Why fear is the new normal in parenting
Do you remember running around the woods as a kid, not going home until it started to get dark? You couldn’t call your parents because of course you didn’t have a cell phone, but they didn’t worry. Your town was safe. You didn’t even lock your doors.
But now, we assume the world is crawling with creeps. Kids can’t hang outside for fear of kidnappers and child molesters, right? Melissa Schorr of Boston Globe Magazine looks at when parents got so scared, noting that overprotection is now the marker of good parenting.
Schorr tells anecdotes from her youth that seem horrifying today. Her mother, she writes, “parented with a ‘70s innocence I can only view with disbelief,’’ like having an elderly man from their apartment building pick her up from the bus. Her friend’s explanation for why her mother could’ve been so trustworthy is a simple, “we know too much today.’’
But is it that simple? Schorr points out that a Harvard psychologist has argued that humanity is getting less violent, but it doesn’t feel that way. Maybe it’s because the media—which she willingly asks if she herself is to blame—has a habit of clinging to these tragic stories, making them seem more frequent than they actually are.
This is what fills our minds with fear, she writes: the constant Amber Alerts, the tragic stories always on TV screens, always driving past the billboard of Baby Doe. Maybe this is why 40 million American adults suffer from anxiety disorder.
Read the full Boston Globe Magazine piece here.
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