On a trip to Prague a couple of years ago, my family piled into a rapidly filling metro car, and I wound up sitting next to my 6-year-old daughter, while her 4-year-old sister sat directly across from us, on her own. At one point, my youngest pulled a knee up to her chest and rested her foot on the seat. Almost immediately, a woman sitting next to her, who looked to be about 70, reached out and gently touched my daughter’s foot, signaling her to put it down. My daughter was surprised, maybe a little embarrassed. But she understood and quickly obeyed.
For a split second, I wondered if I ought to feel chastised: Perhaps the woman was judging me for having failed at some basic parental duty. But something about the matter-of-fact, almost automatic way the woman had intervened reassured me that she wasn’t thinking much about me at all. She was just going through the motions of an ordinary day on the train, in which reminding a child not to put her foot on the seat was a perfectly natural gesture.
Ultimately, I was grateful for the woman’s tap on my daughter’s foot. But the exchange also felt foreign. In my experience, that sort of instruction, from a random adult to a stranger’s child, isn’t much of a thing in America (or, for what it’s worth, in the United Kingdom, where I currently live). Many people don’t seem to think they have the authority to instruct, let alone touch, a kid who isn’t theirs. They tend to leave it to the parent to manage a child’s behavior—or they may silently fume when the parent doesn’t step up.
To informally test that assumption, I created a short online survey and ended up interacting with a dozen people from around the United States. Some were parents; some were not. Every single one said that outside certain situations—where they were familiar with a kid’s parents, or where a child’s safety was in question—they would hesitate before telling someone else’s kid what to do, for fear of upsetting the parent. Marty Sullivan, a technology consultant based in Tennessee, gave a representative answer: “Generally I’d prefer to avoid risking escalation.”
These responses struck me as a bit of a shame, because the exchange between my daughter and the woman in Prague seemed to reflect something altogether good. And I know I can’t be alone in that thought: Both historical precedent and cultural norms in other parts of the world reinforce the idea that a stranger’s meddling in the disciplining of children can have significant merits.
The highly individualistic approach to managing kids’ behavior in public is particularly American—and a historical anomaly. David Lancy, an anthropologist and a professor emeritus at Utah State University, wrote to me that for the majority of human existence, it was unquestionable that “‘the whole village’ participates” in child-rearing. “Siblings, peers, aunts, grandmas,” he told me, “all have distinct roles, including ‘correcting.’”
When I asked Steven Mintz, a historian of families and childhood at the University of Texas at Austin, whether child-rearing in the United States, specifically, had ever involved a more collective approach, he seemed almost tickled: “Did it ever!” he wrote back. He recalled that during his own childhood, in the 1950s, he was “constantly corrected” by people other than his parents for his poor posture, hygiene, grooming, and language. Child-rearing into the first half of the 20th century was, he noted, “far more of a communal and public endeavor”—an approach that entailed a fair amount of what would, by contemporary standards, probably be considered intrusion. “Neighbors, teachers, shopkeepers, and even strangers on the street,” Mintz wrote, “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.”
Today, this sort of “village style” oversight remains a norm in some pockets of the United States. Michelle Peters, a project manager in El Paso, Texas, whose family has roots in Mexico, told me that she has seen communities in both the U.S. and Mexico take a more collective approach to child-rearing. “It is more common and more acceptable for adults to correct children who are not their own,” she said, and people feel “a greater sense of social intimacy and immediacy,” which extends to caregiving in public settings. Yet in much of the United States, Mintz told me, the collective has given way to a “privatized and protected model of parenting.”
