The Hoosier Contrarian

Thursday, January 14, 2016

What We Believe About Child Safety Is Wrong

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.

My kids, pictured here circa 2000 were free-range kids, within reason. They

survived quite nicely.

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.

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 3^rd 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.

Buy Kurt's latest novel, THE SALVAGE MAN

“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!”

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“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

Thursday, January 7, 2016

My Parents Would Be In Jail

The following story is true. The family asked me not to use their real names.

NOBLESVILLE, INDIANA A week before this past Christmas, 9-year-old Jacob Smith was excited for Santa’s visit. In his family’s picturesque Victorian-era home with its deep, wrap-around porch, hardwood floors and tall ceilings, he wrote a letter to Santa.

He’d been thinking of Santa’s cottage, set up on the courthouse lawn just down the street from his home. Santa had a mailbox there for just such a letter.

Warning: This story will end with Jacob’s parents being questioned by the police and child protective services. If you’re looking for a light-hearted Christmas story, this isn't it.

Jacob’s father is an award-winning schoolteacher, his mother a free-lance marketing specialist. The next morning before school they agreed to let him walk alone the 4 blocks to the courthouse square to put his letter in Santa’s mailbox.

Santa's cottage on Noblesville's square. Painted by Rodney Reveal

It’s a ridiculously, unbelievably Normal Rockwell-ish journey, down a brick street lined with historic architecture where Jacob often walked the family dog – a loveable, old blind mutt, past the doors of his family’s friends, even other family members, the route for Christmas, 4^th of July, and Homecoming parades, and then past the coffee shop, restaurants, and businesses his family visits regularly. He dropped the letter in Santa’s mailbox and turned for home, deciding to take the alley that runs from the square east-west behind his house, knowing that would lead him a few steps closer to the family’s kitchen door.

Halfway home he was stopped by an elderly woman in a car. She asked what he was doing in the alley in the dark. He told her his name, his parent’s names, his address, and that he was just a couple blocks from home. She parked her car and insisted that he stop and walk with her to his home. Once home, Jacob told his mother about the elderly woman he met in the alley.

And then a police officer arrived at their door, asking why Jacob had been allowed to walk to the square before school (the elderly woman had apparently called the police). Jacob’s mother recalls an awkward exchange with the female officer who warned Jacob that there were bad people in the neighborhood. And though no law defines such matters, the officer got into a discussion with Jacob’s mother about the specifics of what was safe and not safe in the neighborhood where Jacob’s family had lived for years, but where the officer didn’t live. Again, no law defines these matters, it was just the officer telling Jacob’s mom what she thought should be allowed.

“You know since a child is involved, I’ll have a file a report with the Department of Child Services,” the officer said before leaving.

Once the officer left, Jacob’s mother explained to him that his neighborhood was safe and that he would be free to explore it, with permission, that he shouldn’t stop for adults no matter who they are, especially when he’s confident in what he is doing, that she and Jacob’s father weren’t going to by hypervigilant helicopter parents who obsessed over his every move, that part of growing up is having freedom, making mistakes, and learning to be independent. She told him not to be afraid, but instead to make smart choices.

Then the Child Services lady showed up saying she was there to talk about the “alleged neglect.” This involved a meeting with the entire family around the dining room table, one that left Jacob, his little brother, and his parents uncomfortable. They were being judged for behavior that is not specifically defined anywhere in law, accusations that were leveled by an anonymous, unnamed elderly stranger whose credentials amounted to, at most, having a differing opinion from Jacob’s parents about what was safe in the neighborhood.

Think a moment about this true story. Today, Jacob’s parents are called “free-range parents.” This kind of parenting was simply called “parenting” a generation ago. But today, a stranger could stop your child, redirect your child’s activities, and escort your child somewhere at their sole direction. And because that stranger simply called the police, you could find yourself questioned and lectured by not only the police, but by Child Services on private parenting decisions that have no specific definition in law. It's just one person in a position of power with a differing opinion about child rearing.

And consider that now there is a document in a file and a pdf. in a database that Jacob’s parents were asked to sign showing Child Services had been called to Jacob’s house. Can you imagine the next time a hypervigilant adult with ideas about parenting that differ from Jacob’s parent's ideas decides to call the police because a 9-year-old boy is walking the family dog on the courthouse square (which Jacob does with his parent’s permission). The newspaper or TV story would likely have a line that reads, “This isn’t the first time Child Services has been called to the Smith home.”

