And yet rattled parents, besieged by media and each other, feel they must take all possible precautions to avoid all these extremely rare possibilities. “But if you live your life that way,” said Dr. Cole, “as best I can tell, you can never even go to the bathroom, because there could be something that sucks you into the toilet.”
Ah, toilets again. But Dr. Cole isn’t being flip. He’s the classic white-haired, sixty-something doctor—he should have his own TV show, he’s so perfect for the part of himself—and over the past twenty years he’s seen more and more parents coming in distraught about more and more outlandish possibilities. Even after he has reassured these parents that their child is fine, they demand MRIs and other tests to “prove” it. Or, just to be safe, they decide to restrict their children’s diets, even after he tells them he seriously doubts this will have any effect on their health.
This eagerness to restrict things is not limited to food. Think of how, thanks to fear, we restrict so many other aspects of our children’s lives. They’re not allowed to walk alone (cars!), explore (perverts!), or play in the park (those perverts again) or in the woods (ticks!) or in trees (gravity!) or in water (drowning!) or in dirt (dirt). It’s not your imagination: childhood really has changed. Forty years ago, the majority of U.S. children walked or biked to school. Today, about 10 percent do. Meantime, 70 percent of today’s moms say they played outside as kids. But only 31 percent of their kids do. The children have been sucked off America’s lawns like yard trimmings.
Where did all this fear come from? Take your pick: The fact that we’re all working so hard that we don’t know our neighbors. The fact that the marketplace is brimming with products to keep our kids “safe” from things we never used to worry about—like shopping cart liners to protect kids from germs.
Then there’s the way our brains cling to scary thoughts (girls murdered on a country road) but not mundane ones (all the girls who walk home from school without getting murdered). That’s just basic psychology. Meanwhile, “helpful” articles list the dangers of every possible activity from running barefoot (fungus!) to flying kites. “Choose a sunny day when there’s no chance of lightning,” one kite article actually suggested. So I guess we shouldn’t choose a day when trees are flying by the window and there’s a funnel-shaped cloud coming toward the driveway? Thank you so much, oh wise magazine!
Fear, fear, fear. We’re always expected to be thinking about fear. Schools hold pre-field trip assemblies explaining exactly how close the children will be to a hospital. At least, our school did. Come home and the TV tells us about “the killer under your sink!” (Turns out you shouldn’t drink Drano.) And “the monster who could be your neighbor!” (but probably isn’t). And “the hidden danger in your drink!” (A lemon. It has bacteria on it. Big deal. So does everything else.) Everyone is exhorting us to watch out, take care, and plan for the very worst-case scenario. Which puts a damper on things, to say the least.
A doctor wrote to the Free-Range Kids Web site:We live in beautiful Ardsley, New York. I pay 20K in taxes a year to provide a safe environment and good education for my children. You would have thought I committed a crime when I let my 8-year-old daughter ride her bike by herself approximately two city blocks to a friend’s house. My wife let it be known how vehemently she disagreed with me. In addition, all the parents in the neighborhood also thought I was crazy. Indeed, of course I would have grieved had “something” happened. But should I let that immobilize my children? I lost my mother to a drunk driver at the age of 46, and my sister to cancer at age 24. In addition, I am an emergency medicine physician who sees tragedy every day. Therefore, I know, more than most, the pain of tragedy and longshots. I could let this paralyze me, but I don’t. I choose, to the best of my ability, to allow my children the same freedoms that I had as a child growing up, when I was taking the train by the 7th grade, and riding my bike by myself by the age of 9. I choose to give my children freedom.
What a cool guy, embracing life with his eyes wide open. Good luck to him, and good luck to you, dear reader, as you seem to be on the same journey. And then good luck convincing your friends and spouse to join you.
You’re going to need it.
REAL WORLD
What’s Wrong with Our Society?
What’s Wrong with Me?
A Free-Ranger writes:I’m a mom of a 13-year old boy and an 11-year old girl and I’m ashamed of how paranoid I am. The news keeps you in constant fear of your child being abducted and raped and eaten, etc. I was a kid who took two buses to get to my Catholic School as early as age 7. And I did it all by myself. My friends and I wandered all over the city, and as long as we were home by dark, we could do whatever we wanted. Without cell phones! Now, here I am, with a teenager, and I get an upset tummy when I watch him walk with his friends to junior high each day. What’s wrong with our society? What’s wrong with me? Here I am, a fearless adult who went everywhere I wanted, and I’m too paranoid to let my teenager walk to the store. I’m ashamed that I’ve allowed society to shape me into a worrier. Yes, there are predators. But they aren’t everywhere and I need to get over myself. Fast. Before I raise a scaredy-cat son and paranoid daughter. We’re gonna have a whole generation of skittish people if we don’t give our kids some space, starting with mine. I’m gonna go kick them out of the house on this sunny afternoon and let them wander. (But they better answer their cell phones.)
Going Free Range
All kids are different, as are all parents (for better or worse), but if you’re reading this book, chances are you are probably wondering how to start weaning yourself off of excess worry and giving your kids some old-fashioned freedom. There are no hard-and-fast timetables and, alas, no guarantees of which of these will work for you (or me!), but consider the following suggestions:
Free-Range Baby Step: Cross the street with your school-age child, without holding hands. Make ’em look around at the traffic.
