Lenore Skenazy has turned her Internet fame as the “world’s worst mother” into a career as a reality TV star and inspirational speaker.
Lenore Skenazy had her big “parenting fail” moment back in 2008, after the New York City newspaper columnist wrote an article titled “Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone.”
The column, detailing the Sunday afternoon she abandoned her youngest son at Bloomingdale’s with only a subway map, $20 in cash and the esteem-boosting confidence that he’d be able to find his way home to Queens on his own, set off a firestorm of media attention, landing the sharp-witted Yale grad on everything from “Good Morning America” and “The Today Show” to “Dr. Phil,” “The View” and “Nightline” to defend her choices.
For a while—that is, before the next American parent committed an indiscretion worthy of the nation’s scorn (hello, Shanesha Taylor)—Skenazy wore the crown of World’s Worst Mom, a title she, unlike most saddled with that dubious Internet crowd-sourced distinction, has managed to cheekily parlay into a lucrative side career as a public speaker, reality TV star (TLC’s “World’s Worst Mom”) and leader of what she’s dubbed the “Free-Range Kids” movement, which encourages overprotective parents to simply let their kids play, unsupervised, and allow them to face the world themselves. If there’s anyone who can speak to how helicopter parenting has hurt our children’s ability to freely discover and enjoy life on their own, it’s Skenazy.
And yet, even Skenazy admits she’d have had trouble letting her kids go back to class at Vistancia Elementary School in Peoria following the death of a first grader amidst rumors he had succumbed to the latest health scourge, enterovirus D68.
Only about 20 percent of the student population attended classes at Vistancia Elementary School in Peoria the week one of their classmates died of an unknown respiratory infection.
“I’m not immune to fear,” Skenazy says. “If there was true evidence of an infection that spread through the air, and there was evidence that children were dying of it from being in a particular place, I would avoid that place. But that decision involves a lot of things. Is that what the kid died of? Were there other circumstances? Is the virus easy to catch or not?”
As it turned out, the first grader, 6-year-old John Lucas “Luke” Smith, likely died from a respiratory illness unrelated to the viral strain that’s been linked to more than 1,000 confirmed cases nationwide, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, since mid-August. Although the Maricopa County Department of Public Health has declined to release results of the particular case to anyone outside of the immediate family, it has stated that there have only been two confirmed cases of EV-D68 in Maricopa County and, so far, zero deaths—which would indicate that Luke Smith died of an unrelated illness.
Nevertheless, parental fear over the incident has been high. Erin Dunsey, spokeswoman for the Peoria Unified School District, says that after the student’s death, only about 20 percent of Vistancia’s students showed up for school the next day.
“It took about a week for parents to feel more comfortable sending their kids back to class,” says Dunsey, who adds that the district hasn’t yet figured out how and when the kids who missed class during that time will make up the lost hours.
“We sent out updates daily from the public health department, and let the community know that the school was doing everything possible to ensure a safe environment” continues Dunsey. “But the stance we kept all along was there’s no right or wrong way a parent can react to something like that. Whatever the parents decided to do, whether they decided to keep their kids home or bring them to school, that was the right decision for their kid.”
Fear Factory
Skenazy imagines there was some intense soul-searching going on in Peoria while parents pondered who would be among the first to send their kids back to school. Thanks to the Internet, never before have we been so immediately aware of health and safety issues as we are today. But at the same time, never before have we felt under such public scrutiny to do the right thing, parent-wise. Parent shaming is practically an Internet meme today—try Googling “parenting fail”—and nobody wants a cellphone video of their little darling coughing up a school lunch to wind up at the top of the Cheezburger.com Fail Blog.
“The real question every parent is supposed to ask themselves before they allow their child to do absolutely anything in America is ‘How would you feel if your kid died?’” says Skenazy, who heard variations of that very question asked thousands of times after she made public her son’s solo subway adventure.
“Like, ‘Oh, you’re gonna let your kid wait in the car? How would you feel if you come back and he’s dead?’ Or, ‘You’re gonna let your kid go to the bathroom at the mall? How would you feel if she’s raped and murdered?’ We start thinking it’s normal to picture our kids dead, because that’s the path that the TV news and the parenting magazines and the experts follow when they’re telling us, ‘beware, beware.’”
It doesn’t help that what we watch for entertainment only amplifies our fears.
“The more lurid and tragic and heart wrenching a story is, that’s what makes the news, and then those stories get recycled through the drama shows.”
Skenazy was surprised one day to see her own son’s subway story played out on an episode of “Law & Order SVU,” even featuring a young actor with a big mane of curly brown locks identical to her son’s. Of course, they did spice up the ending a bit. “Instead of coming home, he’s tortured with cigarette burns and murdered by bullies,” Skenazy says. “They add a sadistic flair to make it a little more exciting.
