Nothing calls our can’t-win parenting culture into sharper focus than the outrage aimed at the parents of a 3-year-old boy who entered a gorilla exhibit at the Cincinnati Zoo over the weekend.
“They should have shot the mother instead,” popped up on my Twitter feed shortly after word spread that zoo officials shot and killed Harambe, the 17-year-old western lowland gorilla who appears, on video, to be dragging the boy through a moat. Similar sentiments have followed ever since.
More than 400,000 have signed
a Change.org petitioncalling for the zoo, Child Protective Services and the Cincinnati Police Department to hold the child's parents responsible for Harambe's death.
Strange, coming from the same culture that shames and pillories parents for helicoptering.
Modern parents and our hovering, smothering, hyperwatchful ways have been blamed for saddling kids with anxiety and depression, robbing them of their childhoods, sabotaging their self-reliance and sapping them of future leadership skills.
Ease up, we're told. Cut the apron strings. Lengthen the leash. There's even an annual
Take Our Children to the Park … and Leave Them There Day.
"The world is not perfect — it never was — but we used to trust our children in it, and they learned to be resourceful," free-range parenting founder Lenore Skenazy once
told The New York Times. "The message these anxious parents are giving to their children is 'I love you, but I don't believe in you. I don't believe you're as competent as I am.'"
Shame on you, helicopters.
Until, that is, your child is perceived as a little too free-range.
Then, shame on you for that.