Should parents leash their toddlers?

Putting a harness and a leash on your toddler has long been a controversial approach: helpful, or humiliating? They are, no doubt, physically effective: Parents who use child safety harnesses can’t help but keep their child in line; they are literally tethered together. And in the case of Harambe, a leash would certainly have prevented the child from making even a fraction of the effort he needed to make to get into the enclosure (provided his parent was firmly holding onto the other end, of course, and who among us hasn’t seen a puppy running around trailing behind a leash without an owner?)

But child leashes are also enabling, and debilitating; they absolve the child from having to listen to a parent, and the parent from having to teach their kids to listen, follow rules, be safe and use common sense.

Young children are, to varying degrees, unpredictable, impulsive, thoughtless. They don’t learn to resist all of these behaviors in the name of safety for themselves and others without parents’ careful, consistent and verbal input. It is work. It’s not supposed to be easy.