If you’re middle aged or older, you know that the freedom Jacob's parents have given him was no big deal in your childhood, as your parents likely gave you far more freedom. Had these standards been in place during my childhood, my parents would have been in jail.

Is the world really more dangerous today for children? I'll look at that question next week in the Hoosier Contrarian.

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“Kurt Meyer’s The Salvage Man is a gentle Midwestern fantasy made up of one treasure after another. Part historical fiction, part love story, and part rumination on modern day life, this novel asks hard questions about the world we live in and the world we leave behind. I couldn’t put it down.”

Larry D. Sweazy, author of A Thousand Falling Crows

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Susan Crandall, Author of Whistling Past the Graveyard

Monday, December 14, 2015

In Search of "Peace On Earth, Goodwill Toward Men"

Anthropologist, Wade Davis wrote, “The world in which you were born is just one model of reality. Other cultures are not failed attempts at being you. They are unique manifestations of the human spirit.”

If more people opened their hearts to that reality, “Peace on earth, good will toward men,” would be more than a Christmas season platitude.

That Biblical pronouncement from angels on the first Christmas has moved people throughout the ages. It’s served as a reminder at the celebration of the birth of Christ to let go of mistrust, grudges, and bigotry and seek kinship with people around the world.

Some Biblical scholars have argued that, “Peace on earth, goodwill toward men,” was a greeting from God meant only for the Christian faithful. A couple of popular online dissertations express condescension toward those who use the phrase to urge peace and understanding for all mankind. Their tone suggests: “Peace on earth and good will toward . . . only those who worship as I do.”

It’s heartbreaking and a little frieghtening to see such a fundamentally good ethic turned upside down and backwards, because that’s a prescription for not just political and social strife, but war. If you don’t believe me, turn on the evening news.

A few years back I went to hear the Dalai Lama, the world’s Buddhist leader speak at an event in Bloomington, Indiana. He said that we wouldn’t have world peace until we each, “disarm ourselves from within.”

Isn’t that what, “peace on earth, goodwill toward men,” means - disarming ourselves of not just mistrust of those who are different, but also the arrogant belief in the exclusive superiority of our own personal experience?

We're in the season in which chirpy TV news anchors ask, "How's your Christmas Shopping Coming?" And of course all of us are still marveling at a year of unprecedented political hatefulness. But I’ve stopped listening. As Christmas gets closer I’m thinking about what the Angels, the Dalai Lama, and Wade Davis had to say. Obsessing over buying shit, ogling at other people’s transgressions, and wallowing in fear all feel like a journey in the wrong direction.

The world has 2.2 billion Christians, 1.3 billion Muslims, 350 million Buddhists, 25.8 million Sikhs, 870 million Hindus, and 13 million Jews, while 16% of the world’s population is agnostic or atheistic. The fastest growing religion in the world is Islam.

Some in each faith category no doubt believe those who lack their faith are doomed to damnation. Some Christians believe other Christians who don’t practice as they do are destined for hell, just as some of the Islamic faith – Shiites or Sunnis, believe adherents of the other sect are doomed, or evil, or unclean.

Yet each faith also calls on their faithful to care for the well being of others – all others! In ancient text and poetic language they each echo “Peace on earth, goodwill toward men,” and a mash-up of Wade Davis and the Dalai Lama: Other cultures are not failed attempts at being you. They are unique manifestations of the human spirit. Disarm yourself of the arrogant obstacles to that reality and love everyone.

On my Facebook feed is a regular stream of complaints of a war on Christmas. When I was a kid, people freely said, “Happy Holidays.” Now it’s politically incorrect in some circles to dare say it, to open up your well wishes to people of all religions in this, “season of giving.” I think of comedian John Stewart’s sarcastic quote: “You have confused a war on your religion with not always getting what you want.”

It’s like we’re acting out that Seinfeld episode where George’s father, Frank creates his own December 23rd holiday called, “Festivus,” which includes a ceremony called, “The Airing Of The Grievances.” Across our social and political landscape this season, it seems people are armed to the hilt with misjudgments, unfair accusations, resentments, bigotry and rage.

Peace on earth, goodwill toward men. That is my wish at Christmas time. It’s more than a wish for me or those I love, but for this entire world and all the people in it. And they need not all think what I think or worship as I worship. I don’t care if they’re Christian, Muslim, Jewish, atheist, gay or straight, black or white, conservative or liberal, rich or poor. I wish it for them all the same.