Free-Range Brave Step: Let your little bikers, starting at age six or so, ride around the block a couple times, beyond where you can see them. (Yes, in their helmets.)
One Giant Leap for Free-Range Kind: Drop off your third-or fourth-grade child and a friend at an ice cream store with money for sundaes. Pick them up in half an hour. So there.
Commandment 2
Turn Off the News
Go Easy on the “Law and Order,” Too
Is there one single reason we are so much more scared than our parents? One person, place, or thing that left us so shaken that we spend literally four times as much time supervising our kids than our own moms and dads did in 1975? Yes, and I’ll give you a hint:
It has white hair, seems to be on CNN about twenty hours a day, and has piercing blue eyes so brimming with empathy that you want to hold him tight no matter what your sexual orientation. Or his.
Of course, it’s not just Anderson Cooper that’s driving us crazy with fear about crime. But he’s part of the problem, just like cable news is, and local news is, and Larry “Let’s Talk About Little Caylee Anthony One More Time” King is. And Nancy G. And Law and Order, and Law and Order, and Law and Order, and the other Law and Order. The one with the special victims. Or, as TV historian Robert Thompson says, “The Law and Order for people who like to see crimes that are grossly sexually fetishized and practiced on children or vulnerable adults.”
What’s not to like?
The problem with all these shows, from the news to the dramas ripped from the news, is that they present us with a world so focused on the least common, most horrific crimes that we get a totally skewed picture of what it’s like out there. How skewed? Let’s take a look at the TV listings.
Well, hmm. This week you could watch a double murder on The Mentalist. That’s nice. Then it says there’s a “dismembered, headless body” discovered on Bones. I guess Bones did some test marketing and realized that a merely dismembered body might lose some viewers. (“Forget it! If the head’s still attached, I’m not watching.”) Then there’s CSI:
NY. The episode I just watched showed, oh, a guy’s stomach sliced open because he swallowed a key. And a body dredged up from a swamp. Then there was a woman almost drowned by a madman in a bathtub, but she survived—only to stumble around and accidentally impale her breast on a towel hook. (I hate it when that happens.) On the local news right after that, there was a guy on fire, and a guy who plunged to death, naked. And Law and Order featured a fourteen-year-old girl raped by a Serbian war criminal. Well, we didn’t see the actual rape. But we saw her going, “Mph! Mphmmph!” through the duct tape over her mouth as the leering guy reached for her thigh. (She was, of course, bound with a phone cord—like anyone still has a cord phone—and blindfolded.)
I’ll get to real news shows in a minute, because we all know how they can make you feel totally depressed about the world. But less attention has been paid to the fact that even these so-called entertainment shows (Rape! Bondage! Towel-hook impaling! That’s entertainment) end up changing our whole outlook.
The problem is that once we see horrific images, only half of our brain takes the time to say, “Wow. That makeup person did an incredible job with those puncture wounds. And hats off to the wonderful writing staff!” (If, indeed, any part of the brain ever thanks writers.) The other half of our brain just takes in those gruesome images wholesale and files them under “Sick World, comma, What we live in.”
In his book The Science of Fear, Daniel Gardner explains that once an image gets into that “reptilian” part of the brain, not only can you not shake it, you also can’t extricate it from all the other images and feelings jostling around in there, either. After all, it’s only been the last hundred years or so that the brain has started seeing realistic-looking images (TV, movies) that weren’t directly applicable to its fate (lions, spears). So it hasn’t figured out yet how to separate the real from the manufactured. Especially whatever’s manufactured by Jerry Bruckheimer.
Thus the fight-or-flight, feel-it-in-your-guts reptilian brain treats The Dark Knight and a commercial for Dexter and the nightly news as one and the same. So when we are faced with a situation we think might be risky and we are trying to figure out what to do, it starts rummaging through all the horrible stuff it has seen and comes to the conclusion, “Jeez Louise! Look what can happen! Run for your life!”
Now, if you’re wondering why our reptilian brains would be making us more scared today than our parents’ reptilian brains made them just a generation ago, one reason is that when our parents were raising good ol’ us, they didn’t see this kind of TV. They saw Bonanza. Or maybe Medical Center. They weren’t seeing dead bodies with realistic towel-hook holes in them. They weren’t seeing all those autopsies on CSI or horrific dismemberments or decaying bodies dredged from the river. In fact, says TV historian Thompson, “I don’t think there’s a single episode of Law and Order that could have even been shown before 1981.” That’s because, until then, graphic images like the girl with the duct tape, rapist, and phone cord were taboo. In fact, they were the stuff of porn.
What happened?
In 1971, the rules changed. From 1929 up to that point, says Thompson, broadcasters held themselves to a code of conduct so strict that they couldn’t even use the word “pregnant.” They couldn’t use bad language. They couldn’t show a toilet bowl on TV. (That’s why the Ty-D-Bol man was always in the tank.) Through the Great Depression, a world war, two nuclear bombs, and the civil rights movement, the material you could hear on the radio and see on TV stayed pretty much the same. Tame. Then, in ’71, along came All in the Family.