“If you’re fed a steady diet of fear and terror,” she continues, “and then the school sends home a note saying, ‘Parents, this is just to let you know that there was an unfamiliar van near one of the bus stops today. Even though nothing happened, this is a good opportunity to remind your children never to get into a van with a strange person who might want to rape and murder them,’ it’s no wonder you try to go to bed and you’re still shaking from your entire day of having fear shoved down your throat. I don’t blame parents for being afraid!
“But there’s this great quote,” Skenazy adds, paraphrasing a line most often attributed to Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz: “‘All the fear in the world does not prevent death; it prevents life.’ That’s the message I try to get across to parents.”
One ‘Flu’ Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Dr. Cara Christ, chief medical officer for the Arizona Department of Health Services, says that this year is not the first year enterovirus D68 has circulated among our population.
Dr. Cara Christ likes Ebola—at least when comparing the deadly disease to more easily spread viruses like the common flu, which is what she says parents should actually fear more.
“One of the nice things about Ebola—if you can say something nice about Ebola—is that it’s not spread like the flu or enterovirus,” says Christ, who serves as the chief medical officer for the Arizona Department of Health Services.
“It’s actually much harder to catch. You have to be with someone who is visibly sick, and you have to get their bodily fluids into your eyes, mouth, a cut or a sore, in order to get it. That’s another huge plus with Ebola: we know people are not actually contagious until they develop symptoms. So we can watch people and get them into an appropriate environment to keep them from spreading the disease to other people if they start showing symptoms.”
Compare that to the flu, which the CDC says puts more than 200,000 people in the hospital and claims more than 49,000 lives each year, often striking kids who show no signs of vulnerability beforehand.
“Because we’re so used to hearing about the flu—it comes every year, we know that it’s coming every year—we dismiss it,” Christ says. “But actually, as a parent and being in the field that I’m in, I am more afraid of influenza with my children than I am of an enterovirus or Ebola or any of the other diseases. We see 1,500 times the deaths from flu, in a good year, than we see from Ebola. Yet more people would be apt to get an Ebola vaccine than they would a flu vaccine.”
Christ chalks it up to our fear of the new and unfamiliar, and to science’s ability to keep finding more new and unfamiliar strains. “We’re able to pick up and identify these very specific viruses because we’ve got advanced detection now. And when you hear very specific virus names, I think it sounds scarier. I mean, everyone was clamoring to get the H1N1 vaccine the year that came out. But every other year, it’s difficult to get people to get their flu vaccine.”
For a mother of three young children who also spends her work week tracking viruses and infectious diseases, Christ manages to keep calm and parent on.
“I do have to admit, there are days that I just have to say, ‘I’m not gonna watch the news, I’m not gonna read the paper anymore!’” she says.
“Because it is scary. I mean, between the infectious diseases and the other stuff going on in the world, it can be inundating, when you’re getting all of that information at once.
“Sometimes,” she adds, “I think it’s just good to help people realize that things are actually okay!”
Live Through This
The good news is, the information, when taken without all the hysteria and drama, is actually fairly comforting. Ebola is rare and not easily spread; more kids are killed by the measles, a disease few Americans even worry about getting vaccinated for today.
EV-D68 has been here before, too, and most parents survived it without even knowing.
“We have enterovirus in our community every single year,” Christ says. “It made the news this time because this was a strain we hadn’t seen in a while. But this actually circulated back in the ’90s and before that, in the ’60s. So adults have been exposed to this, which results in a kind of natural immunization for them. The reason we’re seeing it mostly in kids now is because they’ve never been exposed to it, and just don’t have the defense against it. But it’s already gone through the community before.”
The irony that today’s hyperparents all survived bigger health and safety threats back in their own distant childhoods is a part of Skenazy’s shtick.
“Go Google the FBI statistics: We’re at a 50-year crime low,” she says. “If you were growing up anytime from 1963 to now, it was more dangerous outside at that time than it is today. So if you don’t think your parents were crazy to let you walk to school or play outside, then you’re not crazy either for giving your kid a little unsupervised play time.”
Health risks are lower today too, thanks to medical advances that have neutralized a lot of diseases, like polio (another enterovirus, actually), that used to kill us.
“I just try to make sure that I’m doing the best that I can with my kids,” says Christ, who sticks to the tried-and-true preventative measures. “For starters, they’re completely vaccinated. I keep them home when they’re sick, to keep them from spreading it to other kids. And then, of course, I encourage good hand washing, because that’s always a great way to prevent transmission of diseases.”
Other than that, Christ says, she just tries to stay on top of any symptoms her kids might exhibit, takes them to the doctor when necessary and does her best not to freak out over every scary-sounding new virus strain.
“Really,” she says, “I think that’s all a parent can do.”
