From The Wall Street Journal

Dec. 15, 2000

Copyright Daniel Akst

Now that I’m a father and hang out with parents all the time, I’ve come up with a modern version of the old joke about why the chicken crossed the road. Mine is, why do the children of America learn to swim? The answer is not to get anyplace. It’s to make them "water-safe."

Safety comes first for parents, of course, and if I really want to shock people I just tell them that, when I was 10 or 11 years old, I was allowed to ride the New York subways by myself. This was in the late 1960s, when crime was already in full swing, but nothing ever happened to me except that I learned my way around. I learned to swim, in other words, in the turbulent city we lived in.

It’s a paradox of modern parenting that everyone is obsessed with child safety but few parents seem worried that by swaddling our children in Volvos and soccer camps we render them all the more vulnerable to the untidy realities they sooner or later must face. Even the so-called experts are starting to recognize this. "The youngster who has been overprotected doesn’t get the training he needs to become an adult--to be autonomous and resilient," warns Vanessa L. Ochs, the author of "Safe and Sound: Protecting Your Child in an Unpredictable World."

The Real Risks

What most middle-class parents don’t seem to realize is how physically safe their children are by historical standards. From 1960 to 1998, according to federal data, death rates from accidents among children ages one to four fell a remarkable 68%; for children five to 14, accidental deaths dropped 57%. Deaths from disease have also fallen sharply. While child homicide has increased, it remains rare--and except among teenagers these killings typically occur at home at the hands of a parent or other "caregiver." Strangers are virtually no threat at all.

School is extraordinarily safe; many more people are struck by lightning each year than die by violence in school. Your children are safe from abduction, too, unless it’s your spouse doing the kidnapping. A 1988 federal study (a new one is in the works) found that abduction by strangers befalls 200 to 300 children a year, an infinitesimal number in a nation of roughly 71 million children under the age of 18.

This is not to say that sensible measures like bicycle helmets and infant car seats haven’t helped. Drowning, in fact, is a leading cause of childhood death, so making sure your kids can swim is smart. But many measures we take to protect children aren’t so sensible. Recently I met a single mother who lives in a rural area with her 10-year-old son, whom she does not allow to wander off even on her own wooded property without supervision. Now she wants to get him a cellular phone. "He’s all I’ve got," she explained. Another friend, also the parent of an only child, attacked the very notion of overprotection. "How can a child be overprotected?" he demanded. "There’s no such thing as too much safety for a child."

Parental paranoia is about to reach new heights with the invention of lightweight mobile tracking devices for kids. Several companies are working on such systems, which will rely on digital mobile-phone technology and satellite-based global positioning devices. Day-care centers, meanwhile, are starting to deploy Web cameras so parents can keep an eye on their tykes from the office.

Given the facts, why are parents so paranoid about the well-being of their kids? The media have played a big role, but other factors include the rise of single parenting and the low birth rate among middle-class families. Edward N. Luttwak has proposed a similar rationale for the intense reluctance of Western nations to go to war. When you have fewer sons, the loss of one is ever more painful.

But I think the most important reason parents obsess over insignificant risks is that the significant ones are so much less convenient. It’s easier to keep your child indoors than to stay married to his father, for instance, even though divorce is associated with such woes as poverty, delinquency and impaired school performance.

Parents talk a great game about limiting television, but by the time American youngsters graduate from high school, they’ve spent about 15,000 hours watching TV, which is more time than they spend in school. By the time they leave elementary school, children watching the typical amount of TV will see about 20,000 murders and more than 80,000 other assaults. It’s not all violence, of course; there’s lots of sex, too. The average kid may also see some 20,000 commercials each year.

And, of course, a lot of the time we’re just not there, which may account for our paranoia about our kids’ safety. Roughly a quarter of the children ages 10 to 12 are regularly left to their own devices while their parents work, and 5% of six- to nine-year-olds are in the same category. This is different from playing baseball in a public place without parental oversight. Latch-key children are "at risk of physical injury, emotional and psychological harm, and poor physical, social and intellectual development," wrote the authors of a recent study by the Urban Institute.

The Leading Killer

So we sublimate our legitimate fears for our kids by driving them to organized activities instead of letting them play freely in the neighborhood. The trouble is that motor vehicles are the leading killer of Americans at every age from six to 27, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. And by permitting spread-out patterns of development, the car has left many children with no alternative to being driven everywhere. Unfortunately, that contributes to the growing problem of child obesity. Newsweek recently estimated that some six million American kids are fat enough to endanger their health, and five million more are close. "The children we see today are 30% heavier than the ones who were referred to us in 1990," said Dr. Naomi Neufeld, a Los Angeles endocrinologist.

Nowhere is our neurotic and contradictory approach to childhood risks more manifest than when it comes time to hand over the car keys. Young people between 16 and 20 have the highest auto fatality and injury rates of any group, and thanks to a lethal combination of inexperience and testosterone, young male drivers are far and away the likeliest people to be killed or injured in a car crash.

A 1999 editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association noted that driver-ed classes were found to actually increase injury risk to adolescents," because they "encouraged driving at an earlier age (thus increasing exposure)," while the training "had little or no effect at decreasing the risk per mile traveled."

It’s hard to let your kids take the risks inherent in growing up, but it might be easier if we focused instead on what really threatens their well-being. So turn off the TV, stay out of divorce court and, for Pete’s sake, don’t drive them to McDonald’s. At the very least, make them walk.

Mr. Akst is a writer in New York’s Hudson Valley.