ArcaMax

There's a hidden side to today's poverty debate that traditional politicians on the left and right too often overlook or undervalue: the decline in neighborliness.

Perhaps the word strikes your ear as too quaint, simplistic or old-fashioned for an era as sophisticated and raucous as this one.

Thoughtful debates tend to prefer more high-toned terms such as "social capital," "community cohesion" or "civil virtue."

Yet even in the sophisticated, densely researched works of Robert Putnam, Jane Jacobs and other social researchers and critics, I have found the word "neighborliness" popping up as an indispensible virtue to an orderly community.

My column-writing colleague Timothy Carney at The Washington Examiner linked a decline in "neighborliness" to the recent wave of stories about parents getting arrested for letting their children play alone.

For example, a mother in North Augusta, South Carolina was thrown in jail earlier this summer for leaving her 9-year-old daughter at a neighborhood park while she went to work nearby.

More recently, a Port St. Lucie, Florida mom was similarly charged after she allowed her 7-year-old son to walk a half-mile to a park alone.

Well-meaning people call the cops when they see a child without parents, writes Carney, but "neighborly adults look after other adults' kids when the parents are unavailable."

I'm not alone in detecting deeper social anxieties at work here.

"We're arresting parents," observed Michael Brendan Dougherty of "The Week" magazine, "because civil society is retreating from children altogether.

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