What do Anne Shirley, Scout Finch, and Lucy Pevensie have in common besides being young heroines of great novels who embody an adventurous spirit of play and display admirable courage when faced with adversity? Answer: If they were transported to modern-day America and engaged in their characteristic unsupervised play, they’d probably get Child Protective Services (CPS) anonymously called on them.
As documented in a New York Times piece, parents in recent years have increasingly faced legal jeopardy for letting their children play unsupervised. Take one recent example not too far from where I grew up in Baldwin City, Kansas, where Shaley Knickerbocker and her husband, Nick, had a police officer knock on their door after a neighbor reported them. As homeschoolers, Shaley occasionally let her eight-, six-, and four-year-old children play in the yard in the morning as she watched from her living room window. The officer arrived one evening in response to a call that children were playing outside unattended. No further action was taken at that time, but now the Knickerbockers were on law enforcement’s “radar.” A couple months later, Shaley had the kids at a park a block away, and her six-year-old needed to go to the bathroom. So she said he could walk home to go (Nick was at the house). Mere moments later, as the boy was nearing home but was out of sight from his mother, a police officer rolled up and asked him where he was going. The boy responded that he lived right there, pointing to his house. The officer then escorted the boy home and questioned Nick about if he knew where his child was.
How did such a Nanny State come to be? One part of the story is that in the 1960s, a new social awareness arose around child neglect and abuse. This spawned new federal legislation, including the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act of 1974. Like so much social welfare legislation, CAPTA conditioned federal dollars on compliance with federal standards, and centralized state child protective services bureaucracies grew out of this. Kansas’s transition was typical of many states. Before the mid ’70s, child welfare services were largely a county-level matter governed by local boards of child welfare and often with the assistance of private and faith-based groups. This was transformed into a centralized bureaucracy to ensure state compliance with the new standards. The idea was that this would be a rational replacement of a patchwork of county systems in which child abuse was underreported and inadequately dealt with.
As Jonathan Haidt has argued, it is actually essential to healthy childhood psychological development for children to engage in risky play.
There is truth to the criticism of the older state of affairs. One piece of evidence that abuse was being underreported was that, following the new centralized reporting protocols, the number of reported cases skyrocketed (from 150,000 children per year in the early ’60s to over 600,000 in the early ’70s to 1.5 million in the mid ’80s). One prominent example of abuse that went unreported for years was the story of Dave Pelzer’s sadistic abuse at the hands of his alcoholic mother in the late ’60s and early ’70s.
And yet, A Child Called It is a classic example of how the abuser systematically sought to wall off the victim from the outside world to prevent the community from intervening. Dave was confined to the basement, not allowed to engage in normal community activities like attending church or even going outside to play. Hence, Dave was not allowed to do normal childhood activities like youth group or recreational sports or scouts, so he had virtually no interaction with any virtuous adults who, in a healthy community, would help police with such matters as a matter of course. In other words, such extreme cases do not abrogate the need for communities with robust social capital to help detect and prevent child abuse just because they sometimes fail to detect them. They are not foolproof, nor are the state child protective services.
Moreover, by the mid ’80s, 65 percent of reported cases of abuse were “unfounded.” In the most recent year we have data for (2024), of 4,350,000 referrals to CPS regarding 7.69 million children facing alleged mistreatment, over half of reported cases (52.9 percent) were screened out initially. Of the remaining 3.6 million, about 530,000—16 percent—of the investigated children turned out to be formally confirmed as victims of legal abuse (which means the substantiated victim rate against total yearly reports is about 12 percent). One need not be a social scientist to see the clear implication of the data: We have a massive over reporting problem of child abuse. Indeed, the number of initially screened-out reports has increased since 2020 by about 25 percent.
We know that the overwhelming majority of screened-in referrals that are investigated come from professionals like law enforcement and educators. In 2024, over 65 percent of screened-in referrals came from professionals, while only 7.1 percent came from anonymous sources. Indeed, we have evidence that anonymous reports are screened out at much higher rates, with one study finding that jurisdictions that permit anonymous reporting were three times as likely to be inaccurate as those that require reporters to identify themselves. These facts led Texas to ban anonymous reporting to CPS in recent years. And this is not only a “red state” thing. Following a ProPublica investigation into New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services—which found that innocent parents were victims of intrusive harassment after “jealous exes,” “spiteful landlords,” and other malcontents weaponized the anonymous child welfare hotline—New York passed legislation banning anonymous complaints.
Still, to all of this, the stubborn Nanny Stater might reply: Better to be safe than sorry. To such a reply, I would retort: Did the COVID pandemic not teach us anything about the pitfalls of extreme safetyism? Did it not teach us that this aphorism is not a master principle of prudence? When so enthroned, will we not become a society of neurotic denizens who—thrice vaccinated, double-masked, and donning a proton pack of Lysol—venture outdoors only to sanitize our Amazon packages?
The Knickerbockers of Baldwin City, Kansas, were pretty obviously the victims of do-gooder safetyist neighbors anonymously reporting. But let us for a moment give the anonymous reporter the benefit he or she did not bestow on the Knickerbockers: the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps the anonymous reporter was genuinely concerned that the child was in danger, such as running out into the street. But even in that case, wouldn’t a more neighborly thing be to simply walk outside and ask if they are okay and if their parents are around? Or even go knock on your neighbor’s door and politely check in? The fact that this plan did not even enter the mind of the anonymous reporter teaches us a lesson. The (hopefully unintended) consequence of the centralized reporting child protection bureaucracy was to disincentivize basic neighborliness and exacerbate atomization.
The flawed legal and bureaucratic structures are only part of the story, of course. The larger trends in culture and the sciences of safetyism have wrought havoc, and we need a corrective in the other direction. To take one mundane example, the safety obsession combined with insurance and liability concerns led to playgrounds of diminished quality and number, according to researcher Tim Gill. I have seen this myself. At a previous home, our city neighborhood playground was legendary. It had been built twenty years prior by volunteer parents from around the neighborhood and featured a glorious 30-foot-long, 4-foot-wide slide propped up on a thick, old, wooden platform that families came from all around to play on. In the name of safety, this was razed and a new park, sponsored by a giant health insurance company, was erected on its corpse. It features plastic platforms with rounded edges and slides a fraction of the size, height, and fun of the old. But if your child falls from a fraction of the height they might have fallen from before, worry not! He’ll be caught by a most pillowy and tort-free rubber safety surface.
As Jonathan Haidt has argued, it is actually essential to healthy childhood psychological development for children to engage in risky play. Of course, our world is a vast improvement in many ways over that of Jem and Scout’s Maycomb. And yet, we need our kids to play more like them, rolling in tires down through the neighborhood, even if that comes with the occasional crash into the proverbial Radley house porch. And we need to recover the neighborly virtues that support and facilitate unstructured play in our communities by helping parents keep an eye in case there is an actual reason for alarm. You know, like if a drunken, racist, lying, child-abusing coward attacks children walking home on a Halloween night. Like Atticus Finch and Bob Ewell, in such cases the fault lies not with the parent, but with the perp—and the virtuous person, like Boo Radley, does not satisfy his neighborly offices with an anonymous tip.