Click to buy Kurt's latest novel, The Salvage Man

Larry D. Sweazy, author of A Thousand Falling Crows

Click to buy Kurt's first novel, Noblesville

Susan Crandall, Author of Whistling Past the Graveyard

Monday, December 7, 2015

What Is A Hoosier? Understanding Hoosiers Via an 1890s Economic Boom

In my first novel Noblesville, David Henry is a 21st century high school history teacher who travels to 1893 and experiences firsthand what he’d been teaching his students about – a still young America, hopeful and ambitious, both aspiring to and rejecting its European heritage.

I worked hard to give Noblesville a strong sense of place – the feel of Indiana and a Hoosier accent. In the 1890s, Indiana was a shade different from the rest of America in superficial ways. It had the smallest foreign born population in the nation, and sure, folks talked a little different here – they might ask, “Do what?” instead of “Pardon me?” and refer to bell peppers as, “mangos,” but there were deeper character traits particular to the Midwest and Indiana. America’s ambivalence toward its European heritage was uniquely filtered through the Hoosier experience and Indiana's self-depricating reflex.

The Tescher family on their front porch in 1890s Noblesville. The adults in this photo were living what amounted to the good life – raised in the three decades after the Civil War, trying to solidify a status of a maturing nation, state, and town. They had achieved what was then rare – upper middle class status. This was admired and envied, so long as you didn’t act superior – there was no greater social crime in 1890s Indiana.

The world's then largest known natural gas field was discovered under central, eastern Indiana in the late 1880s. In the resulting gas boom economy in 1890s Noblesville, the homes that lined the streets were reimagined versions of European architecture – French Second Empire, Italianate, English Gothic Revival, and Queen Anne. When folks from the Midwest went off to Chicago World’s Fair in the summer of 1893, they marveled at the fairgrounds filled with reproductions of Greek and Roman architecture. And midwestern towns like Noblesville mimicked the cathedrals of Europe with stately stone and brick courthouses anchored by impressive bell and clock towers.

In that decade, ladies in towns as small as Noblesville subscribed to magazines that showed the latest fashions from Paris, simplified for mass produced and available on the courthouse square or in downtown Indianapolis. Artist’s renderings of the latest European fashions regularly appeared on the pages of Noblesville newspapers. Pretty fancy, huh? Yet, the town’s fathers were middle-aged men who had fought a brutal, insanely savage Civil War. Many of the grandparents who sat at the dinner table or taught Sunday school had been raised in log cabins. So though telephones and electric lights had freshly arrived and automobiles were being invented not only in Kokomo, 35 miles north of Noblesville, but also in various places in America and Europe that year, there was still a ragged, primitive edge to any small town like Noblesville and truly raw primitive living was a vivid memory for many residents who wore those memories like a badge of honor.

These realities created glaring contradictions, but more accurately it was two competing ideals resting side by side in the American, and Hoosier mind. Americans of the 1890s hated Europe’s class system, yet aspired to be upper class. This was especially true of Hoosiers. Intellectual refinement was to be pursued but not at the expense of forgetting your roots or pretending to be better than others with less. Hoosiers of the 1890s would delight in a refined, elegantly dressed young woman willing to do somersaults in the grass with small children or a college educated man ready to roll up his sleeves to fix a machine or tend to an injured animal. Get it too far one way, you’re a backwoods yokel. Too far the other way and you’re a self-important snob.

Pointing To The Future: Think we've lived in a time of great change? Consider the ladies at right. The child is Edith Tescher with her grandmother, Cornelia Bauchert, photographed in Noblesville, circa 1895. Cornelia was born in the 1840s. When she was Edith’s age trains were a rare oddity and there was no electricity, telegraph, telephone, canned produce or indoor plumbing. None. Native Americans still occupied the western half of America and the dominant architecture of Indiana was the log cabin. 50 years later Edith was being raised in a town with paved streets lined with European-inspired architecture, an electric plant, ice delivery, 2 rail lines that connected the nation, running water, and sea food and seasonal produce shipped from across the country. The west was tamed and the native population on reservations. Edith would become a woman in a time of airplanes, automobiles & radio. The heart of the Hoosier spirit in the 1890s was to respect the foundation of Cornelia’s world while aspiring to Edith’s future.

Hoosiers of this time admired and envied both the grand houses and the well-educated, but would tease you as a snob for putting house numbers on your home (“C’mon, everybody knows where you live!) or ended words like “coming” or “going,” with the full “ing” when comin’ and goin’ would do just fine, which might earn you a sarcastic eye roll – “Well professor, you sure talk in a refined manner.”

