Democracy: A democratically run community.

If liberal societies are desirable because they strive to minimize coercion, parenting matters for our ability to maintain a liberal order. If we do not give kids the chance to develop the skills that come from unsupervised play, they are going to find it very difficult to generate cooperative, tolerant, and non-coercive approaches to both larger-scale institutional problems as well as smaller-scale “Ostrom moments.” So much of our interaction in the liberal order is in spaces not fully defined by formal rules nor enforced by formal mechanisms. Without practice at dealing with such situations, young people may struggle and ask for formal rules and enforcement, which will likely smother those informal spaces. More young people without the skills developed by unsupervised play might result in a severe coarsening of human social life. Changes in parenting can reduce the vulnerabilities of democracies.

The ability to solve low-level conflicts through peaceful means by the parties involved reduces private coercion, and thereby reduces the demand for more public forms of coercion. Free societies rest on a bedrock of informal conflict resolution and the skills necessary to make that happen may well be developed through forms of unsupervised childhood play. Declaring such play to be too risky is a decision fraught with risk, both to the well-being of children and to the society they will inhabit as adults.