When did parents get so scared? - The Boston Globe http://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2015/08/26/when-did-parents-g...

When did parents get so scared?

When you were a kid, you probably spent hours outside and
unsupervised. Its not that way anymore.

By Melissa Schorr A U G U ST 26 , 2 0 1 5

PERSONALLY, I BLAME IT ALL ON BRIDGE TO

TERABITHIA.

In the 1977 Newbery award-winning classic I read

as a child, Jesse, a lonely boy heading to fifth
grade, befriends new girl Leslie, and together they
fabricate a fantastic imaginary kingdom in the
woods near their homes. Then tragedy descends
(spoiler alert): Swinging across a gulley, Leslie
slips from a rope, bonks her head, and abruptly
dies.

I LLUSTRATI O N BY AMY JUN E BATES

CONTINUE READING BELOW

My take-aways from this tale the woods are dangerous! life is fragile! must have
burrowed deep into my psyche. Thirty years later, the thought of letting my own two
daughters, now 6 and 10, wander unsupervised in the woods behind our suburban South
Shore home fills me with dread. Perhaps worse, Ive imbued them with my fears about the
dangers lurking there: ticks, poison ivy, the occasional coyote (to say nothing of the darker
ones I dont voice aloud: heroin addicts, vagrants, child molesters). Now Ive quashed their
natural impulse to explore. They hardly ask anymore.

Despite the eye-rolling of our elders and psychologists bemoaning that we are raising a
nation of wimps, I belong to a cohort of parents ruled by fear. Every mother I ask can
recall with pinpoint accuracy a moment of stomach-churning panic when her child went
momentarily missing at a mall, in a hotel lobby, up an elevator, in the Childrens

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Museum.

Rather than abating with time, the checklist of parental worries has only lengthened as our
children have aged, like pencil marks ticking up their growth chart: from SIDS to
chemicals in sippy cups, arsenic in apple juice to hormone-laden milk, Lyme disease and
meningitis and measles outbreaks, vaccinating, not vaccinating, concussions and
trampolines, whole grapes and popcorn, school shootings and cancer-causing sunscreen,
overheated cars and negligent nannies, boogeymen kidnappers and friendly neighborhood
molesters, and always, above all, the judgment of our fellow parents for failing to be as
hypervigilant as they are.

CONTINUE READING IT BELOW

View Story

When kids get along but

parents dont
She wants to preserve the childrens friendship, but
doesnt want the other mom in her life as a friend.

(Of course, it must be noted that all this hand-wringing falls under the hashtag
#middleclassproblems. In Ta-Nehisi Coatess new book, Between the World and Me, he
describes a West Baltimore upbringing where everyone had lost a child, somehow, to the
streets, to jail, to drugs, to guns. Many dont have the luxury of obsessing whether their
childrens bug repellent is DEET-free.)

Anyone who has spent the last decade of bedtimes revisiting classics in childrens
literature cant help but be struck by this evolution in parental oversight. In the Little
House on the Prairie series, Laura and Mary trek miles to reach their one-room
schoolhouse. In 1968s Ramona the Pest, Ramona and her friend Howie walk themselves
to kindergarten alone. A sequel, Ramona the Brave, begins with Ramona and her older
sister Beezus, now 6 and 11, returning from a solo trip to the park an act that earlier this
year practically caused a national panic attack and got Maryland parents Danielle and
Alexander Meitiv slapped with charges of neglect.
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As Hanna Rosen wrote in her 2014 Atlantic story, The Overprotected Kid: Its hard to
absorb how much childhood norms have shifted in just one generation. Actions that would
have been considered paranoid in the 70s walking third-graders to school, forbidding
your kid to play ball in the street, going down the slide with your child in your lap are
now routine. In fact, they are the markers of good, responsible parenting.

So what, I want to know, has caused this change? Has all our hovering made things any
safer? And what is it doing to our kids?

MY MOTHER, A NEW YORK CITY

ELEMENTARY SCHOOL TEACHER, parented
with a 70s innocence I can only view with
disbelief. In kindergarten, I was picked up from
the school bus by an elderly man who lived in our
apartment building. In later years, I waited for my
mother, unsupervised, cellphone-less, at the local
library until she could pick me up. A teenager
down the hall a boy, no less baby-sat me, and I
went to my share of sleepovers and sleepaway
camps. All of these acts require a faith many
parents today cant seem to muster, but my own
mother shrugs off my horror. We trusted back
I LLUSTRATI O N BY AMY JUN E BATES
then, she says. Today, as another mom friend of
mine ruefully observes, we know too much.

My parenting peers have their own Terabithias. Theyre mostly high-profile true-crime
stories: the 1979 disappearance of 6-year-old New Yorker Eton Patz; the 1981 Florida
abduction and murder of Adam Walsh; the 1987 panic over Baby Jessica, the Texas
toddler who fell down a well; and, especially for Bostonians, the 1997 case of Louise
Woodward, the British au pair accused of shaking baby Matthew Eappen to death.
Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker has argued that humanity is getting less violent, but
tell that to any parent who has had to explain what happened that day at Sandy Hook
Elementary School. (My older daughter gets apprehensive just driving through
Connecticut.)

