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39 Regulation 32 (2016-2017)
Infantilization by Regulation

handle is hein.journals/rcatorbg39 and id is 106 raw text is: 32 / Regulation / SUMMER 2016 INFANTILIZATION BY REGULATION Like helicopterparenting governmentpolicies to protectpeople from cognitive biases risk stunting their ability to avoid and handle mistakes. BY JONATHAN KLICK AND GREG MITCHELL n the 2001 cinema classic Bubble Boy, Jake Gyllen- haal's character, Jimmy, is forced by his mother to live inside a system of plastic tubes and bubbles, ostensibly because he was born without immunities. After the woman he loves leaves town to marry another man, Jimmy builds a portable bubble, escapes from his par- ents' home, and follows his love from California to Niagara Falls to declare his feelings at her wedding. In the film's climax, Jimmy removes his bubble, indicating that he would rather embrace his love and die than stay locked in his protective dome. However, it turns out he didn't need the bubble at all; it was just part of an elaborate effort by his mother to protect him from the ubiquitous dangers in the world outside the bubble. Stories of overprotective mothers and overbearing fathers are funny in the movies. In real life, paternalism rarely goes to such extremes. However, the protective impulse comes naturally to most parents. Recognizing the potential to take this impulse too far, folk wisdom traditionally cautioned moms and dads against trying to live their children's lives for them. According to this wisdom, making their own mistakes (and suffering through the consequences) is essential to children's development. In addition to the practical benefits, philosophers such asJohn Stuart Mill believed this kind of mistake-based learning is central to the autonomy of-and even the value of-human beings in general. Protecting individuals from making mistakes, in Mill's account, robs them of the opportunity to genuinely flourish. Choices made in a context where only prescribed options are available do little to exercise the skills needed to make choices in general. Also, ex post protecting an individual from the con- sequences of freely made choices has the potential to limit the incentive to develop the capacity to make choices. These protec- JONATHAN KLICK is professor oflaw at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. GREG MITCHELL is thejoseph Weintraub-Bank ofAmerica Distinguished Professor of Law and Thomas F. Bergin Teaching Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law. tions serve to keep a person in developmental infancy. Beyond that, if a person isn't allowed to own his failures, how can it make sense to credit him with his successes? Because of this, according to Mill, the overly protected person is unfairly limited. Somewhere along the line, this model of human flourishing and the associated method of parenting fell out of favor. Parental involvement moved from setting and enforcing outer limits, to micromanaging free time and play dates, to fixing mistakes, to the proverbial helicopter parenting we see today. Not only has this kind of parenting become acceptable; it may well constitute the current normative expectation of what constitutes a good parent. Parents who allow their children to walk home alone without adult supervision prompt calls to the police and child protective services, and leaving children alone in a safe and comfortable car in a store parking lot is viewed as negligence or worse. While causality is always difficult to isolate, it is hard not to notice the correlation between this parenting approach and the calls for trigger warnings and safe spaces breaking out on modern college campuses. What started out as funny anecdotes of par- ents scheduling their kids' classes and meeting with professors to discuss their children's grades has evolved into sad stories of parents attending their kids' job interviews and negotiating ben- efits packages for adult children who apparently aren't equipped to do these things on their own. While outsiders may write these stories off as apocryphal, one of us actually received a message from an administrator at his law school that a student's father had called the dean's office to com- plain that a test was unfair and his child should not have received the grade awarded. Never mind that the student had not come to plead the case personally; never mind that law school grades are generally distributed according to a fixed curve such that not everyone can be ranked above average; never mind that law students tend to be in their mid-20s and in three years' time will be working as lawyers handling real problems with real consequences; all that