"Motherhood in the Age of Fear"

When we view parenting as a corner solution - where we refuse to recognise that anything can trade off against a child's safety - this is where we end up.

As many have pointed out, including me right now, if parents REALLY believed that children should never face any risks to their safety, they would NEVER put them in a car. Driving kids is far more risky than all the other stuff the Helen Lovejoys want to prohibit or refuse to expose their kids to.

Parents, and onlookers, don't really believe their own safety rhetoric. Like so much else involving women, this is about policing WOMEN'S behaviour. The rhetoric of child safety is just the excuse. And it is, as the author notes, a form of harassment:

"“And if it’s not a cop but a person on the street, calling them names, yelling at them that you’re a terrible mother, threatening to call the police and have their children taken away, then I’d tell them to be extremely calm and clear with that person. I’d tell them to take out their own phones and start recording the interaction. I’d tell them to say calmly and assertively: ‘I haven’t done anything wrong; I haven’t broken any law. My child is fine. I don’t know you, so please step away from us. You are harassing me, and you’re harassing my child. If you don’t stop harassing us, I’ll have to call the police.’”

As I listened to her, it occurred to me that I had never used the word harassment to describe this situation. But why not? When a person intimidates, insults or demeans a woman on the street for the way she is dressed, or on social media for the way she speaks out, it’s harassment. But when a mother is intimidated, insulted or demeaned because of her parenting choices, we call it concern or, at worst, nosiness. A mother, apparently, cannot be harassed. A mother can only be corrected."