Etan Patz and the End of Innocence—and Outdoor Play
May 25, 1979, brought the end of innocence. On that day, a sweet six-year-old boy named Etan Patz disappeared. He certainly wasn’t the first child ever to be abducted and murdered. Yet somehow his disappearance profoundly affected an entire generation—and changed the way that we parent.
Born in New York City on October 9, 1972, Etan Patz grew up in Manhattan, in a loft building near the corner of Prince Street and West Broadway. Etan was nearing the end of his first year of kindergarten when his parents decided that he could walk by himself—for the first time—to the school bus stop located just two blocks away from his home.
They never saw him again.
Immediately after Etan’s disappearance, his father, a photographer, posted photos of his son throughout New York City, and police initiated a weeks-long search. Etan’s case would captivate America and garner national media attention as the whole country asked, “What happened to Etan?”
For any parent, this is the worst horror that could ever happen. His parents never stopped looking for him, and his disappearance helped to create the missing-children movement, including new legislation and new methods for tracking down missing kids, such as the milk-carton campaigns of the mid-1980s. Little Etan was the first missing child to be pictured on the side of a milk carton.
Many sociologists and psychologists point to the Etan Patz kidnapping as a turning point in our society. It was the beginning of a new age of worry for parents, and many of the “kid freedoms” that people from an earlier generation remember are now a thing of the past.
Before Etan, it wasn’t unusual for young children to walk to school without an adult—or at least to walk to the bus stop. I have friends who remember taking the subway alone or with other kids when they were nine or ten years old. That would almost never happen today—it would almost certainly prompt a CPS call.
Although they were not the first, the high-profile kidnapping-murders of young children in the late 1970s and early 1980s, including Adam Walsh and Johnny Gosch, had a very significant effect on American life. The FBI had been involved in child-abduction cases since 1932, when legendary aviator Charles Lindbergh’s baby was kidnapped and murdered, and child murderers like Albert Fish had been around since the 1920s. But it wasn’t until 1984, after Etan, Adam Walsh and a handful of other kids went missing, that the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children was authorized by Congress.
Parents became more afraid after the 1970s and 1980s. Was it the increased media saturation that heightened everyone’s fear? Increased news cycles and awareness via the milk-carton campaign aside, abductions and murders of children have always been and continue to be exceedingly rare events.
The vast majority of the 800,000 reported annual cases of abducted and missing children end with the return of the children within hours. More than 200,000 of those children are victims of family abduction, often involving parents in custody disputes. Of the 58,000 “nonfamily” abductions, most involve abductors who know the children or families, and more than 99 percent of those children are returned alive.1
Now, to be clear, that’s not to say that those cases don’t send shivers down the spines of parents. But they fall into a different category than the stranger-as-bogeyman abductions. Those types of abductions—the Etan Patz–like cases, in which a child is kidnapped by a stranger and held for ransom, or with the intent to harm or keep the child—occur approximately 115 times a year, with a nearly 60 percent survival rate and about a 4 percent rate of going unsolved. That means that roughly 45 kids get abducted and killed every year by strangers-as-real-life-monsters.
This number hasn’t increased since the 1980s, and, in fact, there is some evidence that it may have actually decreased along with national crime rates as a whole. Indeed, crime specialists seem to agree that this is probably the safest time in history to be an American child.
But a sociological shift was also occurring around the time of Etan Patz’s disappearance—one that gave people a sense that they might be able to “control” the uncontrollable. Erika Christakis, an educator at the Yale Child Study Center, wrote in an article, “Did Etan Patz Mark the End of Carefree Parenting?,” which appeared in the April 24, 2012, issue of Time magazine: “Once, people viewed car crashes, electrocution, fires, head injuries and the like as tragic and inevitable, perhaps even ‘acts of God.’ But when epidemiologists began observing that most accidents had clear, predictable causes, they were more accurately relabeled as preventable injuries. This led to bicycle helmets, car seats, food safety and ‘baby proofing.’ Soon, it seemed, everything ‘accidental’ could be prevented. Sudden infant death syndrome. Asthma. Drowning. Burns. Broken bones. Allergic reactions. Concussions.”
As Christakis notes, this way of thinking was soon applied to parents’ sense of responsibility: “It was a huge shift in perception, and with it came a heightened responsibility—and anxiety—about keeping children safe. If bad outcomes were now in a parent’s control, then a parent who didn’t take these preventive steps was a slacker at best, and criminally negligent at worst.”
The perceived social pressure on parents was on—and helicopter parenting and the overprotected child were born.
The term “helicopter parenting” was first used in 1969, in the book Between Parent and Teenager. The author, psychologist Haim G. Ginott, quoted his intensely (s)mothered teen patient: “Mother hovers over me like a helicopter and I’m fed up with her noise and hot air. . . . I’m entitled to sneeze without explanation.” The term became part of the language after former school principal Jim Fay and psychiatrist Foster W. Cline used it in their 1990 book, Parenting with Love and Logic. Now it’s part of our culture.
