Sugar and Spice and a Parent’s Worst Fears
I’m struggling for the glad heart to raise a daughter in this cockeyed, chilling summer of 2002. I can protect her, or so I tell myself. The odds are with me. But I’m not so sure I can protect her childhood. The odds of that grow longer all the time.
We throw fences around our little girls, our boys too. We don’t let them venture beyond our gaze, and maybe not even that far. Their movements, we plan. Their activities, we supervise. We give them a code word so they won’t be fooled and walk off with a Big Bad Wolf who says Papa is hurt and needs help. We tell them not to worry about lost puppies. We tell them about little girls stolen out of their yards and grabbed out of their kitchens, and about big girls kidnapped from lovers’ lane. We scare them for their own good. And if we don’t, someone will.
“The flowers, the crying, that’s what they mention,” says my friend Susan about the first- and second-graders she teaches. “They see it on TV; they hear people talk about it. But they won’t say a thing unless you bring it up. They hold it inside.”
This burden, inside, weighs how heavy? How do we protect our children from fear?
I re-read Tom Sawyer this week. I’d forgotten that Mark Twain intended it for parents too. “Part of my plan,” he wrote in the preface 126 years ago, “has been to pleasantly remind adults of what they were themselves, and of how they felt and thought and talked, and what queer enterprises they sometimes engaged in.” There were Robin Hoods and pirates and puppy love and summer vacation. Yes, kids and summer. There was a dangerous cave--and, I was reminded, the witness to a murder.
When I was a boy, I thought Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher were quaint. Today I see that my childhood was closer to theirs than what we give our daughters and sons today.
Once upon a time: My mom would ask, where have you been? “Nowhere.” Whatcha been doing? “Nothin’.” Responsible parents can’t let children roam nowhere to do nothin’ anymore.
Parents used to feed kids that old line about having to walk a mile to school in the snow. Now parents may be tempted to tell their children about those days when they were allowed to walk even a block on their own.
Einstein was asked what he thought was the most important question concerning the future of humanity. His reply: “Is the universe friendly?”
I turn to the steadiest voice I know, sociologist Barry Glassner: “Kids are more likely to die falling off a bicycle without a helmet on the way to the park than they are to be abducted when they get there. They’re more likely to be hit by lightning.” He should know; he wrote the book on it--”Culture of Fear.”
The trouble: Glassner’s odds of “less than one in a million” make sense in our heads, but we aren’t gamblers with something so close to our hearts.
Last year, it was shark attacks. This year, the world stops for cable TV to feed off the kidnapping, assault, murders and rescues of girls.
We mobilize to safeguard our children from stray maniacs, but how do we also protect the good-nights and sleep-tights of their childhoods from the emotional bombardment of the tabloid echo chamber?
Last week’s precautionary flier from the day-care center tells me not to write my daughter’s name on her clothes or toys. “A child is less likely to fear someone who knows his/her name.” It’s not enough, the warning explains, to tell children not to talk to strangers. They might mistakenly think that “strangers” are only those people who are somehow strange-looking. “Teach them: Don’t talk to people you do not know.”
Along with showing her how to swim and ride a bicycle, I’m told I now must instruct her on how to kick a man in the groin. The novelist Graham Greene once wrote: “There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.” I wish I could put my shoulder to the door and hold back the moment. But I don’t dare.
“Missing,” “raped,” “molested,” “murdered.” Children know more the meaning of a circling helicopter than they do a robin’s song.
