Life in 4D: Parenting, Democracy, and the Administrative State
Supporting agency in a world of extremes.
At its heart, play is rule-bound activities in which the outcome is unknown.
It’s the way we learn to handle the unexpected.
- Hara Morano
Over-Regulation and Over-Parenting
As a follow-up to last month’s post on weaponizing the law, I want to explore how these macro-level dynamics seep into our most personal spaces - like parenting.
While I’ve critiqued the unchecked growth of administrative and criminal laws, parenting has experienced a similar regulatory creep. I've written about this before, but it’s becoming more and more relevant even as our democracy becomes more fragile.
Though I’m not big on labels, I generally gravitate toward what might be called free-range parenting. That’s partly my nature (I’m pretty laid back), partly logistical (I’m busy and can’t micromanage everything), and partly philosophical (kids need to build autonomy and learn through low-stakes mistakes).
Of course, your approach might differ—and that’s fine. Broadly, the literature supports authoritative and autonomy-supportive parenting styles. But how far that goes depends a lot on you and your kids and all the complex four dimensions of your specific landscape.
That being said, I think there’s a very clear feedback loop that is worth making more visible:
Over-regulation has downstream impacts on parenting. And over-parenting has upstream impacts on how people interact as neighbors and citizens or, increasingly, as combatants.
Here I’ll focus on how the over-parenting that over-regulation supports harms our politics in ways, big and small.
Practicing Self-Governance
One clear problem is that today kids have fewer chances to practice self-governance.
First, their choices are increasingly restricted. Kids used to wake up on a Saturday morning and have to choose how to spend their day: biking around, playing pick-up basketball, maybe going to get a Slurpee (my favorite 90’s activity). Now Saturdays are mapped out with activities, frequently chosen by their parents.
Second, while participating in those activities, kids’ experiences are tightly structured. They’re told what to wear, when to show up, and how to behave. Choosing between structured volleyball and structured theater doesn’t offer real agency—especially when parents often make the call about what activities kids do in the first place.
It’s admittedly not a simple black-or-white choice between structured and unstructured time. Kids need structured time too and many structured activities build focus, discipline and teamwork. In general, what’s important is that we think about how different activities build kids’ capacities to make decisions in meaningful ways. Some structured activities do that and some unstructured activities don’t.
But what’s definitely true is that our over-scheduling and over-planning means that kids have less and less space and time for agency. They have fewer opportunities to make decisions and figure out their own values because too often the values are given to them from the start. And that makes them worse decision-makers as adults.
Practicing Shared Governance
Just as kids don’t get to make decisions on their own, we also rob kids of opportunities to learn how to govern with others. In a structured environment, there’s almost always a coach or a teacher or a director or a ref or some other authority figure who adjudicates disputes. When children go to an authority figure for every minor squabble, they don’t learn conflict resolution. They don’t get practice negotiating with peers, setting boundaries, or navigating disagreement without adult intervention.
They also don’t learn how to deal with uncomfortable emotions or conflict in healthy ways. I still have uncomfortable memories of interactions with others kids when I was in elementary school and middle school. How I feel about those interactions helps inform my decision-making today.
We’re also losing the creative aspects of self-governance. When kids play made-up games together, they have to create, negotiate and implement the rules themselves. It’s fully consensual, because if you don’t like the rules the game ends or you go home. Because it’s both creative and voluntary, it generates agency while helping kids get better at problem-solving, conflict resolution, and creative rule-making and breaking.
The rigid expectation we set when our kids are small that there exists a top-down rule book and an enforcer of those rules turns into “there oughtta be a law” when those kids become adults. Increasingly, the only way to manage conflict is via the law, which also happens to be the most expensive, most antagonistic, and most dangerous way to resolve conflicts that we have.
Practicing Respect for Law
Another casualty of over-regulation is kids’ respect for the law. It’s tough to teach the importance of lawfulness when we’re constantly stuck as parents explaining that certain rules are dumb but we have to follow them to avoid trouble. The more exceptions you have to explain, the more arbitrary the whole system appears—and the more kids start to question the point of following rules at all.
How do you teach kids to respect the rules when so many laws and rules are… absurd?
Conversations parents have with kids often sound something like:
“That one’s dumb, but we have to follow it.”
“That one? We ignore it.”
“This one? It’s ridiculous—but we’ll get in serious trouble if we break it.”
