// June 11th, 2007 // No Comments » // Security & Privacy
I ran across a timely article that may help assuage the collective parental panic that inevitably follows news of the loss of a child in an apparently random act of violence.
BBC News has an article reflecting on the shrinking boundaries within which parents limit their children. Parents today can easily be overwhelmed by compelling and tragic stories of losing a child — to illness, accidental death, kidnapping or worse. There are people whose careers are built around keeping attention focused on these tragedies (some I prefer to others).
The result of this deluge of despair is a cadre of parents who feel feel that — to keep from having to bear the weight of a similar tragedy firsthand — they must take all possible steps to protect and sanitize their kids experiences from not only real threats, but from all possible threats they (with the help of 24-hour-global-news) can imagine. The result is an ever-shrinking bubble of pseudo-reality parents attempt to craft for their kids that may ultimately do more harm than good.
The BBC article discusses this trend, and it’s possible impact on childhood development.
From the article:
[...]
“There is increasing concern that today’s ‘cotton-wool kids’ are having their development hampered. They are likely to be risk-averse, stifled by fears which are more phobic than real. Their lack of unsupervised play may also reduce the opportunity to form deep friendships in early years.”
[...]
There remain cultural differences as well. Many American’s (including me I’ll admit) were shocked to hear that Madeleine McCann was taken from her bed in a Portugal resort while her parents were having dinner 50 meters away.
I’ve written about kids and security before. I rarely watch “mainstream” news simply because — as my wife says — it doesn’t improve my life or make me happier. But stories like this have a way of bringing themselves into focus, despite my intentional ignorance.
It’s something to think about — most all of us do it to some degree. Always keeping our kids uber-clean, on a short leash, loaded-up with vitamins, and in the air conditioning may help us sleep better at night. But many of our concerns are really just pop-phobias, and our preoccupation with them may be keeping our kids from living open, imaginative lives unencumbered by our own fears, both real and imagined.
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