So is it simply the media? (And as a card-carrying member, do I have only myself to

blame?) The media is obsessed turn on the TV any time and you will find a child in
danger, says Lenore Skenazy, author of Free-Range Kids. Its an endless stream of
warnings that make you feel that your child is never safe from anything and anyone
everywhere. Everybody knows the way to get an assignment editors attention is to frame
the story in terms of harming children.

To wit: This summer, a spate of news stories warned of the dangers of dry drowning, as
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if this rare tragedy were something new under the sun. A Google search of the last couple
of years reveals page after page of click-bait, including Kids Can Suffer Dry Drowning
Hours After Leaving the Pool and What Every Parent Needs to Know About Dry and
Secondary Drowning. At times, the fevered pitch can reach the ludicrous: In a recent
piece on parents.com, a pediatric urologist warns of a childhood constipation epidemic
after one British teenage girl died of a rare condition.

For Lenox child psychologist David Anderegg, a professor at Bennington College and
author of Worried All the Time, the crux of the problem is frequency overestimation, a
phenomenon that throws off our sense of how common something is. The media
overplaying every child abduction makes people overestimate the probability, he says.
Because our culture is so visual, even if something is rare, the images are repeated so
much, you start to think its not rare.

Though the planet has always been brimming with tragedy and malevolence, previous
generations didnt have minds overwhelmed with fear. They didnt have JonBenet Ramsey
and Natalee Holloway and Madeleine McCann flickering on their screens 24-7, or Amber
Alerts buzzing their phones, or Facebook, where 55 million of us studied the face of an
unidentified 4-year-old girl whose body was discovered this summer in a trash bag on
Bostons Deer Island.

The National Institute of Mental Health reports that 40 million American adults, or 18
percent, the majority of them women, suffer from an anxiety disorder. Its not hard to see
why.

BACK IN 2008, LENORE SKENAZY became the face of the free-range movement when
she penned a column for the Daily News about letting her 9-year-old son take the New
York subway alone. Two days later, she was being called Americas Worst Mom on the
Today Show, Fox News, and NPR. Her true mistake, she contends, was not imagining the
worst-case scenario. What I had done wrong was my not having pictured him dead, she
tells me. In our culture, you must go to the very-worst-scenario thinking tragical
thinking and proceed as if its likely to happen. If youre not worried, theres something
wrong with you.

We have lost the ability to see anything other than black and white; anything is either 100
percent safe or its dangerous, Skenazy says. Weve lost the ability to say something is
safe enough.

Much of our anxiety, Skenazy says, has been fueled by the nature of our litigious society,
which forces manufacturers to be overly defensive, recalling products on only the whiff of
a problem, or parks to strip our playgrounds of risky equipment, or not build them in the
first place.

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Consumerism plays a role, too. If they can convince you your child is in danger, you will
spend anything, Skenazy notes, pointing to products from bath-water thermometers to
baby kneepads. Its easy to see how anybody who wants to make a buck just has to worry a
parent, Skenazy says. Sure enough, soon after we talk, a press release drops into my
in-box hawking the Starry Night automobile sunshade that, for $12.99, will protect your
kids skin from possibly cancerous sunbeams.

There is another popular theory for parents worry, advanced by evolutionary

psychologists. Parents across the ages have certainly experienced the savage loss of a child
from a farm accident, a streetcar, the flu. But today, as birthrates have plummeted,
perhaps we somehow see our children as even more precious than we once did.

No mother of ten children will tell you Its OK I lost one child, says David Anderegg.
But if you have ten kids, lets face it, you cannot be as invested in every child. One
strategy, from an evolutionary standpoint, is to have as many children as possible and
hope some will survive; the other is have very few and invest heavily in their care.

With more first-time parents than ever older than 35, there is also the challenge of having
children as fertility wanes. One mother I spoke to, whose second child is one of the
estimated 5 million worldwide born to date using fertility treatments, wonders if this
highly intentional (and expensive) form of conception creates on some level a fiercer
biologic impulse to protect those hard-won offspring.

This culture of not trusting anyone, of never outsourcing child care, has a significant
unintended consequence, especially for women: It inhibits our ability to turn to other
pursuits, like, say, full-time work. It has become almost superstitious, says Skenazy. A
good parent always has their eyes on their child. Any time you take your eyes off your
child poof! theyre in danger. Omniscience used to be Gods job. We have outsourced
Gods job to us.

Skenazys free-range parenting crusade has unleashed an unintended Pandoras effect if

parents let their kids share the same freedoms the parents once enjoyed, they have to
worry theyre going to be busted for child neglect. My own kids have picked up on these
fears. When I leave my 10-year-old alone in a car for a minute, say to return a RedBox
DVD inside the grocery store, she dives under a pile of coats to hide. Shes partly fearful of
being snatched by a bad guy, partly concerned that a well-intentioned passerby will call
the police on me.