That groundbreaking show became a huge turning point in our media and our culture. Every week, All in the Family broke another taboo. It talked about impotence, molestation, constipation. It flushed a toilet! And the ratings went through the roof. It became the number-one-rated show for five years straight—a feat never surpassed (though the Cosby Show did, later, tie it).
Naturally broadcasters said, “Number one for five years? Let’s make five thousand of these!” So they started throwing in all the sex and grit and bodily functions they could. As did TV news. And let’s not forget that, this being the seventies, plenty of social up-heaving was going on outside the boob tube, too.
In 1981, things lurched dramatically again, as cable TV came into its own and started segmenting the hitherto mass audience. You wanted to watch women writhing in leather bustiers? You had your MTV. Or your Playboy Channel. Or your HBO. Whatever. You had a lot of channels. You wanted weepy stories of women with unusual diseases? You had Lifetime. And if you wanted news all day long? You turned on CNN.
Let’s stop here and think about what that meant: an entire twenty-four hours to fill with news. Every day. How on earth could you keep people watching the same channel for hours on end?
There is one proven and tested way. Pick a sensational tabloid story and treat it seriously, earnestly, gravely, as if all you really want is the best for your viewers. Repeatedly broadcast the same heart-wrenching footage, looping back again and again, right after this message, to create a sense of the most compelling, continuing, crying-shame story ever to dominate a news cycle. A story so gripping, viewers would feel almost guilty turning it off. A story you could drag out (like this paragraph) for hours and hours, days and days, even if you had only tiny crumbs of info to add. And to date, the best story anyone has ever found turns out to be . . . a missing child.
“Missing kids are everybody’s fear,” said a cable exec I can’t quote by name because she’s still in the biz (even though she’s not happy about it). “Especially when there’s a story with somebody who looks normal,” she said. “People really respond to that. They think, ‘That could be me.’ ” “Me” being a middle- to upper-middle-class white person, usually.
The granddaddy of this programming was the 1983 two-part miniseries, Adam, based on the story of Adam Walsh, a six-year-old boy who was abducted from a Florida Sears and beheaded in 1981. It makes me sick just to type that.
The series about him—a ratings blockbuster—introduced America to Adam’s dad, John Walsh, who appeared with his wife at the end of the show with photos of other missing children. Walsh became a crusader for children’s safety and went on to host America’s Most Wanted. He also helped found the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. You probably came of age eating breakfast with those kids.
“The whole milk carton phenomenon begins at this time,” says Thompson, referring to the phenom of dairies printing the photos of missing children on their cartons—without even clarifying whether the child was kidnapped by a stranger (extremely rare), taken by a divorced parent in a custody dispute (more likely), or had simply run away (also quite likely). Mornings became pretty somber as we ate our Rice Krispies with the milk carton kids staring us in the face. In fact, it began to feel as if millions of kids were being taken, willy-nilly, across the country. And all together, this set the template for our modern-day fear of abduction.
That fear, as I’ll say again and again in this book, bears no relation to reality. The statistics cited by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children itself show that the number of children abducted and killed by strangers holds pretty steady over the years—about 1 in 1.5 million. Put another way, the chances of any one American child being kidnapped and killed by a stranger are almost infinitesimally small: .00007 percent. Put yet another, even better way, by British author Warwick Cairns, who wrote the book How to Live Dangerously: if you actually wanted your child to be kidnapped and held overnight by a stranger, how long would you have to keep her outside, unattended, for this to be statistically likely to happen?
About seven hundred and fifty thousand years.
But if we rarely heard about kidnapped children before the eighties (with the exception of the Lindbergh baby), they have since become a staple of TV. A particular child’s story that captures the public’s interest can go on for months—sometimes years. To this day, the JonBenet Ramsey case can still start an argument, even though the mother
was exonerated and has gone to her grave. Between that case and Elizabeth Smart and Maddie McCann and Caylee Anthony, we all feel as if we “know” someone who disappeared. We’ve watched their home videos. We’ve “met” their families on TV. And because we’ve heard about them so much, their stories start to seem tragic, yes, but not totally surprising. They fit perfectly into a worldview that says, “Just another example of kids getting snatched and killed.” Our brain has stored all the other stories before it, so each new one just confirms our belief that child abductions are happening all the time.
So now, when you’re thinking about whether you could ever let your kids hang out by themselves in the video game department at Target—which is where we deposit ours, because otherwise they’d moan and groan the whole time we’re trying to concentrate on various Mr. Coffee features—you automatically think about Adam Walsh snatched from the Sears. Even though that was in 1981. Even though, every day, millions of parents go shopping with their whiny kids, and the kids wander off for a while, and the parents panic and then they find them in the toy department and everyone’s OK. It’s hard to remember, but we should: the likelihood of something truly tragic happening is, thank God, extremely low.
Now let’s look at how the folks in the TV biz work to make us feel otherwise.
Free-Range Kids, How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry) Page 3