard, who said another resident of the community had alerted him to a kid alone. “Parkinson [the mother] said she insisted her son was safe and had the right to walk through his neighborhood by himself. But the guard said she had broken the law and called the police,” the Post reported. The situation escalated. The mother was arrested, convicted of contributing to the delinquency of a minor and sentenced to six months of suspended jail time. In addition, her name is now listed on the state’s Abuse and Neglect Registry.
The mother had the option to plead guilty and accept a misdemeanor charge, but she refused to agree that she had committed a crime. The Post’s report generated more than 3,500 reader comments, many of them condemning today’s restrictions on unsupervised play and independence for children.
Like many of those readers, I thought back to my own childhood, when kids were all allowed to wander the neighborhood by ourselves. But I also got to thinking about a larger issue. For me, an important part of the Washington Post case was that the boy at five years of age had developed a passionate (and harmless) interest that he wanted to pursue – collecting feathers. His pursuit lays the foundation for a life of choosing what to study, where to live, how to treat others, and much more. Yet letting him do that by himself was framed as a crime. Isn’t autonomy an important quality that more people should develop and that society should encourage? Wouldn’t the world be better off if more people had the capacity to form original desires and act on them rather than line themselves up with others’ beliefs and expectations?
Alongside the five-year-old’s case, I’d read another article about young people bailing out on their first year in college after just two weeks because having to fend for themselves away from home was too taxing emotionally. It’s no secret that recent and current generations seem to have much less capacity for independent living and decision making than, say, Baby Boomers.
What is autonomy and why does it matter?
Let’s distinguish here between independence and autonomy. They’re related but not the same. Independence is the state of functioning without assistance from others, while autonomy is the capacity to act according to your own wants, values and interests. Autonomy develops when someone is encouraged to make choices and allowed to experience the consequences of those choices. To use an increasingly popular term, autonomous people have agency. They feel like they are creating their own destiny. Autonomous people know how to set goals they have chosen, guide themselves and resist pressure from others, which to my mind leads to a healthier, happier society.
Thwarted autonomy, as in the case of that five-year-old, can lead to passivity, depression, self-doubt, tension and low self-esteem. Chances are, the boy in the article will carry a burden of guilt or shame because his enthusiasm for collecting feathers caused horrendous trouble for his family. What I wish had happened in his case was a friendly neighbor starting a conversation with him, taking an interest in his feather collecting, learning that a family member had given him permission to be there alone and confirming that the boy knew the way back home. Calling the police would then have been unnecessary and inappropriate.
For adults, autonomy can’t be absolute. It needs to be balanced by relationships, respect for others and common sense. But I can’t help wishing that more people, whatever their age, received encouragement to tune into and amplify their interests and values, regardless of the opinions or fears of others. As an introvert, this seems to me a basic element for our flourishing as humans.