Between freedom and fear

The culture of safety and overprotection. Is the world really that more dangerous?

Dec 10, 2025

I was six when I first tasted independence. My pack of first grade friends and I walked three quarters of a mile unchaperoned to a busy intersection in our neighborhood in Queens, traversing alongside a busy multi-lane boulevard. Instead of heading straight home from school, we headed to the mall in the opposite direction and didn’t tell anyone.

I don’t remember the details of this surreptitious joy walk, just the visceral memory of walking on the sidewalk next to a rush of cars, our little heads buzzing with electricity from the thrill of feeling like such big kids.

I’d like to imagine that we were a gang of six year olds colluding something mischievous, but I think we were just curious to test the very edges of our independence by breaking the rules for an afternoon. I have to laugh at the memory now because we weren’t meddling, defiant teens—just curious six year olds.

Upon reaching the mall, I called my mom (who was decidedly not laughing) from a payphone in the entrance of Alexander’s (shoutout to anyone who remembers that old school New York department store). I’m also impressed that I had coins in my pocket to even make that call. Maybe it dawned on me that I was in trouble. Maybe I suddenly realized that she might be worried. On the other end of the phone, my mother was both livid and relieved.

It’s sort of hard to believe that we were allowed to walk home from school by ourselves at that age to begin with. By the time we as parents were comfortable letting our children do the same at age 11, we were already latchkey kids doing our homework in front of the T.V. in an empty house.

While reading the book, The Coddling of the American Mind, last week, my head was swimming in a constant tug of war comparison between the freedoms I enjoyed as a child and the more constrained ones my kids had. Meanwhile, I kept questioning whether I was the one imposing those restraints.

This isn’t an endorsement or a critique of the book, by the way. There was stuff I agreed with and much that I didn’t. I scoffed at how two privileged white male professors could have so much to say about microaggressions, for example. I also found that the authors often cherrypicked anecdotal cases to generalize them as trends and tended to overlook social structures to oversimplify systemic issues.

Still, even as I mulled over the central concept of how the culture of “safetyism” pathologizes discomfort and is producing a generation of less resilient kids, the idea of it stayed with me.

Currently, I’m sitting in the aftermath of a storm. Last week’s tears become this week’s remorse. The anxiety that slithered its way through my insides with a chokehold on my nerves has finally subsided into a state far more rational. I can think more clearly now. I’ve had to flex my parenting muscles recently and find myself second guessing myself entirely. Did I coddle my kids too much? Did I not allow them to make enough mistakes? Are they equipped to cope with conflict and hardships? Am I too overbearing??

I know I’m not alone in wanting to protect my kids. Helicopter parenting, overprotection—whatever you want to call it—I constantly overthink how much, how far, how little. We’ve lost any tolerance for our kids to be uncomfortable. But at the same time, I cut myself some slack because we’re expected to be so much more involved in our children’s lives than our parents ever were.

This is modern parenting, which is ironic since we were raised as a generation who was left alone to tend to ourselves. Schools now demand a certain level of parental involvement, many parents are way too invested in the college admissions process, and some of the unsupervised activities that were common during my childhood would get a parent charged with neglect and endangerment these days.

I love sharing stories with my kids of how we grew up driving without car seats or seatbelts. My brother climbing in and out of the front seat from my mother’s lap, tumbling in the backseat next to me, never sitting still for a minute. My dad was a smoker too, so my childhood memory of car rides was watching plumes of smoke unfurling from his cigarette, curling in wisps like a secret code written in air before it dissipated in a haze. Car rides were chaotic. Nobody was strapped in. I don’t know how we collectively survived the 70s.

Dangers were always out there. I’d argue that 70s and 80s New York City was more dangerous than the Bloomberg-era version of the city that my kids were born into. This triggers a memory of when I was nearly kidnapped by a stranger in a car one day, involving a phone call and a man pretending to be my authorized pickup person after school. We’re so conditioned to fear the boogeyman and other perils that might be lurking at every corner that we’ve nearly rendered unsupervised play a thing of the past. But dangers have always been lurking.

So why have we become so overprotective? Is the world really that more dangerous? Is fragility the reason why anxiety, depression, and suicide among teens have been on a sharp rise since the 2010s? Or can we blame it on phones, cancel culture, and algorithms?

