Our deeply held beliefs about child safety on the
streets of America are largely false. And, what most parents are doing to keep
their children safe is the most dangerous thing they could do.
Last week I wrote about the Smith family of Noblesville,
Indiana, parents who went afoul of police and child services after allowing
their 9-year-old to walk 4 blocks alone to mail a letter to Santa. Though no
immanent threat was apparent, an elderly woman stopped their son along the way and called the police. The police officer that
arrived at the Smith home lectured Mrs. Smith and her son, saying there were
“dangerous people in the neighborhood.”
Their story is not unusual. Across America parents who give
their kids freedom to roam are being treated like negligent fools. Several
social media responses to last week’s blog post lamented, “Well, the world just
isn’t like it was when we were kids.” That widely held, but mistaken belief is
at the core of the problem.
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My kids, pictured here circa 2000 were free-range kids, within reason. They
survived quite nicely.
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Go looking for proof that kids are in greater danger today
than a generation ago and you simply won’t find it. It doesn’t exist.
Here’s the reality: Crime against children today mirrors
that of 1970. Almost no one seems to know this except the crime statisticians
who gather the data. In the ‘70s and ‘80s such crimes rose, reaching a peak in
1993. Since then, it has declined. So those you hear lamenting, “The world
just isn’t like it was when we were kids,” are mistaken. It’s very much the same
as it was in 1970, when kids were allowed to roam freely in their
neighborhoods.
The Crimes Against Children Research Center reports that
crimes against children continue to fall across the board.
What are the odds of your child being abducted and killed by
a stranger? 1 in 1.5 million. Still, that’s what most parents worry about. So
instead of letting their kids walk to school or move about freely in the
neighborhood, they drive their kids everywhere to ensure their safety. But
guess what the #1 cause of death among children under 14 is? Riding in a car. In fact,
your child is far, far more likely to be hurt in a car accident than by a
stranger while walking to school.
And that fear of random strangers? Truth is, the person most
likely to abduct a child is a family member. And person most likely to molest a
child – someone the child knows well.
Why are our fears so upside down and backwards?
Those 1.5 million kids not killed by a stranger today don’t
get their stories told on the news. Their safe day isn’t interesting. But that
one kid in 1.5 million; his story is told over and over and over again by news
channels with 24 hours to fill. And in our nation's lurid attraction to grief-pornography, we'll watch the parents weep openly on Dr. Phil. Never
mind that 3 children die and nearly 500 are injured everyday in car accidents. Not interesting. Not compelling. Not heart-pounding.
So wanna have a screwed-up view of your kid’s safety? Watch television news, the place where, “If it bleeds, it leads.”
In his book, The Science of Fear, Daniel Gardner detailed
the many ways American parents fear the wrong things, that death statistics
reveal a child is more likely to choke to death on food than to be abducted and
killed by a stranger. So we drive our kids to school, but don’t know the
Heimlich maneuver?
We fear the wrong things! And in doing so, we’re raising a
generation of children who are not learning independence and self-reliance.
They’re not exploring and discovering their world, it’s being spoon fed to them
by irrationally fearful parents.
A day or two after New Years I pulled up to my local coffee
shop, on the very route Jacob Smith took to Santa’s mailbox on the square.
Across the street I saw Jacob’s mother amble down the street with the family’s
old blind dog on a leash. Jacob and his little brother ran along the sidewalk
ahead of their mother. I shouted hello.
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| The Wall Street Journal: Campouts Test Helicopter Parents. |
Inside with my coffee and Wall
Street Journal, the article I found first was about Kindergarten in Germany and
the practice of children being sent on weekend camping trips away from their
parents to explore in the wilderness. In the startling 3rd paragraph
it reads: “While U.S. preschoolers
practice their ABCs, their counterparts in German Kindergarten, age 3 to 6,
head into the outdoors to learn to get dressed, prepare meals and go to bed–all
without their parents.” On these camping trips the children are given
knives and taught to whittle sticks for roasting hot dogs over a fire for
dinner. One group, all non-swimmers, camped on an island.
Could you imagine this in America, were children are treated
like paper-thin, fragile blown glass that might break if jostled, where
hypervigilant parents supervise their every move? Our culture is so awash with
irrational fear no school would ever be allowed to take 4-year-olds into the
forest for a weekend campout.
What German children learn in Kindergarten isn’t in the U.S.
curriculum. They’re taught to be independent, self-reliant individuals. And
childhood in otherwise rigid Germany is pretty relaxed. The WSJ article pointed
out that kids as young as 5 are routinely sent alone by their parents to the
bakery or corner store. And the nation doesn’t start teaching them to read and
write until age 6. To Germans, teaching kids to be resiliant and independent
comes first.
On a trip to Japan last October, I saw children who looked
as young as 6, waiting alone on busy train platforms for their commuter ride to
school, and I noted with interest a square block-sized park filled with perhaps 50 children, swinging, playing ball, clustered in circles talking, and not one single parent anywhere to be seen. My son, who lives there, told me that is normal.
Think Germany and Japan have got it wrong? Google
international test scores and see how American kids stack up against theirs.
Then check life-expectancy and child mortality rates in the these 3 nations
just to put an exclamation point on how far behind America has fallen.
Other western nations are raising kids the way American
parents raised them a generation ago, where kids organized their own pick-up
basketball and baseball games and moved about their neighborhoods each day
without a helicopter parent hovering overhead, intervening and protecting. They
learned to resolve disputes with other kids on the own, be independent, and discover
the world on their own individual terms. Those days are gone in America. Now near-all kids activities are adult-directed and supervised.
You can tie a kid’s shoes for him over and over while he
watches, but he won’t learn to do it until he does it himself. A lot of
child rearing is like that. You simply can’t do the learning for them. They
have to do it themselves or they’ll never learn.
Our fears that get in the way of that are emotional, not rational.
Our fears that get in the way of that are emotional, not rational.
“A broken man, an abandoned house, and a lonely woman—all the makings for a beautiful, haunting tale of loss, forgiveness, and redemption. The Salvage Man is a lovely, bitter sweet story you won’t soon forget. I loved it!”
Sherri Wood Emmons, author of The Seventh Mother
“Meyer turns the pages of history with gentle care and a warm heart, creating a story I’ll remember forever. Thank you Kurt Meyer for opening a door to my beloved town’s past and allowing me to travel the streets and meet the people of Noblesville 1893.”
Susan Crandall, Author of Whistling Past the Graveyard
& The Flying Circus
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