Fear with Child

Last week I touched on the topic of the paranoid parental fear that seems to be gripping the country. As a parent of a young child I am constantly being told by friends, family and even people I hardly know that the world is a very dangerous place for my child and that only through constant vigilance will I assure my child will reach adulthood without being kidnapped, molested, murdered or bludgeoned. Even the TV news gets in on the stoking of parental fear
by making any case of a missing child or worse the lead story of the night's broadcast (they even have a quaint name for this).

To all this I say poppycock, which is a old fashioned way of calling bullshit on the culture of parental fear. I've read books on the subject of the exploitation of fear (The Culture of Fear by Barry Glassner) and one of the things that I have learned is that reality is not as dangerous a place as we are lead to believe. The crimes that most parents spend countless hours worrying about are at historic lows and statistically, our children are safer now than they have ever been in the history of our country.

Kidnappings are at a historic low. Sexual abuse of children by adults have been declining also. It is a fact that children today are less likely to be molested, kidnapped or killed than their parents were thirty years ago, and the odds of these things happening have continued to decrease generation after generation. And yet we, as a society, think that letting our kids go to the park or take the subway by themselves is akin to neglect and abuse. Again, poppycock. This is what kids need.

What we are doing is raising a generation of children unable to take charge of their own lives because they are so accustomed to having their safety managed by an adult. If a child doesn't have the chance to get into scrapes and little bits of trouble when they are young then they will have no capability to deal with scrapes and trouble when they are older. This is what childhood is for; it is a relatively consequence free period of life where you learn the cost of mistakes and how to deal with them productively. A child who doesn't get into little scrapes as a child will get into bigger scrapes as an adult.

Pitting the facts and logic against this culture of fear is getting harder and harder to do. As a father who has custody of my bi-racial son I read articles about how this fear gripping our society is affecting men and I worry. I worry about a father in Boston who is investigated by police for telling his daughter to 'please be quiet' while on the subway because I have told my son the same thing many many times in public. He and I don't share the same skin color and in the back of my mind I do often wonder if other people look at me and my child and let their fear run away with them. Do I set off the ‘stranger danger’ alerts in parents?

This fear of being labeled a threat to children actually makes our children less safe. I firmly agree with Hillary Clinton's premise that it takes a community to raise a child. We all have to look out for children to protect them, but what happens when one lives in a community overrun with illogical fear? Do we create men like Clive Peachy who did not stop to help little Abigail Rae because he was worried that people would think he was an abductor? Is that where we are going with this fear? Would you, put into Mr. Peachy's place, have stopped to help Abigail?

Now, there are things for parent's to fear in our communities. This Venn diagram that I came across last night is a good illustration about how we are directing our fears towards the wrong things. Statistically our children are less likely to encounter a molester at school, but far more likely to encounter a man who will actively stalk them, lie to them and once trusted by our children, send them off to a strange country where their lives will be in danger. Why do we fear the long shot and allow a greater threat to our children unlimited access?

People tell me that it is a dangerous world and that kids these days are growing up faster than before. All this attention and protection aren't helping. As Tim Gill, author of the parenting book No Fear, puts it, “our fear of [stranger danger] is magnified so dramatically, we deny our children the basic freedoms and experiences they need to grow up.” We are raising children in a protective shell who will be ill-prepared for the harshness of life.

The experiences we offer our children in childhood set their expectations in life. If a child grows to adulthood without experiencing the wrong side of a swindle, then they will grow to be an easy mark. If a child grows without criticism then they will not be able to handle it as an adult. As a parent we have to give our children the space they need to inoculate their character against the hardships of life, or they will remain a child forever.

Colin complains about the troubles in his life on occasion. He will voice his frustration by telling me “it isn't fair Daddy.” He is right, life isn't fair. Life is hard, and for long periods everyone will suffer through hardship and loss, money will be tight, expectations will not be met, and then there's high school. I try to instill in my son the tools he will need to make the best of life, hardships and all. Part of my job is to let him learn a lot of these things in little ways, now that he is a child.

I do not want my son to grow up miserable and unhappy. I want him to have the skills he will need to make the most of life and find happiness in the face of all the uncertainty and unfairness of the world. I want his expectations of life to match the realities and if that means bucking against the culture of fear then that is what I will do.