Many voices have pointed out that we are doing our children a vast disservice. Alarmed by
the rise in anxiety, depression, and dependence among college students, Stanford
University undergraduate dean Julie Lythcott-Haims broaches the issue in her new book,
How to Raise an Adult. Why did parenting change from preparing our kids for life to
protecting them from life, which means theyre not prepared to live life on their own? she

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writes. We treat our kids like rare and precious botanical specimens. . . . Without
experiencing the rougher spots of life, our kids become exquisite, like orchids, yet are
incapable, sometimes terribly incapable, of thriving in the real world on their own.

On some level, psychologists say, children need to experience fear, so that the first time
they are in a dangerous situation, they have some idea how to react. If you deprive your
child of opportunities to do mildly dangerous and adventurous things, you are putting
your child at a new risk that your child is going to grow up not knowing how to deal with
danger, not knowing how to handle difficulties, not knowing how to solve conflicts and
problems, says Boston College psychologist Peter Gray, author of Free to Learn. If
theyre not allowed to climb the tree, they may grow up with a fear of heights. So I say to
parents, How do you weigh this risk? There is a tiny chance something horrid could
happen, but there is a bigger chance this will happen if your child doesnt play outdoors.

Is this just experts simply adding one more anxiety to our ever-growing pile? Possibly.
Now parents are anxious about being too anxious, Anderegg quips, only half-joking.
Theyre trying to hit that sweet spot where their kids will not suffer the effects trying to
over-parent without their kids noticing.

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I LLUSTRATI O N BY AMY JUN E BATES

IRONICALLY, THE TRUTH IS THAT OUR CHILDREN have never been safer. Between
1987 and 2012, childhood deaths from unintentional injuries such as drowning and
poisonings fell 60 percent, according to Safe Kids Worldwide. Crimes against children
(and against adults, for that matter) have fallen to levels last seen in the late 1970s, though
some experts wonder if this is just because we never let them outside anymore.

According to polling, the fear of child abduction is the top reason parents say they dont let
their kids out alone, yet it is, in fact, extraordinarily rare. According to The National Center
for Missing & Exploited Children, there are only around a hundred cases of child
abductions by strangers in a given year (many of those children started as runaways).
Lenore Skenazy famously calculated that, statistically speaking, her son would have to

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stand alone on the street corner for 600,000 years before he would get snatched by a
stranger.

The only thing Ive seen that makes parents relax is letting their kids do something on
their own go get the milk for dinner, play in the forest, she says. When they come
back, theyre so happy, so grateful you believed in them; the joy you see in their faces
immediately touches your heart, and theres no space left for the fear.

I want to agree. I try to persuade myself that I need to relax, let go, suppress the pit of fear
in my chest when they bike around the bend in the driveway and out of my sight. I stop
hovering when they rollerblade downhill; I sign one up for sleepaway camp, let her go
down the block to buy a muffin from the bakery alone.

Then, one March afternoon in our seaside village, an apparent child predator actually
comes to town. News of it travels swiftly, reverberating at the spring band concert held
that night in the high school gymnasium. A 10-year-old girl reported a man attempted to
lure her into his car, pulling over and asking her, You need a ride, sweetheart? The girl
slammed the cars door closed and ran inside to her mother.

Wait, werent these incidents supposed to be extraordinarily rare?

My head spinning with contradictions, I call my local police department, expecting to

receive an abundance of reassurance. Instead, I speak with Detective Lieutenant Gregory
Lennon, who commands a regional child abduction response team. Every day, he receives
an itemized list of a dozen or so reports of attempted abductions across the United States.

Dont assume because you live in a bucolic community your children are at less risk of a
random act of children victimization than anywhere else, he warns me. Child abductions
are actually more likely to occur in an isolated area than a highly populated city. Predators
are like lions stalking young zebras separated from their herd, he says. Immaturity
combined with freedom equals disaster. You have to watch your kids. Be vigilant.

Finally, I reach out to John Walsh, whose son Adam was murdered after being abducted
from a department store in 1981. Walshs avid lobbying and crime-fighting crusade on
Foxs Americas Most Wanted and CNNs The Huntmay make him a national treasure in
the eyes of many, especially when it comes to raising awareness about the dangers facing
children. But Im curious to find out: Does he feel as if he might have planted too many
seeds of fear?

When I get him on the phone, Walsh staunchly rejects any notion that his advocacy played
a role in todays overwrought parents. I dont believe Ive created a generation of scared
parents, Walsh barks. I dont believe Im scaring the hell out of people. You owe it to
your children to make them as safe as possible. What my wife and I tried to do was create
an awareness. Knowledge is power. Children are a gift, and there are people who hunt
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them.

Instead, he turns the tables, grilling me on what Ive done to arm my daughters against
potential predators, then berating me for not sufficiently preparing them. You should
teach those girls everything they should know to protect themselves, he says. You teach
your child hygiene, sex education the most important thing is personal safety. Dont be
paranoid: Dont tell them they cant go to sleepaway camp or go online. Give them the
tools to make them safe, and maybe youll be one of those lucky ones.

Maybe.

Melissa Schorr is a contributing editor at the Globe Magazine. Her second novel for teens,
Identity Crisis, will be published in January. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.

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