I briefly considered whether I should feel reprimanded: Maybe the woman was criticizing me for not fulfilling some fundamental parental responsibility. However, there was something about the woman’s almost instinctive, matter-of-fact intervention that gave me the impression that she wasn’t giving me much thought. She was simply going through the motions of a typical train day, where it was quite normal to tell a child not to put her foot on the seat.
In the end, I was appreciative of the woman tapping my daughter’s foot. However, the interaction also seemed alien. In my experience, it’s not very common in America (or, for that matter, the UK, where I currently reside) for a stranger to teach a stranger’s child. It appears that many people don’t believe they have the right to teach, much less touch, a child who isn’t theirs. They frequently let the parent handle a child’s behavior, or they may become silently irate when the parent fails to take charge.
I developed a brief online survey and ended up communicating with a dozen individuals from across the United States in order to test that assumption informally. While some were parents, others weren’t. All of them admitted that they would be reluctant to give advice to someone else’s child out of concern for upsetting the parent in specific circumstances, such as when they knew the child’s parents or when the child’s safety was at risk. Tennessee-based technology consultant Marty Sullivan provided a representative response, saying, “In general, I’d prefer to avoid risking escalation.”
The exchange between my daughter and the woman in Prague seemed to reflect something positive, so I felt a little disappointed by these responses. And I’m aware that I’m not the only one who thinks that: historical precedent and cultural norms around the globe support the notion that a stranger’s involvement in a child’s discipline can have important benefits.
Particularly American—and a historical outlier—is the extremely individualistic approach to handling children’s behavior in public. In a letter to me, anthropologist David Lancy, an emeritus professor at Utah State University, stated that it was undeniable that “the whole village” takes part in raising children for the vast majority of human history. He informed me that “correcting” is one of the many different roles that siblings, peers, aunts, and grandmothers all play.
In response to my question about whether childrearing in the United States in particular had ever involved a more collective approach, Steven Mintz, a historian of families and childhood at the University of Texas at Austin, appeared almost amused: “Did it ever!” he wrote back. He recalled how, in the 1950s, when he was growing up, people besides his parents “constantly corrected” him for his bad language, posture, grooming, and hygiene. He pointed out that raising children in the first half of the 20th century was “far more of a communal and public endeavor”—an approach that involved a good deal of what would likely be regarded as intrusion by modern standards. According to Mintz, “neighbors, teachers, shopkeepers, and even strangers on the street felt empowered, and often morally obligated, to correct a child’s misbehavior, scold a lack of manners, break up a fight, or escort a wandering child back home.”
In certain areas of the United States, this kind of “village style” oversight is still commonplace today. According to Michelle Peters, a project manager in El Paso, Texas, whose family is Mexican, she has observed that communities in Mexico and the United States adopt a more collaborative approach to raising children. She claimed that people feel “a greater sense of social intimacy and immediacy,” which carries over into providing care in public places, and that “it is more common and more acceptable for adults to correct children who are not their own.” However, Mintz informed me that a “privatized and protected model of parenting” has replaced the collective in many parts of the United States.
That closed-off approach gives parents more control, but it also puts them under more pressure, just like in other parts of parenthood. You must constantly monitor your child if you are the only one who can judge their behavior in public. Anxiety can also result from that sense of accountability: I frequently find myself speculating—and second-guessing—whether my children are upsetting others or breaking some unwritten rule, rather than simply parenting as I see fit. (Is my daughter too close to that guy? Is it bothering the store owner that my child is looking through their magazines?) According to Amy Banta, a mother of three in Salt Lake City, this is one of the reasons she truly values it when others correct her children. She remarked, “I can’t predict every boundary that my child might potentially cross.” “I’m going to need your assistance.”
It is unclear whether directing all parental guidance is the best course of action if the objective is to gradually introduce children to the norms of civilized society. Children are intelligent, to start. A child may rightly believe that he can do no good whenever his parent or other caregiver turns away from him if he knows that they are the only ones who will ever correct him. Furthermore, I’ve discovered that a stranger’s tactful intervention—as opposed to my persistent nagging—can be a more successful way to show my children that the people in their immediate vicinity are actual people with needs of their own, whose privacy and comfort should be respected. According to Banta, the nudging of another adult can serve as a form of “social proof”—a confirmation of the lessons a parent is attempting to teach.
Banta told me about a time when her five-year-old had trouble staying still when she took him to a community theater performance. Banta recalled, “I kept telling him that he couldn’t wiggle in his seat, because he was shaking the whole row,” but “he didn’t want to listen to me, because he was having so much fun bouncing.” Banta’s son was asked to stop shaking the seats excessively by another woman in the row during intermission. “See?” I asked, glancing at my son. “It’s not just me,” Banta informed me. During the second act, he was much more aware of his movements and would occasionally check to see if he was disturbing the woman in the back row, who gave him a hearty “yes” when the show was over.
Of course, there are disadvantages to using a group approach to discipline children. Many people have genuinely irrational expectations about how children should behave in public. According to Miranda Rake, a writer and mother of two from Oregon, she believes that a lot of America has too little tolerance for typical child behavior. She claims that she “gets the stink eye” in many places and feels “on eggshells in a lot of coffee shops and certainly restaurants,” even in Portland, which she views as being fairly laid back. “There simply isn’t a sense of community among the children here.” That, in her opinion, makes it more difficult to determine whether nonparents’ interventions would improve the atmosphere or make it less family-friendly.
Rake’s worries are not wholly unjustified. According to Mintz, “community norms that could be rigid or exclusionary” have generally accompanied collective child supervision in the United States, and “adult authority could at times be authoritarian or abusive.” In contrast, the more communal approach to childrearing in many contemporary societies outside of America includes tolerance for childlike unruliness. Sarah B. Hrdy, an anthropologist who has studied child-rearing dynamics in traditional hunter-gatherer societies extensively, told me that was also the norm for the majority of our evolutionary past. When instruction does take place in these cultures, it usually takes the form of gentle, frequently nonverbal guidance, like what I experienced in Prague, as opposed to reprimands or censure.
Both Hrdy and Mintz noted that, in many respects, American society is just not suited for a flourishing culture of community supervision, putting aside the difficulty of striking a balance between tolerance and discipline. According to Mintz, “where such a culture once existed, it was supported by various forms of social infrastructure—the kind that has been steadily hollowed out over the past several decades.” Neighborhoods in America used to be closer together. Because fewer mothers worked outside the home, neighborhoods were populated with adults who could watch over each other’s kids during the day. There were fewer possible personal risks (legal or otherwise) associated with disciplining a child that was not your own because of the deeply rooted cultural respect for adult authority: “Adults could discipline, correct, or even physically intervene without fear of being sued, shamed, or filmed,” Mintz said, adding that “few questioned a neighbor’s right to reprimand a child for rudeness or risk-taking behavior.”
The idea of reviving collective child-rearing norms may seem a bit unrealistic in a time when social trust has declined and fewer people know or interact with their neighbors. However, most of the Americans I talked to seemed willing to be a little more straightforward with other people’s children if only they could be sure that it would be accepted. To put it bluntly, I would definitely welcome it.
