by Kim Brooks
Accordingly, the America of the late 1970s and early 1980s saw a surge in expressions of fear-based child-safety measures. It was no longer acceptable to let kids walk to the store, play unattended, or ride their bikes around the neighborhood. The distance children were allowed to roam contracted, and eventually disappeared; unsupervised children were now unsafe children. Concern can take many forms. One can imagine an alternate history where, against this backdrop of general cultural anxiety, parents project their unease onto issues of children’s health or education or social supports. But this is not what happened, because unlike more gradually intensifying fixations, moral panics such as the one surrounding child safety need catalysts. Incidents to launch them into public consciousness. One can see how events such as the 1979 kidnapping and killing of Etan Patz, the 1981 abduction and decapitation of Adam Walsh, or the 1983 child-abuse accusation scandal that began when the mother of a preschooler in Manhattan Beach, California, later diagnosed as mentally ill, went to the police claiming that her son was being sexually abused by the childcare workers at McMartin Preschool instigate the type of moral panic Mintz describes. In the preschool child abuse case, the charges were eventually dropped because of lack of evidence, but not before precipitating the longest and costliest legal case in American history, setting off a nationwide witch hunt, and resulting in the wrongful conviction of dozens of childcare workers charged in similar cases, all of which were eventually overturned.
These events conspired to unleash in the American imagination an image of the vulnerable or threatened child, the child who, at any moment a parent is not looking, might be abducted, raped, tortured, and murdered. Not only was coverage of these events televised and sensationalized; it was also long-lasting. Popular magazines from mid-September 1986 to mid-February 1987 published an average of one story per week about child abuse, child molestation, or missing children. The networks aired multiple made-for-TV movies and docudramas on the subject. In 1986, NBC aired Adam: His Song Continues, a docudrama about Adam Walsh, which ended in a roll call of 55 missing children. (His father, John Walsh, would extend entertainment vigilantism to its logical conclusion by creating America’s Most Wanted in 1988.) And Americans who might not have tuned in could receive the message in other ways. As the sociologist and criminologist Joel Best tells us, Americans during this period “saw photographs of missing children on milk cartons, grocery bags, billboards and televised public service messages. Toy stores and fast-food restaurants distributed abduction-prevention tips for both parents and children. Parents could have their children fingerprinted or videotaped to make identification easier.” And none of these frequent reminders bothered to distinguish between custodial disputes and runaways, which accounted for the vast majority of missing children cases, and the much less common occurrence of stranger abduction, which account for just 3 percent of all cases. None of these reminders came with an asterisk that a child was more likely to die from choking, not just on food but on anything a small person might happen to introduce into his or her windpipe, than at the hands of a stranger. Instead of facts, we set our imaginations on the stricken faces and broken lives of people like the parents of Adam Walsh and Etan Patz.
Psychologists often refer to a phenomenon called the availability heuristic. In its simplest terms, the availability heuristic tells us that people judge the likelihood of something happening not by facts or statistics or rational thought, but by the ease with which we can recall an example of its happening. This made perfect sense for our hunter-gatherer forebears, or maybe for anyone without access to a television or an internet connection. But for people raising children in the age of mass media, the psychology fails us. No parent could forget the faces or anguished stories of parents whose child has gone missing. How easy it is to recall these examples, regardless of how rare they might be. A 1986 national survey of youth found that kidnapping of children and teenagers ranked highest in a set of national concerns, higher than the possibility of nuclear war and the spread of AIDS, which tied for second.
The kidnapping panic of the 1980s was certainly not the only event of recent decades to transform norms of parental supervision and childhood independence. Later, as the missing-children movement grew, other parallel movements arose to combat child abuse, crack cocaine, teen pregnancy, pedophilia, drunk driving, playground safety, sexual exploitation, and so on. In the early 1990s, fears spread over a surge of youth gang violence, and five years later, another panic arose over claims that bands of youthful “super-predators” were killing and assaulting without remorse. “These panics,” Mintz explains, “arose from legitimate worries for the safety of the young … but they were also fueled by interest groups that exploit parental fears, well-meaning social service providers, child advocacy groups, national commissions, and government agencies desperate to sustain funding and influence. If panics arise out of a genuine desire to arouse an apathetic public to serious problems, the effect of scare stories is not benign. They frighten parents, intensify generational estrangement, and encourage schools and legislatures to impose regulations to protect young people from themselves.” And if the kidnapping panic of the 1980s changed the way we perceive the risk of allowing children to be unsupervised in public places, we can see a parallel process play out with children and cars in more recent years.
