Childhood Independence and Democratic Self-Governance

April 04, 2024

Cooperation and coordination are essential characteristics of a self-governing democratic society. Efforts to undermine a culture that fosters these virtues are destabilizing to a liberal order. Teaching children the value of independence and self-reliance helps to foster such values, leading to a healthier democracy. Too often, kids are denied the independence they need, and parents who give it to them are bullied by the state for doing so.

A family in the Atlanta suburb of Canton, GA (just south of where I live, actually) has earned the ire of the state and its agents by doing just this. Lenore Skenazy and Diane Redleaf report at Reason that the Widner family has been the target of harassment and bullying by Cherokee County (where they live) police and state social workers for allowing their seven-year-old child to stop by the supermarket for a cookie on their way home from the local YMCA. An overzealous grocery store employee was rattled by the unattended child and called the police. The employee then detained the child until the police arrived to take the child home. This happened in 2018, and since then, the Widners have had multiple dealings with police and social workers who accused them of breaking laws despite the fact that no state agent could point to said broken law.

Unfortunately, this is not an uncommon occurrence. Overprotection of kids has become the norm in America despite living in the safest period in American history. Helicopter parenting, overscheduling, and a lack of freedom and independence have all increased. As a result, kids are growing up without the skills they need to be self-actualizing adults who can function in a complex world. This has significant consequences for democratic self-governance. 

As the late economist Steve Horwitz pointed out,

Denying children the freedom to explore on their own takes away important learning opportunities that help them to develop not just independence and responsibility, but a whole variety of social skills that are central to living with others in a free society. If this argument is correct, parenting strategies and laws that make it harder for kids to play on their own pose a serious threat to liberal societies by flipping our default setting from “figure out how to solve this conflict on your own” to “invoke force and/or third parties whenever conflict arises.” This is on of the “vulnerabilities of democracies” noted by Vincent Ostrom (1997).

In a world of adults who were brought up without the ability to sort out their problems, coercion becomes the default mode of problem-solving. Deferring to authority is the norm instead of relying on the emergent rules that come to govern society, reducing the value of self-governance and, thus, peaceful cooperation. 

Horwitz leans heavily on the political economist Vincent Ostrom in his understanding of the liberal democratic order. As he puts it, 

Democracy and the art of citizenship are the way “self-governors” construct “rule-governed relationships” to prevent and resolve conflicts while minimizing the use of private or political coercion. Ostrom is clear to say that the practice of democratic citizenship concerns neither the market nor the state as typically construed. Instead it comprises all of the various ways humans use language and persuasion to develop “covenantal” solutions to the endless problems of conflict that constitute life in a social order. Such covenantal solutions include everything from larger scale social institutions, to various civic and market organizations, to neighborhoods and families. For Ostrom, democracy is the practice of creating rule-governed arrangements through conversation, collaboration, and consent.

So, the value of childhood independence and freedom is not just in their ability to figure out how to solve conflicts. It’s about them learning to solve conflicts in the moments that define everyday life, all the seconds that fall between the cracks of the state and the market. We are constantly navigating complex social interactions, often without giving them much thought. The only way to figure out how to do this is through the low-stakes environment of childhood play, where one can easily recover from failure. It’s the tiny mistakes leading up to adulthood that help us understand how to get along with others in daily life. We learn what works and what doesn’t, what’s socially acceptable, and what is socially unacceptable. If we are prevented from making these mistakes, we necessarily require an authoritative third party to resolve the simplest of conflicts. This is a poor arrangement that is, at best, likely to lead to less liberty for everyone.

Seeing human interaction as an opportunity to cooperate instead of as an inevitable conflict to combat is foundational to democratic self-governance. The knowledge, norms, and rules that emerge through constant processes of trade-offs and adjustments are what give us the chance to live peacefully among a society of individuals seeking conflicting ends. If we deprive our kids of these skills, then we deprive them of a future in which they are more free and less susceptible to anti-democratic actors.