Extremely long article that gets into the why's and wherefore's of where this whole mentally comes from... Great read, in full, if you follow the link...
Reason Magazine - Child-proofing the World:
"..."...About six months ago, I received another unscheduled lesson in contemporary childhood (or, more precisely, contemporary parenting). My wife and I had moved to a small town in southeast Texas, and I was dropping our 3-year-old son off for the first time at his new day care center. As I started out of the U-shaped driveway, I saw something that made me hit the brakes so hard I almost cracked my head against the windshield: A car pulled into the driveway with a toddler jumping up and down in the passenger seat of the automobile; in the back seat, I saw another unbelted child climbing the upholstery. What the hell kind of parent would allow such a thing? I wondered for a second before the answer came to me: my mother, my father, and every other parent I knew growing up during the '60s, '70s, and early '80s.
Things sure are different nowadays with the kids, and in a most puzzling way. By most standards, the vast, overwhelming majority of American children are doing better than ever. With some notable, insistent, and tragic exceptions, indicators such as mortality and accident rates, life expectancy, and educational attainment all suggest that the kids are more than all right. In fact, they are flourishing, brimming over with the potential to live longer, to live better, and to be smarter than their parents (just as their parents outstripped their parents).
And yet, the national discourse on children--the way we talk about "the kids" and their future--describes a tableau of unremitting fear and trembling, a landscape marked by relentless risk and deprivation. Although apocalyptic rhetoric in general has diminished in recent years--overpopulation, nuclear war, global warming, and the like just don't pack the same wallop they did in years past--the air remains thick with stories of how children must be protected from a world that is conceived largely as a malevolent presence that seeks only to hurt them, a sort of Mad Max environment for the younger set.
...The threats are everywhere, we are told: If children are not hounded by ritual satanic child abusers at day care or by perverts on the Internet, then they're sucking in too much asbestos at school, or chewing on too much lead at home; if television, purportedly the babysitter of choice in the overwhelming majority of American homes, hasn't transformed kids into underperforming, slackjawed dullards, it has overstimulated them into feral children who must be tamed with Ritalin and Prozac; if we haven't failed the kids by not spending unlimited amounts of tax money on them, then we have transformed them into shallow consumers who can only measure affection in terms of dollars spent; if they're not at elevated risks of brain cancer from eating hot dogs, then they're likely to become punch- drunk from heading soccer balls; and on and on.
Interestingly, such stories tend not to focus on the kids who may truly be most at risk, such as impoverished children in the inner city or rural outposts. Instead, the tendency is to paint with a broad brush, to talk about that great hypothetical abstraction, "middle-class America."
..."Yeah, I'm really worried about raising my kids," a college friend with two pre-teen girls tells me. "Everything's out of control: drugs, schools, college costs." I try reminding him that he himself first smoked dope at age 15 and that his and his wife's combined income--somewhere around the $100,000 mark--should let them be good providers, but he cuts me off: "No way, it's totally different now. Do you know how much college costs? Have you seen the kids today? Do you hear the music? They're out of control," he says, forgetting for the moment his early-'80s penchant for humming Sex Pistols lyrics such as, "I am an anti-Christ, I am an anarchist, don't know what I want, but I know how to get it" and "God save the Queen, she ain't no human being....No future for you!"
We are suckers for tales of decline. Most of the fears and worries regarding children, however, are less based on shared experience and more the result of relative affluence, indiscriminate risk assessment, and a generational solipsism that seems particularly acute in baby boomers. The first generation to "discover" alienation, rebellion, sex, and drugs has been painfully slow to recognize recurrent truths: that parenting is an awesome and fearsome experience, that your children grow up speaking a foreign language, that youth culture is always precisely calculated to maximize disgust in parents.
...Risks that were once taken for granted have now become plainly intolerable and have fueled any number of "common-sense" policies passed during the past decade or so...
...Consider a fairly representative family history: When my grandparents were born in Europe near the end of the 19th century, a fair question was whether they would survive their first few years of life. By the time my parents were born in America a quarter-century later, the question was whether (or when) they would contract polio or some other life-threatening, debilitating disease. When my siblings and I were born toward the end of the baby boom, the question was whether we'd have our own bedrooms. When my own child was born a few years ago, the question was which college he would attend.
...In fact, despite lower absolute percentages, the rate of increase in life expectancy and educational attainment for black children--who are disproportionately poor--actually outstrips that of whites. In these very important ways, things are, on the whole, getting better for the overwhelming majority of children.
...At some point, the rate of return runs into the negatives in cultural terms, as well. What sort of message, we might ask, borrowing a favorite phrase of child advocates, does it send to paint the world in the most horrific terms possible, to see danger and disorder lurking everywhere? Do we best prepare our children for responsible, engaged lives by seeking to child-proof the world? What are the costs (to adults and minors alike) of thinking of our children as little Buddhas who must at all costs be prevented from living in the world they will one day inherit? Will kids imbibe such an ethos and respond by shrinking from the world in all its dangers and opportunities alike, seeking first and foremost to avoid the confrontations, negotiations, and possibilities entailed by a robust life? Or will they rebel against overprotection and take more and more unmeasured risks? Perhaps a harbinger of the second response is the rising popularity of extreme sports and increases in teen smoking (still far below 1980 levels). Whatever happens, it seems likely that extremity will breed extremity."
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