In March of 2009, almost exactly two years before I let my son wait in the car, the journalist Gene Weingarten published a Pulitzer Prize–winning article in the Washington Post Magazine titled “Fatal Distraction: Forgetting a Child in the Backseat of a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime?” The answer that emerges in his reporting, reporting that is difficult to read for the magnitude of the human suffering it describes, suggests it isn’t. While many parents who lose children in this way are charged with manslaughter, and some are convicted, Weingarten details the reality that nearly all of them are good, loving, attentive parents, who “one day [get] busy, or distracted, or upset, or confused by a change in his or her daily routine, and just … [forget] a child is in the car.” Weingarten goes on to describe the unimaginable, how approximately fifteen to twenty-five times per year in this country, regular, well-meaning parents “accidentally kill their babies in the identical, incomprehensible, modern way.” “Fatal Distraction” illustrates the correlation between air-bag-safety campaigns (which advocate putting children in the rear-facing car seats in the back seats) and hot-car deaths, and humanizes the parents in these cases, revealing the cruelty of their criminalization. It would be hard to find fault with Weingarten for writing his piece. And yet the purest of motives can have unanticipated consequences for children, parents, communal life, and public policy. The murders of Etan Patz and Adam Walsh were covered so extensively, we remember them as though they happened to children we know. We know their names, recall their faces and their parents’ pleas. We remember Weingarten’s description of the hyperthermic victim, the small corpse, the bloated green abdomen, and we imagine for the slightest second what it would be like to be that child, that parent, to occupy that pain or grief.
There are twenty million children in America under the age of five. Thirty-seven on average die in hot cars. Thirty-seven out of twenty million is not a lot, but it is not nothing. For us to live in a just world, surely the risk of such things happening must be zero. No child should ever be abducted or raped or murdered. No child should ever be forgotten for hours in a broiling car. We say to ourselves that we do not want to live in a world where such things happen. And so now children do not walk to school on their own as Etan Patz did that morning in May 1979. They do not wait in cars, even for a few minutes, even on a cool day in front of a busy store. And we arrest parents who let their children wait in cars for five minutes, parents who let their children play alone in a park. We do this as though it could revive those children we lost, as though in doing it we can make the world right. And so children do not go to the store to buy bread and milk for their parents. They do not play pretend-hitchhiking with their frien
ds along a road. They do not take long walks through the woods, or ride bikes along paths, or build secret tree houses or forts while we are inside working or cooking or talking to other adults or leading our lives. They are no longer afforded, as Mona Simpson writes, “the luxury of being unnoticed, of being left alone.” Whatever we have to do to feel safe from such horrors, no matter how rare they might be, we vow to do it, to pay whatever price is set for a feeling of safety, a feeling of control.
* * *
My father is not old enough to remember the fear that swept through American communities during the polio outbreaks of the forties and fifties. He doesn’t remember being kept home on summer days, being warned that an afternoon at the swimming pool or movie theater might bring death. The vaccine was introduced in 1955, five years after he was born, and by the time he was older, the epidemic of fear had been eliminated ahead of the disease. But he and my mother both remember other expressions of national terror. My father remembers the A-bomb drills in middle school, as frequent as fire drills (and active-shooter drills) today. “Sometimes, we’d be told to crouch under our desks when the siren went off, hands over our head. Sometimes we’d go into the hallways and ball up in lines against the wall.” A little smile plays on his mouth when he recalls these precautions. “All this would have been very helpful in the event of thermonuclear holocaust,” he says sarcastically. “By the early sixties, there was a large enough arsenal to turn New York State into a sheet of glass. But … I suppose it was something to do.”
Near the end of the Cold War, when my sister and I came along, parents still worried about what the arms race meant for their children’s future. But now they had other concerns. At this time, popular magazines published stories with titles such as “How to Protect Your Children from People They Trust,” “The Mind of the Molester,” and “Our Daughter Was Sexually Abused.” I doubt my parents read any of these features, but the tenor of anxiety they created surely permeated the circles in which my parents moved. From my three years of middle school, I really remember only two instructional moments: There was the day my eighth-grade life science teacher brought in a cooler full of thawed supermarket squid for us to dissect. We were then allowed to remove the ink gland and write our names on our lab with it. And there was the day we were all herded into the auditorium for an educational play about sex abuse. At the end of the production, the cast came onstage, all enthusiasm and smiles, and shouted to the kids in the audience, “What do you do if someone touches you in your private places?”
“Tell someone!” we shouted back.
“And what if they don’t believe you?” the actor asked.
“Keep on telling!” we responded.
Twenty years earlier, this sort of lurid pageant would have seemed an inexplicable exercise in paranoia; it would have made my father’s nuclear-fallout drills look as quaint as ring-around-the-rosy. But the world changes, and in scrambling to absorb these changes, we fabricate new fears, fears that propel us forward (or backward). Fear is both a feeling and a force.