The Hoosiers of the 1890s longed for the cultural permanence of Europe, but admired the promise that you could reinvent yourself by going out west and “grow up with the land,” as they called it in those days. As fast as they could they were building European inspired homes and installing indoor plumbing and telephones and paving dirt streets with gravel and brick, complete with electric streets lights overhead. At the same time many of those same upper middle class townies took time off work or closed their offices for a week in the fall so they could go to nearby farms and help family or friends bring in the crops, butcher livestock, barrel apples and potatoes and do the canning. In this time middle class women actually hid their store-bought canned goods so people wouldn't know they weren't canning their own food.

In the late 1800s and turn-of-the-century, Indiana was a politically important swing state, divided roughly along the National Road by Democrats to the south and Republicans to the north. During presidential elections, folks on the east coast waited outside telegraph offices to hear how Indiana voted. And between about 1880 and 1920, the only state whose authors sold more books than Indiana's was New York. It was a bit of a backwater state, but still had to be reckoned with.

Consider more recent Hoosiers and you can see how these qualities echoed down the generations. From Hollywood legend James Dean, to jazz legend Wes Montgomery, to basketball legend Larry Bird, they each had/have the gentle quiet of that old Hoosier demeanor and even a discomfort with fame. In fact, in nearly every famous Hoosier of the past century you can find an undeniable thread of quiet and self-deprication. You also see that when you've been raised not to take yourself too seriously, fame is an uncomfortable suit to wear.

Despite his confident, on stage persona, Gary, Indiana's Michael Jackson was soft-spoken and painfully shy and was finally consumed by a failed battle with notoriety. Fame ate him alive. Despite his feral, throat-punch vocals, Lafayette's Axel Rose, who could be making a fortune doing reunion tours with his old band mates from Guns and Roses, has instead withdrawn into reclusive, quiet isolation. Even though Indy's David Letterman is known for his harsh, frat boy guffaw, he's always saved his most biting and cruel humor for the likes of Madonna and Cher - stars who take themselves too seriously – the greatest sin in Hoosier culture. Seymour native John Mellencamp's "Little Bastard" nickname seems odd for a guy who paints, records rootsy music and lives quietly just outside of Bloomington, Indiana instead of Malibu or Manhattan where other aging rock stars make their homes and party, hoping for trash magazine coverage. And famed Indy author Kurt Vonnegut, though known as a witty curmudgeon, was always in a carefully negotiated, arms-length standoff with his fame, in stark contrast to his southern literary contemporaries like Truman Capote and Thomas Wolfe, who both sought and played to the limelight.

That vital Hoosier quality was revealed most beautifully by Ernie Pyle during World War II. As American families lost sleep at the heart ache of wondering about the well-being of their sons on battlefields across the world, Dana, Indiana's Ernie Pyle wrote the most popular newspaper column in the nation. It was syndicated across the nation and globe. Pyle reported from fox holes, battle fields, lonely barracks, bombers, troop transports and aircraft carriers around the world, telling the story of the American soldier, how he was doing, what he was thinking, what he was fighting for, and how much he missed his family and girlfriend back home. Perhaps no humble voice brought more comfort to America during than that of Hoosier, Ernie Pyle.

You can apparently take a Hoosier out of Indiana, but you can't take the Indiana out of the Hoosier. And true, John Dillinger was a Hoosier, but every rule has its exceptions.

This Hoosier tone takes many shapes. Former Indiana Pacer, Mark Jackson once shared a telling observation about the amiable soul of Hoosiers, noting the difference between sports fans in Indiana and his native New York. He said that when a New York team is doing poorly, it's not uncommon for fans to boo them angrily, shouting profanity-laced insults at players, but when an Indiana team is playing poorly, Hoosier fans do not turn ugly. Instead, they cross their arms and suffer silently in their seats.

Novelist L.P. Hartley once wrote, “The past is a foreign country.” In my novel, Noblesville, David Henry certainly finds this to be true. The Midwestern trait of self-deprecation – to pursue greatness and deny it at the same time is nothing new to him, but its extreme application in a younger Indiana astounds, amuses and inspires him. This duality is the hallmark of Midwestern values in general and Hoosier values in particular. Humility wasn’t just the Hoosier ideal, but the mandate. And though perhaps to a lessor degree, that trait still defines Hoosiers to this day.

Buy Kurt's First Novel, NOBLESVILLE