In her 2014 Atlantic article “The Overprotected Kid,” Hanna Rosin also describes this shift of parenting styles: “It’s hard to absorb how much childhood norms have shifted in just one generation. Actions that would have been considered paranoid in the ’70s—walking third-graders to school, forbidding your kid to play ball in the street, going down the slide with your child in your lap—are now routine. In fact, they are the markers of good, responsible parenting. One very thorough study of ‘children’s independent mobility,’ conducted in urban, suburban, and rural neighborhoods in the U.K., shows that in 1971, 80 percent of third-graders walked to school alone. By 1990, that measure had dropped to 9 percent, and now it’s even lower.”2
Rosin’s parents used to let her roam around unsupervised without ever scheduling things like play dates and swimming lessons. Rosin realized that she is a very different kind of mom: “I, on the other hand, might easily spend every waking Saturday hour with one if not all three of my children, taking one to a soccer game, the second to a theater program, the third to a friend’s house, or just hanging out with them at home. When my daughter was about 10, my husband suddenly realized that in her whole life, she had probably not spent more than 10 minutes unsupervised by an adult. Not 10 minutes in 10 years.”
Why are so many parents today so much more obsessed with their kids’ lives? I have seen it hundreds of times in my clinical practice and feel that tendency in my own life as a parent (and need to consciously resist that tendency). Parents today seem much more enmeshed with their children—that is, parents’ and children’s identities seem fused in ways that they weren’t in earlier generations. Being close to your child is one thing, but when children seem to become extensions of the parents—and of their parents’ hopes, dreams and expectations—the result can be unhealthy micromanaging, aka helicoptering.
It seems that many people of my parents’ generation were too busy working and trying to make ends meet to be hyperfocused on play dates, violin lessons and soccer camps. My generation played sports and did things; I just don’t remember our parents hovering every step of the way. And that helped foster a sense of resilience and agency within me and my friends. “We can do this” was our mantra. Now many kids can’t even carry their own backpacks to school; I see many moms walking to my kids’ elementary school weighted down like pack mules as they carry their kids’ bags. Why?
It’s that fine line between helping and enabling. My pediatrician friend Dr. Michael Schessel told me that his seven-year-old demanded that his father untie the knot in his shoelaces. As Dr. Schessel bent down to accommodate the child’s request, he realized, “Wait a minute. You can do this. Learn to untie your own knot!” It’s as Erika Christakis writes: there is now social pressure to be hypervilgilant and endlessly supportive lest we be shamed as bad parents.
I think much of this dynamic has its roots in the case of poor little Etan Patz’s disappearance. The title of a May 6, 2015, piece by Michael Wilson about Etan Patz in the New York Times sums it up: “The Legacy of Etan Patz: Wary Children Who Became Watchful Parents.”3 Those of us who were kids at the time of Etan’s disappearance were profoundly shaped by it. We are the ones who then pulled the leash tighter on our kids and became the dreaded HPs—helicopter parents.
Wilson talked to several people who were kids at the time and who give various versions of how things changed after Etan’s disappearance. Eddie Spaedh, who grew up in Brooklyn and was a boy at the time, talked about how “the whole neighborhood changed. We went from having to go in when the lights went on, to parents looking out the window and out on the streets, always watching us.”
As the Etan Patz generation grew up and became the overprotective helicopter generation, something else also happened: kids were encouraged to stay indoors, where it was thought to be safer. After all, there are no bogeymen kidnappers—usually, at least—inside the house. And so a shift began: kids who had once been encouraged to go outside and play from sunup until sundown—and maybe even a little after that—were now encouraged to stay indoors.
And what’s a healthy boy or girl to do inside? Computer time! Enter the Glow Kids.
Yes, the Etan Patz tragedy, which led to an entire generation of scared and hypervigilant helicopter parents, was a major factor in the emergence of the Glow Kids generation. Add to that the competitive social pressure that many parents exert on each other, and you have a misguided “my child will out-tech your child,” scenario, a screen-based version of keeping up with the Joneses: You got your child an Xbox? I got mine an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset! What, your child has an iPad and iPhone in second grade? Mine has his in kindergarten—no—in pre-K! God bless them, they mean well—but this screen competition amongst parents is a huge part of the Glow Kids problem.
At the other end of the spectrum, we have a new countervailing force—the “free range kids” movement, started by Lenore Skenazy. A mother and journalist from Queens, New York, Skenazy believes in giving kids freedom and autonomy. Meanwhile, the media demonized her, dubbing Skenazy “America’s Worst Mom” in 2008 for letting her then-nine-year old son take the New York City subway home alone from Bloomingdale’s.
The following year she published the book Free Range Kids: How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children, in which she advocates for a “commonsense approach to parenting” in these “overprotective times.”4 She, too, points to the legacy of Etan Patz as creating a culture of hypervigilant, fearful parents but believes that this mind-set can be changed if mothers and fathers consciously reject this worst-case-scenario or “worst first” thinking.
“Sometimes it feels as if this constant dread is natural. As if it’s just the way parents are ‘programmed to worry.’ But it is cultural, it is specific. We can almost pinpoint when it began,” Skenazy writes in her blog. In 2015 Skenazy’s Free-Range Kids Project declared May 9 as “Take Our Children to the Park . . . and Let Them Walk Home By Themselves Day.” This was a direct response to the case of a Maryland couple who were accused of neglect for letting their two children, ages ten and six, walk home alone from the park.
Regardless of where on the parenting continuum a parent may fall—from helicopter to free-range—the healthy recommendation is to allow children time outdoors away from screen devices.
But there’s a problem.
Even if a parent chooses to raise a screen-free kid, he or she faces one very, very major hurdle. The informed parent may begin to understand that hyperarousing screens are a digital drug, but the places where our children spend the bulk of their day—schools—haven’t gotten the memo yet that screens can be a significant problem and must be used judiciously and only when age-appropriate.
Welcome to the screen-obsessed Educational Industrial Complex.