Home alone.

• Author: Harriman, Pat
• Position: SOCIOLOGY NOTEBOOK

OUR FEARS of leaving children alone have become systematically exaggerated in recent decades--not because the practice has become more dangerous, but because it has become socially unacceptable, suggests a study by social scientists at the University of California, Irvine. "Without realizing it, we have consistently increased our estimates of the amount of danger facing children left alone in order to better justify or rationalize the moral disapproval we feel toward parents who violate this relatively new social norm," says Ashley Thomas, cognitive sciences graduate student and lead author of the work, published in the open-access journal Collabra.

The survey-based study found that children whose parents left them alone on purpose were perceived to be in greater danger than those whose parents involuntarily were separated from them. "Within a given scenario, the only thing that varied was the reason for the parent's absence," notes Kyle Stanford, professor and chair of logic and philosophy of science. "These included an unintentional absence--caused by a fictitious accident in which the mother was hit by a car and briefly knocked unconscious--and four that were planned: leaving for work, volunteering for a charity, relaxing, or meeting an illicit lover. After reading each scenario and the reason behind each child being left alone, the participants ranked on a scale of one to 10 how much estimated danger the child was in while the parent was gone, 10 being the most risk."

Overall, survey participants saw all of these situations as dangerous: the average risk estimate was 6.99, and the most-common ranking in all scenarios was 10. Despite identical descriptions of each set of circumstances in which children were alone, those left alone on purpose were estimated to be in greater danger than those whose parents left them alone unintentionally.

"In fact, children left alone on purpose are almost certainly safer than those left alone by accident, because parents can take steps to make the situation safer, like giving the child a phone or reviewing safety rules," relates Barbara Samecka, study coauthor and associate professor of cognitive sciences. "The fact that people make the opposite judgment strongly suggests that they morally disapprove of parents who leave their children alone, and that disapproval inflates their estimate of the risk."

This also is borne out in participants' view of children left alone by a parent meeting an illicit lover...