Jessica Grose On Parenting
OPINION
On Japan’s Adorable ‘Old Enough!’ Show and the State of American Childhoods
April 16, 2022
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By Jessica Grose
Opinion Writer
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An aggressively adorable reality show that’s been on for decades in Japan recently hit Netflix. It’s called “Old Enough!” and it depicts Japanese little ones, some as young as 2, taking their first solo journeys (the show’s original title is translated as “My First Errand”). These tiny children are shown toddling by themselves to the grocery store, to their grandmother’s house to pick something up or to a local farm to yank an enormous cabbage out of the ground.
Sometimes they get distracted from their appointed mission and start playing, and they often notice and interact with the camera operators, who appear in the background of many scenes. But the narrative is basically the same every time: A child overcomes fears or hesitations by running an errand, learning to politely ask questions of supportive and kind adults when help is needed to figure out how to pay for lunch or cross a busy street. And the kids are brimming with pride after accomplishing their tasks.
In addition to being utterly charmed by how cute the show is, my response was: This wouldn’t fly in the United States. If there were an American version, parents who allowed their children to appear would probably be framed as irresponsible, or the kids would be shown to need parental support at every turn.
You’re probably also thinking: America is not Japan. And that’s correct. Our cultures are quite different. One glaring example is gun violence, something that’s rare in Japan and alarmingly predictable in our country. But, sadly, we know that the presence of an adult doesn’t necessarily protect children from that horror. Another difference is infrastructure. As a University of Tokyo professor explained to Slate’s Henry Grabar: “Drivers in Japan are taught to yield to pedestrians. Speed limits are low. Neighborhoods have small blocks with lots of intersections. That means kids have to cross the street a lot — but also keeps drivers going slow, out of self-interest if nothing else.” But even given these differences, we should at least entertain the idea that Americans have over-rotated on protectiveness in the past few decades and need to reconsider letting their kids do more by themselves.
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Christine Gross-Loh, the author of “Parenting Without Borders: Surprising Lessons Parents Around the World Can Teach Us,” who has lived in Japan and the United States with her kids, said that she had culture shock in both directions — first when she moved to Japan, and again when she moved back to the United States. “In school and parenting, all the assumptions of what children can do and should be learning, it’s almost inverted,” she said. In Japan, there’s a focus on “teaching children to pull their own weight from an early age, having these expectations that they’re capable of being independent, being left at home alone or cooking or using knives or walking to school at 6,” she said.
It’s not just Japan. In much of the rest of the world, kids are allowed to do more solo at earlier ages. Dan Kois, who wrote a book about traveling the world with his 9- and 11-year-olds, said, “Our experience in most of the places we lived in the course of that year, children, especially middle-grade children, were given enormous amounts of freedom that were totally incomprehensible” to the average American. In the Netherlands, for instance, Kois said that kids rode their bikes to school by themselves.
Though I knew American parents were more protective than some parents in other countries, I was surprised at the extent of the protectiveness. According to a 2012 analysis of a survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the mean age at which American adults believed a child could be left at home alone was 13, bathe alone was 7 and a half, bike alone was around 10.
American norms seem also to have become more protective over time. My reaction to “Old Enough!” was similar to my reaction when recently rewatching 1991’s “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead.” I doubt it could or would be made the same way today, and not just because of all the smoking in it. The premise is that a single mother of five kids, from grade school to high school age, goes to Australia with her boyfriend for the summer, and that’s depicted as a very reasonable thing for a stressed-out mom to do.
She leaves her kids with a random babysitter who’s approximately 9,000 years old, whom she meets roughly five minutes before she departs. Sorry for the spoiler, but as the title suggests, early on, the babysitter dies. The kids wind up having to navigate plenty of obstacles on their own — even broken bones — and ultimately learn self-reliance, becoming confident in skills such as holding down a job, cooking and cleaning.
