Teach your children well

The other day, I was flabbergasted almost to the point of being gobsmacked when I read an op-ed piece called "Were we inattentive parents?" by Jennifer Phipps. It was in the Baltimore SUN, and to synopsize, the writer and her husband, dressed in very casual clothing, took their almost-three-year-old son to one of those neighborhood parks in a very tony neighborhood. The park, as a matter of fact, is named for Mattie J.T. Stepanek, the amazing young man who wrote six books of poetry and one filled with his essays on peace activism before losing his life to one of those damned mitochondrial diseases at 14.  Clearly, a park named for Mattie would be a safe place for children to thrive.

The boy was riding a swing with his dad standing behind him and his mother next to him.

And he loosened his grip, and fell off the swing into a bed of what Ms Phipps calls "(not) just a bed of mulch but a bed of springy mulch...

And they went on home.

That's the end of the story, and thanks for reading. 

Oh no, it wasn't. Because within a half an hour of their arrival home, they had a police officer at the door, investigating a complaint of "inattentive parenting."

A male who had been at the park called 911 to report that a boy fell off a swing into a bed of cushy mulch.

As Ms Phipps points out, this craze of helicopter parenting - hovering two feet over your children at all times until they finally get old enough (65, in most cases) to live their own lives - now extends to the children of OTHER people.

Don't blame the cop. The guy called 911 and she is obligated to check things out. 

Blame the other dad, who so self-righteously saw a child experience life and had to put a halt to THAT right away, yessir.

Hey, Big Daddy, life is full of bumps and lumps and falls. Be thankful that this child landed on soft mulch and went home none the worse for wear.  People who seek to place their kids inside a glass Dome Of Protection are bound to wind up with kids who cannot function outside that dome (or inside it, for that matter.)

I'll bet you that the next time Ms Phipps's son is on a swing, he will remember what happened the last time, and the sad result of letting go.

Speaking of letting go, it seems this almost-three-year-old is better at it than SuperDaddy, the kind of guy who calls the school to complain that his kid got wet because it rained outside.