Instead of respect for the law we end up teaching confusion, cynicism or even a kind of legal nihilism.
Worse, the consequences of breaking even trivial rules are real. As a parent, you’re constantly balancing two goals: teaching rational, independent decision-making while keeping your kid out of the criminal justice or child welfare systems. Many parents—especially those from lower-income or marginalized communities—don’t have the luxury of that balance. Over-regulation is frequently weaponized against lower-income families, leading to CPS involvement and even child removal. The stakes are so high that many families make subpar decisions about what’s good for their child just to avoid the costs of government interference.
The Cost of Arbitrary Rules
On a more mundane day-to-day level, over-regulation also wastes valuable parenting energy. My husband and I spent over a year lobbying our elementary school so our younger kids could walk to school with their older siblings. The school’s rule that only fourth graders and up can walk alone made no sense for us given that we live close enough to throw a ball and hit the school. It took a pandemic-induced bus driver shortage to change their minds and even then it still took countless emails and meetings before we were allowed to let our kids do something kids have been doing for eons. If that’s what it took for a well-resourced family with flexible schedules to tackle a relatively low-stakes issue, imagine how these systems fail parents with fewer resources on even bigger issues.
Parenting has also become less fun in part because parents have to deal with an increasing net of rules, expectations, and constraints that cause overwhelm while also harming our kids. Everything has become more fraught, from navigating the world of kids and technology to helping kids make good decisions about friendships and relationships. The more time and cognitive energy parents have to spend on useless and dumb rules, the less time they have to spend on the really important stuff.
Finally, we know that over-regulation causes all kinds of unintended consequences. Regulations around kids and parenting are often sold as safety measures, but they can backfire. They can push kids toward risky behavior in an attempt to circumvent the rules. Other times, they create a false sense of security. Over time, these dynamics can make kids less safe—not more—because they don’t learn how to assess risk on their own.
But perhaps the greatest harm is to our kids themselves. My college students are deeply pessimistic, sometimes catastrophically anxious, struggle with relationships, and have trouble navigating conflict of all kinds.
What’s the Way Out?
Over-regulation of parenting and childhood makes not only our kids but our democracy less safe. Kids have lost the great playground of childhood as a safe place to practice governance and self-governance in low-stakes ways.
We can’t fix the entire system overnight, but we can reclaim space through small, intentional acts:
Practice minor resistance. Push back on pointless rules. Help advocate for opportunities for your kids to have independent spaces to goof around, practice making and breaking rules together, and fail. Encourage your school to bring back unsupervised or unstructured or creatively structured activities that allow kids maximal agency and the room to screw up. Advocate for phone-free schools if you don’t have one already.
Make room for failure. Let kids mess up and learn. Ordering for themselves at restaurants is a great low-stakes exercise in speaking to strangers, managing anxiety, making decisions, and—even better—dealing with the consequences of bad ones. Order something gross? You eat it. Got the wrong dish? Time to speak up. That’s life. It’s our job as parents to help kids scaffold their agency in meaningful ways. Start with low-stakes ways to build agency like deciding what to wear and let them experience the consequences of their choices. Then scaffold up, increasing the complexity and the stakes, over time, while maintaining your role as a critical safety net they feel safe coming back to if they need it.
Be a lazy parent. Not in neglectful ways, but in letting your kids do for themselves what they’re capable of doing. Let kids make their own lunches, choose their own clothes, choose their own activities (and as they get older, make them contribute to the cost), and give them some unstructured time to do whatever they want on weekends. There are obviously exceptions to all these examples depending on your specific family situation, but think about places you can let your kids make free choices and work to maximize them within whatever your own constraints are.
Not every rule needs to be followed. Not every problem needs to be solved for them. Sometimes the best parenting move is to step back—and let life do the teaching.
Resources to Explore Further:
The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt
Autonomy Supportive Parenting – Evidence-based blog, book and tools
The Decline of Play and anything else by Peter Gray. A nice Vox article on the decline of play is here too.
One of my favorite academic papers, defending childhood play from an institutional economics perspective.
What About You?
What are your favorite ways to scaffold agency-building in kids? What kinds of things do you wish your kids could do now that we could do when we were younger? What do you see as the main connections between democracy and parenting? What can we do better, especially right now when politics (and parenting) are so polarized?
Tell me in the comments! And if you like what you read, share and subscribe!
Here's to free-range kids!!