Helicopter Parenting - 1M abductions a year?

Christian and I are both parents; he of grown children and mine still in middle school.  As parents we know that managing risk is a big part of raising kids.  When they are little, they don't know any better.  When they are teenagers, they test.

I once told my young son to not touch our barbecue grill, and he walked right up to the grill and touched it.  This was not willful, more in the vein of experimentation: he pointed his index finger and slowly got close to it and touched it.  Not slowly enough; Dad was grilling steaks and a Chicago-built Weber gets to 600 degrees F.  His finger immediately blistered and he pulled it away in tears.

I felt terrible as a parent; I didn't catch him quite in time and obviously I don't want my kid to have a burnt hand or scars.  One outcome, though, was unexpected: he now has a healthy respect for both hot things on the stove and Dad's safety warnings.

Parents these days, particularly in America, seem hell-bent on removing all risk from their childrens' lives.  Parents want to wrap their children in safety and guide their every step.  There are reports of parents even coming in to their children's job interviews post college (see the excellent book by Stanford dean of freshmen Julie Lythcott-Haims).  Any deviation from the golden path is perceived as a disaster.

Small wonder that grade improvement and anxiety reduction are now large motivators of collegiate drug abuse.  79% of college students taking stimulants report grade improvement as a driver.

Parents fear a lot of risks in the world, and on balance they seem worthy of fear.  Take child kidnapping as an example.  It is a prevalent fear if you read the papers.  Hollywood even made a hit movie out of it.  But are those fears really justified?

Take this article by Parents magazine on abduction.  Lots of scary boldface!  Every 40 seconds a child gets abducted in the United States!   Well, doing the math, that's 788,400 kids a year.  I think we'd notice if a million American kids went missing.  So a less sensational fact – a child is reported missing every 40 seconds – is inflated into unreasonable risk data.  Then we see that 1 in 10000 children reported to the police is ultimately a murder victim.  So, 79 kids are murdered a year in the US.  Obviously terrible news.  But, as something to be fearful of in a country of 330 million people?

Also mentioned: your child's kidnapper is likely to be a family member or someone you know already.  The already-low risk of a stranger abduction is even lower than the statistics you may recall on child abduction.  Meanwhile 24 kids a year drown in five-gallon buckets in the US.  Roughly 3000 are accidental drowning victims in swimming pools or unsupervised swimming.  But those numbers do not generate the clickthrough online that abduction will.

Why is that?  Probably for the same reason many people fear flying when driving is much, much more likely to kill you.  People assess the unknown at higher risk than the known.  They then look to engineer risk out of their lives and their families.  A question one might ask: what will be the outcome of those patterns for development, and for society?

One parenting book that made a deep impression on my wife and I is Parenting with Love and Logic, which takes a much more proactive view of child-raising and risk, though they do not look at this in terms of risk assessment.  The general idea is that you allow your children to make decisions appropriate to their age, and – important – to face the consequences of their decisions.  Small child, small decisions: should you wear your coat outside?  If it's too cold, well, darn, I'll remind you next time we go out and you can remember to wear it.  Charge interest and penalties when they are pre-teen and default on a loan from the Bank of Mom and Dad.  The angst is far better than your child's car being repossessed when they are 25.

Risk management is something we teach our children, many times without knowing it.  And it is a discipline that needs lessons, nurturing, and development every bit as much as strength, intellect, and empathy.  

We've seen some improvement on this in American education, with more recent emphasis on resilience and grit as responses to risk.  Culturally though we may not be quite there, in part due to polarization into "no risk" and "all risk" camps that align with American politics.  We hope to explore that more in future posts.