“Our illusions of perfect safety come at a very high price to children’s actual wellbeing.”
One of the endless challenges of parenthood is remembering all the stuff I’m not supposed to say.
At 14 months, Elliot isn’t leaping into deep conversation yet. But she can find her belly button when asked (or yours, if it’s within reach), which means she’s already paying attention to the important stuff.
So no more cursing when I burn dinner, no more profane suggestions for other drivers on the way to daycare. Life under pint-sized scrutiny takes discipline.
My wife recently added another phrase to our prohibited list — “Be careful!”
We’ve caught ourselves saying it whenever we’re anxious about some new step our daughter is taking or some new object she’s testing. She’ll be waving a spatula around in her high chair — I have no idea how she got the spatula — and I’ll hear myself start to admonish, “Be careful!” Or she’ll dangle half her little body off the edge of the couch, and I have to hold back the urge to exclaim, “Watch it!”
I have to remember that as much as I want my kid to be safe, I also want her to be curious, joyful, and brave. I want her to be a confident explorer of the world, not fearful of it.
In so many ways, that will mean swimming against the cultural tide. There’s a book out this month called Small Animals: Parenting in the Age of Fear. It recounts Kim Brooks’ struggle to raise independent, secure children in an age of irrational anxiety.
She argues that the last few decades have ushered in a “radically new construct of vulnerable childhood,” driven by a relentless focus on rare but terrible things that befall children. “Whatever we have to do to feel safe from such horrors, no matter how rare they might be, we vow to do it,” Brooks writes, “to pay whatever price is necessary for a feeling of safety, a feeling of control.”
There’s mounting evidence that our illusions of perfect safety come at a very high price to children’s actual wellbeing. More than 1 in 20 American kids have diagnosed anxiety or depression, a number that many clinicians believe is an underestimate. College mental health centers across the country are overwhelmed by the growing demand for services. And the amount of time kids spend on “free play” — the unsupervised hours that remain the most memorable part of my childhood — has been in steady decline since the 1950s.
All of this points to a parenting style that puts enormous focus on remote physical risks at the expense of real emotional health.
This goes beyond parenting, too. Marilynne Robinson, the best-selling author and Calvinist thinker, wrote a searing 2015 essay about the rise of a fearful culture in America. “Fear operates as an appetite or an addiction,” she wrote. “You can never be safe enough.”
Addiction strikes me as the right word for it. How else to describe the relentless diet of awful news we’ve cultivated for ourselves? The incredible technical wizardry that allows us, for the first time in human history, to consume a steady stream of tragedy from all over the world?
I’m trying hard to keep all of that in mind as my daughter wobbles further into the world. I will teach her to avoid harm — to leave hot stoves alone, to refrain from eating sharp things, to stay away from cell phones for as long as possible.
But I won’t tell her to be careful all the time, because you don’t conquer fear with caution. You conquer fear with bravery.
Community columnist Eric Johnson lives in Chapel Hill.
Originally published on the op-ed page of the News & Observer.
https://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article217266335.html