Maybe I’m the one to blame. Maybe I intervened too much, too soon and didn’t allow the space for them to struggle and navigate their own way. Perhaps I fell too hard into the trap of grind culture and oversubscribed my kids to extracurriculars instead of more free play to keep up with everyone else who was doing the same.

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

I’ve recently decided that this era of parenting college-aged adults has been the most challenging one for me so far. It has less to do with them and everything to do with me. I know I worry too much, but I didn’t realize just how much my own abandonment issues and trauma around my bother’s suicide would surface and interfere with my reasoning. I’ve had to face some really hard stuff in the process. I did not expect this much reckoning when the kids left home.

I read something recently that suggested today’s young adults are experiencing delayed adulthood. Milestones around the typical adult experiences like moving out, financial independence, and even dating are happening later than past generations.

It would be easy to point to the coddling of our children as the source, but it’s more nuanced and complex than that. A slower transition into adulthood doesn’t equal a lack of maturity, it isn’t evidence of fragility. It does, however, suggest that social and structural shifts in education, cost of living, and the challenging employment landscape may be changing the path to adulthood.

The paradox (or rather, hypocrisy) to all this worrying, of course, is that I enjoyed unfettered freedom and independence away from my parents when I was the same age. There were no phones, no contact for weeks, no pressures to think about my future while in school. I also did a lot of stupid and dangerous things that would make me panic as a parent now.

But my freedom was mine and I grew up and figured out my life, eventually. We have to trust that our kids will somehow find a way to do the same. And we have to trust ourselves that when the time comes, we’ll know how to land the helicopter.

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The week in photos

Sunsets, neighborhood Christmas tree lightings, and bare trees. Winter is here.

A roundup of links & recs

To watch:

The NYC train platform is in no way glamorous, but it serves as a great cinematic backdrop. The CHANEL Métiers d’art 2026 show, set in a decommissioned subway station downtown, is a joy to watch. The clothes!! I was swooning over every outfit and wishing I had places to go to wear clothes this divine.

Some listy things:

79 Teeny-Tiny Gifts Small enough to fit in your hand and all under $40. (The Strategist)
I’m not much for gift guides because I’m really trying to reduce my consumption (yes, even with gifts), but I couldn’t resist this charming and fun list of tiny gifts. I love anything mini.
The Top 25 Food Culture Trends That Defined the Past 25 Years (Food & Wine)
Between having a spouse who was very much entrenched in the restaurant world as a chef and then owning a food business for a dozen years, this was a fun walk down memory lane.
The Defining Artworks of 2025 (Artnews)
The world is turbulent, but art persists and thrives, even in a time where censorship is rising.

To read:

ChatGPT’s Biggest Foe: Poetry (Nautilus)
So this is fascinating. Because poetry is often written in carefully crafted metaphorical verse, researchers found that it has the ability to trick AI chatbots, which are typically trained in prose, into breaking safety guardrails “and convincing them to provide dangerous information, such as how to build a bomb.” Huh. We really giving away how to circumvent guardrails?
Ride or Die (Granta)
Friendships can be complicated. They can be intensely codependent, fiercely loyal, and even destructive. Megan Nolan writes a beautiful piece about an intense college friendship that offered connection and escape, but then ultimately drifted apart.
The Curious Notoriety of “Performative Reading” (The New Yorker)
”A performative reader treats books like accessories, lugging around canonical texts as a ploy to attract a romantic partner or as a way to revel in the pleasure of feeling superior to others.”
Everything can be reduced to a performance—apparently, even reading.
Goodbye angels, hello Ozempic needles – what’s behind the boom in bizarre Christmas baubles? (The Guardian)
I don’t know what’s behind it, but I saw a now-out-of-commission subway metrocard ornament and I kind of want it.

An exhibit worth seeing if you’re in NYC:

To define a feeling: Joan Mitchell, 1960–1965 (David Zwirner, until Dec 13)
I really do love Joan Mitchell’s abstract gestural paintings, I always have. This exhibit of her paintings at David Zwirner gallery in Chelsea focuses on the years when the artist moves from New York to France. Scale, brushstrokes, and texture matter and these photos can never do her work justice.