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While I’m not suggesting that it’s advisable to let your kids go feral for a summer, I suspect that if “Don’t Tell Mom” were remade in 2022, one moral of the story would be about how negligent the mother was. But in 1991, there was simply a happy ending for all involved. (Except, of course, for the babysitter. R.I.P.)
Because art often reflects cultural values, these days in movies and TV shows geared toward kids and teenagers, there seem to be more secondary adult characters, mostly parents, hovering helpfully around the edges. So I asked Kathryn VanArendonk, a critic at Vulture and New York magazine whose viral Twitter thread about “Old Enough!” first inspired me to watch the show, for her insight.
She compared the 1992 version of the children’s TV show “Ghostwriter” with the 2019 Apple TV+ adaptation her children are into. “The general premise is that kids get a message from a literary ghost, and they have to solve mysteries. The show I remember watching was a group of kids off on their own solving their little messages,” she said. The new version is also great, she said, but she noticed a “perpetual checking in” with moms and dads, and “you can see the parent in the background.”
Experts peg the 1980s and 1990s as when American parenting started becoming more conservative in this way. Lenore Skenazy, the founder of Free-Range Kids and the president of Let Grow, an organization that advocates children having more freedom, said that a shift began, understandably, when child abductions were getting a lot of national media coverage. Etan Patz and Adam Walsh became household names, and rather than thinking of these cases as horrific anomalies, parents began to think of child kidnapping as something more common than it is.
Skenazy said that poorly defined child neglect laws also play a role. Many parents have told me they want to give their kids more freedom, but worry that if they let their 9-year-old go to the park alone, for example, they might wind up getting a call from child protective services. (Skenazy notes that this kind of thing really happens.) Others might make the argument that there’s not much downside to being extra cautious, but research suggests something more complicated — a 2021 paper in the Journal of Family Psychology found that too much parental involvement may lead to worse self-regulation among kindergartners. In The Atlantic, Derek Thompson argues that part of the reason American teenagers are so anxious is that their bubble-wrapped childhoods can leave them without a sense of competence.
America is vast, and parents know their kids and their specific neighborhoods best — I’m not about to send my 5-year-old to the bodega by herself quite yet. But I hope watching “Old Enough!” will make more American parents consider the possibility that our cultural norms need a reset, or at least a rethink. I watched the show with my youngest, and she was so jealous and irritated that the kids, some of whom were younger than she is, were allowed to do so many exciting things mostly on their own. Seeing the looks of joy on the “Old Enough!” kids’ tiny faces after completing their quotidian assignments certainly made me want that sense of triumph for my daughters, however they might achieve it.
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Want More on Kids and Freedom?
In 2018, Kim Brooks wrote a piece for Opinion about “Motherhood in the Age of Fear.” As she put it, “We now live in a country where it is seen as abnormal, or even criminal, to allow children to be away from direct adult supervision, even for a second.”
In response to Brooks’s piece, New York Times readers wrote in from all over the globe, telling American parents that they need to chill. A dad from Tel Aviv said: “I have three kids. I’ve left them home alone since the age of 7 to drop off dry cleaning, grab a coffee or pick up milk at the local store. My only requests were no cooking, fighting or using the iron. Read, play or clean your room. Never a problem.”
In 2020, I wrote about the rise in popularity of GPS trackers for kids, which I believe hamper children’s growing senses of freedom.
Reporting this week on “Old Enough!,” The Times’s Hisako Ueno and Mike Ives wrote: “The show’s popularity in Japan is a reflection of the country’s high level of public safety, as well as a parenting culture that sees toddlers’ independence as a key marker of their development.” But, they also note, the show “does have some critics in Japan.”
Tiny Victories
Parenting can be a grind. Let’s celebrate the tiny victories.
I feel like I “won” this evening’s activities. I dropped my daughter off at dance at 5:30, had a 45-minute massage, and then picked her up at 7.
— Becky Rotem, Burke, Va.
