"We Protect Kids From Everything But Fear"

This "My Turn" essay in the current issue of Newsweek totally struck a chord for me. I think about this a lot, about the degree, the passion, the commitment, to which modern middle-class parents adhere to these arbitrary strictures.

For example, my brother doesn't let his 4-year-old daughter watch TV at all. He and his wife decided she has to be 5 years old (I have no idea why that's the magic number). But I don't see the point at all - we (he, my sister and I) watched tons of TV as kids and it didn't ruin us! We drank nothing but Koolaid, and we went to the fair every summer and had an orgy of junk food. We're not fat, we're not stupid.

I just don't see what all the hysteria is about. I think a lot of this is just clever marketing - how much does a long sleeved swmsuit cost??? All this craziness is just so companies can sell us alternatives that cost 10 times as much (e.g., soy chips versus potato chips).

There's a difference between setting reasonable limits (on TV, on junk food, on sun exposure), which many parents also don't bother to do, and this current obsession with controlling every minor childhood frivolity, as if all this vigilance really matters, really has an impact on your child's long-term quality of life.

What is a much more important parenting responsibility, in my opinion, is to teach kids to cope with life's ups and downs, rather than trying to control everything (which is impossible anyway) and rather than trying to protect kids from the vagaries of life.

Here's the link and some excerpts from the article:

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17770831/site/newsweek/

We Protect Kids From Everything But Fear
With hand sanitizer and long-sleeved swimsuits, we're teaching our childrena dangerous lesson.
By Paula Spencer
Newsweek
April 2, 2007


Fear is the new fuel of the American mom. If it's not fear of her childbecoming obese, it's the fear of falling behind, missing out on a sportsscholarship or winding up with a thin college-rejection envelope.

It's not that I think parents shouldn't worry about anything. I'm personallypetrified of SUV drivers on cell phones. I fret as much as the next momabout how to pay for college. I pray my kids won't wander onto MySpace andpost something dumb.

But you can't go around afraid of everything. It's too exhausting! No matterhow careful you are, bad stuff happens (diaper rash, stitches, all yourfriends assigned to another class). And it's seldom the end of the world.

Watching my daughter's friends ogle my pantry, I realized there's one big,legitimate fear that I haven't heard anybody mention: what's the effect of our collective paranoia on the kids? Yes, these very kids we want to be so self-sufficient, responsible, confident, happy and creative (not to mention not food-obsessed). They're growing up thinking these weirdly weenie viewsare healthy and normal.