How safe do we need to keep them?

More from the New Yorker on Helicopter parents

As for children’s safety, Honoré makes what will no doubt be the controversial recommendation that we stop fretting about it. He quotes Samuel Butler on the subject: “Young people have a marvelous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances.” Allergy rates in children are rising throughout the industrialized world. Honoré blames this on oversanitized environments: “Just look at what happened in Germany. Before unification, allergy rates were much higher in the western part, even though the Communist-run eastern half had much worse pollution and more children living on farms. After the countries reunited, East Germany was cleaned up and urbanized—and allergy rates soared.”

Finally, Honoré takes on domestic psychology, in particular the “self-esteem movement” born of the nineteen-seventies. To him, as to other writers on overparenting, this is a matter of disgust. “Every doodle ends up on the fridge door,” he says. According to the research he’s read, such ego-pumping confers no benefit. A review of thousands of studies found that high self-esteem in children did not boost grades or career prospects, or even resistance to adult alcoholism. If I am not mistaken, however, there is something about the self-esteem movement that strikes Honoré at a level deeper than the question of our children’s competence. Marano, as the title of her book tells us, is worried that we are producing a nation of wimps, people who won’t “make it.” Honoré is worried that the Stepford children produced by overparenting will make it, and turn the world into a rude, heartless, boring place.