No Handcuffs Needed

What? A mom in NY gets arrested and spends a night in jail because she made her unruly kids (ages 12 & 10) get out of the car and walk?

I don't know if it was safe or not to let them out where she did. I wasn't there. And I don't know how far they were from home. There's a lot I don't know. But I think people should cut this mom some slack.

I first heard about this yesterday on the Today Show. In two different segments, they talked about how the mother had “snapped” and had “abandoned” her children. How she had "crossed the line." They talked about what this mom should have done: take a deep breath, try to understand where her emotions were coming from. (I'm sorry, but that advice is not helpful). They did come back in the second segment with something a little more tangible: the mom should get out of the car and tell her "sweeties" that she "needs a mommy-timeout." While this was a better solution than the first two, it did nothing to address the fact that it was the noisy kids who needed a time out in the first place, not the mom. The show's segments were based upon the presumption that the mom was completely unjustified and the focus was on what the mom should have done.

Ironically, making misbehaving kids get out of the car and walk is exactly the solution offered in one of my favorite parenting books, Parenting With Love and Logic, by Foster Cline and Jim Fay. The authors say this should only be done in a safe environment, and in a safe and age-appropriate way. (When it isn't safe for the unruly kids to get out of the car, the authors suggest the parents get out of the car, leaving the kids inside to get bored and think about the situation). So in the case of the unruly kids in NY, we don't know if it was safe or not but it certainly seems age-appropriate to me. It seems out of hand to automatically condemn the mom.

I hopped on over to Motherlode to see what Lisa Belkin and others had to say. Lisa also feels that 10- and 12-year-olds are old enough to get out of the car and walk home, depending on the neighborhood. I perused the comments to Lisa's post and I must say the fur was flying! People are passionate about this - there are now 169 comments about her post.

With the help of my 9-year-old daughter (who, for the record, thinks the NY mom was completely wrong), I tallied the first 75 comments to Lisa's post. The majority of commenters were sympathetic or supportive of the mom. There were 32 comments in favor of the mom, 19 that were neutral or needed more information, and 24 that found the mom out of line. There were harsh comments (#2 and #9, for instance) as well as helpful and humorous ones (see #16). In the end, the Today Show's perspective of an out-of-control mom was not shared by the majority in this unscientific little sampling of opinions.

Parenting is a series of judgment calls, about a thousand of them a day. How long do you leave your 5-year-old, playing quietly in his room, alone before you see what he's up to? Your 6-year-old cries at swim lessons - do you force her in the pool anyway? Is your 9-year-old ready for overnight Girl Scout camp? Judgment is a tricky thing. Different people arrive at different conclusions. We ourselves might even reach a different conclusion on a different day.

Lastly, we are human. As a parents, we do not always act in the best, most perfect way. Maybe we fail to use a polite tone of voice when asking them for the hunredth time to pick up their toys/clothes/shoes/etc. Perhaps we are a tad sarcastic when they ask us for the hundredth outfit for their Build-A-Bear friend. Anyway, I think this mom deserves the benefit of the doubt and a little time and space to figure out what works best for her kids.

By the way, my brother is a police officer with almost 20 years experience, none if it in NY, I might add. I called him last night to ask what he would have done. He paused for a millisecond, no doubt putting on his "cop" face and summoning the accompanying non-judgmental tone of voice, and said "No, I wouldn't have arrested her." I smiled. He would have left his handcuffs on his handy police-gadget-belt; no handcuffs needed.