Do helicopter parents have heliport kids?

by David Benjamin

 

“Herbert T. Gillis: Son, is this the book you were looking for? 

“Dobie Gillis: Oh, yeah. Thanks, Dad. I don’t know what I’d do without you. 

“Herbert T. Gillis: Yeah, neither do I, but just thinking about it has made my whole day.”

—“The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis”

 

MADISON, Wis.—When an old-school newspaper editor gets copy that’s not news, he (or she) dismisses it as “dog-bites-man” and then he spikes it. The newsiness of news lies in its unpredictability. It’s a surprise, a deviation from the commonplace. Man bites dog? That’s a surprise.

There are. however, occasions when a dog-bitten man turns newsworthy. Recently, buried on Page 15 of the New York Times, I found just such a revelation in an article about a church-lady mob called Moms for Liberty (M4L) that’s working to ban from America’ school libraries indecent books—mostly about sex and slaves. M4L’s main enabler, Gov. Ron DeSantis, has goaded his Republicans allies in the legislature to purge sex and slavery from all the books in all of Florida. 

I feel obliged to mention, reluctantly, that the prurient Moms’ poster gal, a righteous blonde named Bridget Ziegler, is a little kinkier than your average Sarasota County school board member. Her fellow board members recently learned to their chagrin that Bridget partook of a “threesome” (girl-guy-girl), including a girlfriend and Bridget’s husband, whose name (I’m not making this up) is Christian. The girlfriend has also filed charges against Bridget’s hubby for sexual assault. News reports are fuzzy about whether the girlfriend’s complaint about Christian refers to the now famous menage a trois or to a separate sexcapade. 

Although this is fun, and definitely man-bites-dog, it’s actually beside the point, because Bridget, Christian and M4L have already gotten what they want. 

In Florida now, and soon in other “red” states, parents are required to submit a consent form that either allows or denies their kids access to a long list of books deemed “indecent” by self-appointed Inquisitors like Moms for Liberty. 

So far, among millions of parents subject to Florida’s opt-in/opt-out dirty-book rules, only three percent have sided with M4L. A caveat here: this three-percent book-ban uptake might be inflated by the demographics of Lee County, where two-thirds of voters are Republican. In 2020, Donald Trump got 59 percent of the county’s votes. 

However, the telling number is this: Forty percent of kids can’t access the alleged smut in Lee County’s school libraries because their parents didn’t turn in the permission slip. They didn’t opt in, opt out, or opt at all.

We all know why. 

Most parents are busy. They have jobs. They’re swamped by stupid forms that they ignore until the last minute, or until they get a “final notice” in an envelope with a red border, or it comes from the IRS. Stuff from school ends up under the junk-mail pile, or stuffed in a handbag hanging on a doorknob, or on the floor in the back seat of the car. 

And kids? C’mon, man. Kids are not going to bug mom and dad to fill out some piece of paper sent from school. Most papers sent from school mean nothing but trouble for kids. Besides, kids are both busier and lazier than parents. Half don’t even know where the school library is (if there is one), and hardly any of them read anything but TikTok and Instagram. 

Lee County is an instructive case of dog-bites-man. Until the “parents rights” clampdown in Florida, no one was asking how many parents have feelings about dangerous books allegedly lurking in school libraries, emanating Rabelaisian vibes and indoctrinating impressionable young minds with black rage and white shame. 

Now we know. In a Republican county in a conservative state with a MAGA governor and right-wing supermajorities in both houses, 97 percent of parents have no discernible interest in any book in their kids’ libraries. This vast majority don’t care whether, when or how children might learn about sex and slavery. Why? Perhaps they trust the schools to do the job conscientiously. More likely, they don’t have the time or the energy to try to control the uncontrollable. 

Whatever they do, parents know their kids are going to find out what they found out—not in school or from mom and dad—when they were kids. 

For example, ’til eighth grade, I attended a parochial school that had no library. If I was curious about sex, slavery or, for that matter, Martin Luther, St. Mary’s School was a dry hole. I compensated by borrowing hundreds of books from the Tomah Public Library, none of which taught me anything useful about sex. I wouldn’t have had any sexual education at all if not for my cousins Bobby and Danny. Also, there was this slutty thirteen-year-old girl who showed us …

No, let’s leave her out of this.

As for slavery, well, I grew up in a segregated pre-Rev. King America when Southern revisionism was all the rage among history-book authors. Any kid who wanted to learn the actual truth about America’s original sin had to go dig it up himself—which I did. If I’d gone to a school library to study slavery, I would’ve been worse informed than if I’d only read Little Black Sambo. 

In all my school days, neither of my parents ever questioned the curriculum, challenged a teacher (God forbid), argued about my grades or wondered what books I might be reading. They never came to school. They never called. This was normal. School was not parental turf. It was where parents unloaded kids, thankfully!, for seven blessed hours a day, 180 days a year. It was freedom. 

 I notice recently that schools have begun restricting mobile phone use by device-addicted students who tend to spend entire class periods texting, surfing social media or watching video. I’m puzzled by the apparent fact that somehow schools chose to tolerate this sort of obvious disruption. 

Was it that long ago that if you chewed gum, or passed notes—or whispered—in class, you got sent to the principal? And no parent on God’s earth would object because this happened in school, and school has rules that every parent followed—or suffered the consequences—when they were in school. Remember?

Today, there are parents fighting for their kids “right” to keep their phones in hand, turned on, all the time, from first period ’til the bell rings. Really?

Why? 

Because, if I’m reading this right, today’s “connected” kids need to get in touch, immediately, at any moment, during class, with mom and dad. 

C’mon, man! Have kids really changed that much? Do they really yearn to hear the soothing sound of their parents’ voices that much more than any previous generation of kids? In school? Have these kids bonded with mom and dad more deeply than Holden Caulfield, Dobie Gillis or Phoebe Buffay ever did?

Every school I ever went to had an office, with phones, available to any kid who felt a desperate need to call a parent. Through twelve grades, I never heard of a kid who did that (or admitted to it). Once, in eighth grade, I got flattened on the playground and had to be tended by the school nurse. After she bandaged my wound, she asked if I wanted to call Mom. Call Mom? What for? This was school. Mom didn’t even know where my school was. Besides, she wasn’t home. She had a job. All my schools were full of kids with parents who had jobs.

 I think they still do. I think most kids still regard school as their turf, and parents don’t belong. I think a mobile phone s something kids use to avoid parents, not call them. And I think most parents—like the 97 percent in right-wing Lee County—still have bigger problems on their minds than whether their kids pee in a unisex bathroom or find out that Thomas Jefferson boinked Sally Hemings.