* * *
When I reached out to the sociologist Joel Best, to ask him how this happened—how, around the time I was born and in the decades that followed, threats to children became the number-one issue for Americans—he tried to help me see it in a larger social and historical context, explaining that people who aren’t sociologists think of history as events. One event followed by another and then another. It is an extremely human trait to narrativize everything. But many sociologists don’t act this way. They look at the same events, the same concerns, the same legal precedents and pieces of legislation and media relics and see, instead of discrete events, waves of social movement. Best holds that “there was a big wave before the Civil War that brought abolition. And then there was another wave from 1880 through the First World War that brought Prohibition, and the anti-immigration movement. Then … another movement that started in the sixties. That movement rested on the premise that children are threatened; they’re at risk in the modern world and they need to be protected. And it seems that movement just continues through to today.”
In his book on the subject, Threatened Children: Rhetoric and Concern about Child-Victims, Best describes the two common but contradictory explanations people tend to use to justify our cultural obsession with child abduction and other similar threats. He refers to these as the explanation of social decline and the explanation of recent enlightenment. The explanation of social decline should be familiar to anyone who has ever listened to a grandparent or parent reminisce about the good old days. Once upon a time, it goes, everything was better—streets were cleaner, people were honest, schools were better, neighborhoods safer; everything was bright and shining and hopeful. We believe that now everything in the world has gone to shit. Maybe it was okay for me or for my parents to wait in a car as kids, or go to the park on our own, or run wild with little supervision or monitoring, but times have changed. What once was safe now is reckless. The problem with this way of thinking, Best explains, is that “social collapse is easy to assert but difficult to prove.” What looks like a wave of new problems may simply be a matter of increased awareness, better record-keeping. “We think of nostalgia as a phenomenon of individual experience, but its force on groups and cultures can be just as profound.”
The second explanation offers exactly the opposite assertion about the movement of humanity. According to Best, “It argues that we have become more sophisticated; we now realize that threats to children exist; we appreciate their seriousness, and we can recognize and do something about them. Once naive, we have become knowledgeable. It doesn’t matter if threats to children are increasing or decreasing. What matters is that we now understand the problem.” We used to let children out of our sight, but now we know to keep close watch. We used to put them to sleep on their stomachs; now we know the risk. We used to let them spend their summers bored and aimless; now we know the importance of extracurricular activities and structure and enrichment. The list could go on. But as Best points out, the difficulty with this second way of thinking comes when we take for granted the correctness of our current interpretations of social problems—when we assume that we, unlike them, those well-meaning idiots from the past, are the ones who are truly in the know. “No doubt,” he writes, “the people in every era make the same assumption, that they correctly understand the nature of their society’s problems. Salem’s congregations believed they had discovered demonic forces at work, and the Progressives congratulated one another for recognizing the threat posed by white slavers.”
When it comes to our current fears regarding unsupervised children, we see both versions of folk wisdom at work. In the sixties or seventies, a child could walk to school or wait in a car because people were better, the world less violent, we say. But also, parents were dumber. They simply didn’t know. Sure, parents used to leave kids on their own, but they also let them drink Kool-Aid by the vat and play with toy weapons the NRA might find a touch aggro. They let them build forts in the trunks of station wagons careening down the freeway or swim without sunscreen until their skin blistered. Parents let kids wait in cars because they were idiots. But also, on average, because it was safer, because people were better then, gentler, less monstrous. It sounds so nice and pleasant, this safer, simpler past. It sounds almost too good to be true.
But that is the rational, critical part of my brain at work, not the fearful, superstitious parent part. Would it ever be possible to merge the two, to impose what I learned from sociologists on my day-to-day mom life? And even if I could, how feasible would it be if I was the only one doing it and the other parents and teachers and neighbors I encountered every day were perfectly satisfied with their unsupported conclusions and inherited folk wisdom? It’s one thing to notice the emperor has no clothes. It’s an entirely different thing to be the only one to say so.
And so all fall and through the winter, I did what I was supposed to do. I took care of my kids. I stayed out of trouble, didn’t spee
d, didn’t even let my kids wait in the car while I fed the parking meter or walked the grocery cart back to the corral.
Then one unseasonably warm February afternoon, Felix wanted to set up a cookie stand in our front yard.
“What’s a cookie stand?” I asked.
“Like a lemonade stand,” he explained. “But with cookies.”
It seemed like a cute idea. We lived two blocks from a train station, and our condo fronted a well-trod street, lots of downtown commuters passing by. We baked the cookies, set up the stand, scrounged up as much change as we could from beneath the couch cushions. Felix wanted to charge two dollars per cookie, and I told him that was out of the question.
“That’s what Starbucks charges,” he pointed out.
“We’re not Starbucks,” I replied.
After a bit more back-and-forth, he hung his cardboard sign around our fence and opened shop. Business was bustling. I went inside to dig up some more change, stopped for a minute to wash a few dishes. There was a window above our kitchen sink from which I could see the yard, the little table, the back of Felix’s head. I grew bold. I’d washed the dishes and I went on to dry them. And then I saw two men in police uniforms approach the yard. I dropped the dishes. I ran down the stairs, flew out the door, practically screaming. “I’m here, I’m here, I’m here. I was watching him from the kitchen. I could see him from the kitchen.”