Utah Mom Is Appalled When Child Services Gets Called In Because of a Spirited Neighborhood Soccer Match

“Child-on-child aggression” is how child protective services categorized the incident — and why they decided to investigate. What the heck had happened?As a Park City, Utah, teacher, Heather Bryant, explained in a piece she wrote for her local paper, the Park Record, her children — 12, 8, and 5 at the time — were playing a game of pickup soccer in the neighborhood. Sounds innocent enough, right?Yet afterward, the mom of another boy who’d been in the game overheard him complaining to Ms. Bryant’s 8-year-old that Mr. Bryant’s older son had played rough. She then called the authorities.What disturbs Ms. Bryant, she writes in her piece, is that somehow “a casual soccer match outside — kids running hard, voices raised, bodies colliding in the ordinary way children play — was later described as ‘dysregulated’ and overly rough. Normal physicality was reframed as aggression. Healthy competition became cause for alarm.”Once the Division of Child and Family Services was alerted, the system kicked into gear. A caseworker was dispatched to interview Ms. Bryant’s three tots — at three different schools. Ms. Bryant didn’t even hear about this until after it happened, when the caseworker called to say that the investigation had yielded nothing of note.Nothing? For Ms. Bryant, a whole world of worry had just opened up. The caseworker’s call, she told me, knocked her “sideways” and left her shaking. She started worrying whenever her tots were playing with their friends. Would the other children say something to their parents? Would she be investigated again?And what did it mean that she, a longtime teacher who wanted to give her tots some bracing, confidence-building unsupervised time, had had her parenting second-guessed?Ms. Bryant had moved to Park City in part because it’s such an outdoorsy place. Tons of ski children are on the slopes instead of inside on screens. How healthy.“Helicopter parenting is associated with higher anxiety, lower resilience, and reduced independence in children,” Ms. Bryant wrote in the Park Record. “Yet this approach is increasingly normalized and protected, while parenting that allows for age-appropriate freedom is treated as suspect.”In the end, thank goodness, the caseworker told Ms. Bryant, “We want to reassure you that your children are all clearly well-adjusted. No further action will be taken.” In other words, the case was closed.That’s a victory for common sense. But here’s the foundational problem: We think of tots today as fragile. Hearing about a spat or fight or almost anything upsetting, we — parents, onlookers, government authorities — have become conditioned to leap in for fear that the children will be damaged. Completely discounted is the damage in undermining tots’ innate resilience. One reason children are so anxious and depressed lately is likely that they get so few chances to work things out on their own. If you never figure out how to deal with an older child playing rough, you never learn how much you can handle. Instead, an adult is always there to solve the problems (or call a hotline).Meanwhile, the parents get stuck in anxiety mode. By being with our tots so much of the time, so close, we near all the little spats and squabbles. Minor things that would have been forgotten are now witnessed, worried about and turned into “issues.” Why is that progress?After Ms. Bryant wrote her opinion piece, she reposted it on Nextdoor and got over 50 comments, all of them supportive. Turns out no one likes parenting under a microscope.Growing up under one isn’t great, either.Creators.com

Utah Mom Is Appalled When Child Services Gets Called In Because of a Spirited Neighborhood Soccer Match

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