drwex | Cultural values and parenting

This AM I had a moment of cultural parenting paralysis. It went sort of like this:

Driving L to school I find myself at a stoplight behind a recent-model SUV occupied by Driver, Adult Passenger, and Child Passenger. It's immediately obvious that Child Passenger is both young and not in any kind of restraint or seat. She's bouncing around, including leaning over and hugging Driver.

(For those of you who are not yourselves parents I need to note that this is a Major Bozo No-No. Driving with your kid not in a proper seat can get you a ticket in most states and in some places even more serious charges of child endangerment if the police and the DA are feeling cranky. But I've no idea what the MA law is on the topic, so let's just call it a serious safety concern.)

To my consternation, Parent pulls into the same parking lot as I'm heading for and it's immediately clear that Child is a classmate of L's. I don't know her, or her mother, but we have at least some tenuous connection.

I really wanted to say something - I consider having an active child bouncing around the back seat of a car to be dangerous for the child, the other occupants of the car, and probably others nearby. But I didn't, in part because I really resent people trying to tell me how to parent my children so I try not to tell other people. Everyone makes choices, and lord knows there are people around me who make parenting choices that raise more than a few eyebrows.

To complicate things further, the family is clearly one of the not-of-this-culture set that make up the majority of the class. I believe they've come from a country where the legal system has a very different view on child and automobile safety. What they did is probably perfectly normal for them - hell, my own mother doesn't understand my peculiar fetish with child safety while driving. When I was a child I bounced around the backs of cars in more or less exactly the same way this girl was bouncing around.

So my critique, if any, would come from a particularly privileged class and time position. I'm a white guy who is highly educated and can not only afford high tech safety equipment for my children I can read and understand the complex statistics that are used to justify regulations on such things. I come from a culture where children are rare (few per family) and each child is given a proportionately higher share of attention. Our culture has peculiar views of what privileges children should be given and at what stages of life, as well as what restrictions need to be placed on them. Other cultures don't necessarily share any of these things.

So I say nothing, and drive myself to distraction with self-analysis. Ain't being a geek grand.