When Is It OK to Mind Your Business?

I am with my daughters at a park near our home. It isn’t quite cold, but the threat is implied. A breeze is raising tiny goose bumps on my arm. I am thinking I should have worn warmer clothes.

My daughters, the younger, 17 months, the other 5 years old, are doing their usual park routine, oblivious to the weather, only really needing me for a push on a swing. They come to this park all the time. Here pick-up friendship is the thing; names are rarely exchanged.

Onto this scene bound two little boys, brothers shot with energy as they clamor aboard the jungle gym. Then suddenly, gloriously, these children are without their shoes.

Their mother/father/responsible adult companion isn’t around, or at least not anywhere close. I do not know these children, nor have I ever seen them before.

It is instinct, I suppose, that leads me to speak my words.

“Aren’t your feet cold without shoes?” I say.

The boys turn to face me. “No!” they respond with an emphasis that sounds as if it has been practiced a lot.

My older daughter gives me a startled look. She seems to know that I have broken with protocol.

My intro rebuffed, reason then takes hold.

“Oh,” I tell myself. “So butt out.”

I should have known, of course. “Mind your own business” is about as close as we come to a national motto here in the land of the (sometimes very) free.

Usually I do keep my tongue. I disapprove silently, scowling inside. I worry about innocents--babies who should be in car seats, children without helmets on their bikes--but then I push the concern aside.

I don’t want to be “rude,” a busybody, somebody who thinks she is holier than thou. Besides, I tell myself, I don’t need more troubles than my own.

The shoeless kids, of course, are small potatoes. There was no harm done, the boys were not imperiled in any way. The trip to the park may have just overstimulated my mothering gene.

But the incident, as small as it was, is one that I haven’t forgotten. There’s another, contradictory line in our unwritten national creed. It’s something like “Americans help each other out.” This part has never been more complicated than now.

Children, certainly, don’t like strange grown-ups telling them what to do, or in the case of the jettisoned shoes, suggesting that what they are doing is somehow wrong.

Yet their parents, I imagine, would be even more appalled if a stranger presumed to tell them what is best for their child. “Leave It to Beaver” is a relic in 1992. The people who live in the neighborhood have changed. We don’t know most of them anymore.

Today’s parents might begin by asking a strange know-it-all, “What gives you the right?” Were somebody talking to my daughters, I might ask the same. Suspicion is a learned response.

In public life, we speak of the “pendulum” swinging this way or that on the more sensitive issues of our times. Abortion, gun control, the right to hate versus the right to live in peace, the public’s mood is said to be “pro” or “con.”

Big issues are squeezed into the form of a multiple-choice quiz. They never fit. Yes! We should report child abuse. No! We should not tell anybody how to raise their child.

So where do you draw the line between help and interference? If you live and let live, does that mean that you let life go wrong as well? Chances are you draw your lines in different latitudes than I draw my own.

A few weeks ago, I was watching “60 Minutes” as Morley Safer was interviewing the parents of a boy who had been playing with their handgun at home. The boy had invited a friend over, a neighbor, to spend the night. The friend was shot to death.

The parents told “60 Minutes” that they were sorry about this. They said that their son knew how to handle a gun, but that the dead boy did not. They said that was where the problem lies.

Parents should teach all children the proper way to handle guns, the gun owners said. That way if their child goes over to a friend’s house, he will be prepared just in case there is a firearm lying around.

The grief-stricken mother of the dead boy, meantime, just did not understand this rationale. Neither did I. These parents talking to Morley Safer looked like responsible human beings.

Yet here was the hands-off policy taken to its ludicrous, tragic extreme: Your boy should have known. We are not responsible for keeping him safe at all.

“Mind your own business” assumes a lot. Sometimes it assumes way too much. It implies that I have enough sense to manage my own affairs and that you have enough to take care of your own. This would be in a perfect world.

In real life, we cannot be guided solely by bumper-sticker mottoes. Wisdom often falls between the lines.