As in other aspects of parenthood, that closed-off approach gives parents more control but also puts them under more pressure. If you’re the sole arbiter of your child’s public behavior, you have to keep a pretty close eye on your kid at all times. That sense of responsibility can also produce anxiety: Rather than just parenting as I see fit, I often find myself guessing—and second-guessing—whether my kids are bothering people or violating some unspoken rule. (Is my daughter standing way too close to that guy? Does that shopkeeper mind that my kid is flipping through their magazines?) Amy Banta, a mom of three in Salt Lake City, told me that this is one reason she really appreciates it when other people step in to correct her kids. “I cannot anticipate your every boundary that my child might possibly cross,” she said. “You’re gonna have to help me out.”
If the goal is to steadily acquaint children with the conventions of polite society, it isn’t clear that filtering all guidance through parents is the most effective approach. For one thing, kids are smart. A child who knows that his parent or other caregiver is the only one who will ever correct him might reasonably conclude that he can get up to no good whenever that adult turns away. What’s more, I have found that a stranger’s gentle intervention—as opposed to my nagging—can be a more effective means of conveying to my kids that the people around them are real people, with their own needs, whose space and comfort one ought to respect. Another adult’s nudging can function as a kind of “social proof,” as Banta put it—a reinforcement of the lessons a parent is trying to impart.
Banta told me about a time when she took her then-5-year-old to a community-theater performance and he struggled to sit still. “I kept telling him that he couldn’t wiggle in his seat, because he was shaking the whole row,” Banta recalled, but “he didn’t want to listen to me, because he was having so much fun bouncing.” At intermission, another woman in the row asked Banta’s son to stop shaking the seats so much. “I looked at my son and said, ‘See? It’s not just me,’” Banta told me. He was far more mindful of his movements during the second act, periodically checking to see if he was bothering the woman down the row—who gave him a big thumbs-up after the show ended.
The collective approach to correcting kids’ behavior can have its drawbacks, of course. Plenty of people have truly unreasonable expectations about the way kids should act in public. Miranda Rake, a writer and mother of two in Oregon, told me that she thinks tolerance for ordinary kid behavior in much of America is too low. Even in Portland, which she considers quite laid back, she “gets the stink eye” in many places and feels like she’s “on eggshells in a lot of coffee shops and certainly restaurants,” she said. “There just isn’t a culture of community around kids here.” In her view, that complicates the question of whether interventions from nonparents would make the environment more or less family friendly.
Rake’s concern is not entirely unfounded. In the United States, collective supervision of children has typically coincided with community norms that “could be rigid or exclusionary,” Mintz told me, “and the authority of adults could at times be authoritarian or abusive.” Meanwhile, in many modern societies outside America, tolerance for childlike unruliness is part and parcel of the more communal approach to raising kids. (That was also the norm for most of our evolutionary past, Sarah B. Hrdy, an anthropologist who has extensively studied child-rearing dynamics in traditional hunter-gatherer societies, told me. Where instruction does occur in such cultures, it tends to involve subtle, often nonverbal guidance—of the sort I encountered in Prague—rather than scolding or censure.)
The challenge of balancing tolerance and discipline aside, both Hrdy and Mintz observed that in many ways, American society is simply not set up for a thriving culture of community oversight. Where such a culture once existed, it was propped up by various forms of social infrastructure—the kind that has been steadily hollowed out over the past several decades, Mintz told me. American neighborhoods used to be more tightly knit. A lower proportion of mothers were employed outside the home, which meant that neighborhoods were filled with adults during the day who could keep an eye on one another’s children. A strongly ingrained cultural respect for adult authority meant that “few questioned a neighbor’s right to reprimand a child for rudeness or risk-taking behavior,” Mintz said, and the potential personal risks (legal or otherwise) of disciplining a child not your own were fewer: “Adults could discipline, correct, or even physically intervene without fear of being sued, shamed, or filmed.”
In an era when fewer people know or interact with their neighbors, and social trust has waned, the thought of reviving collective child-rearing norms may seem a little far-fetched. And yet, the Americans I spoke with seemed, on the whole, largely open to being a bit more direct with other people’s kids—if only they could have assurance that such involvement would be welcome. I’ll come out and say it: I would certainly welcome it.
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