This Concerns Kidnapping! Read Immediately!

Wow. No, you are no­­­t dreaming. It’s time for another installment of Blog You Like A Hurricane. (You didn’t remember it existed? You never knew it existed? You faintly recollect it showing up on your News Feed one day in 2011 but never bothered to read it? You don't fool me!). 

Today let’s talk about……..child abductions! It’s February. I’m currently wintering in the historic waterfront city of Hartford, CT. If anyone has a more cheerful topic, I’m all ears.

Actually let’s talk about fear of abductions. This week a coworker said her 10 year old son is having training on how to steer clear of potential pedophiles. This seems crazy to me. I don’t think anything like this was ever thought of when I was that age. Fire drill procedures were the only training against a potential disaster I can recall. Rather than getting scared half to death, I’m hoping the kids will just treat it as a big joke. (Like we treated fire drills. The school might catch on fire and we could all die if we don't learn to walk single file? OK, Boomer). And I know that’s how everyone treated sex ed too—which, if I remember didn’t take place until high school. Um, the cat was kind of out of the bag by then. I mean we didn’t have the Internet but we did have cable TV and magazines and older kids who were actively dedicated to corrupting the impressionable minds of their juniors.

Part of the kidnapping fear may lie in misleading headlines. There is a difference between “missing children” and abducted children. Most missing children are teen runaways and most abducted minors are abducted by a family member who doesn’t have legal guardian rights over them. But most people’s primary fear is about strangers kidnapping kids, isn’t it? Those cases are 0.1 percent of missing children cases. There’s about 100 kids under 17 abducted by a stranger per year out of 84 million kids. And most are teens. and 90 percent of them come home. Children under the age of 12 are practically never kidnapped by strangers. By comparison, 4,000 kids aged 18 and under die in car accidents per year. 2,500 kids die from firearm injuries. Cancer kills 1,800 kids.  

So as a threat, stranger kidnappings barely register on the radar screen. I don’t want to say parents are being irrational and paranoid. It’s not unreasonable to say that unless you can know that zero kids are kidnapped, you can’t feel safe. But it is interesting, isn’t it? We haven’t raised the age for kids to get driver’s licenses or banned kids from riding in cars. We haven’t passed laws banning guns from being in any home with a child. But it almost seems we have completely reorganized childhood around the fear of strangers kidnapping children.  

Of course movies and shows probably don’t help. I love the show Stranger Things but what was season 1 about? Children getting abducted by strangers! Andis whole widespread fear apparently has its origins in a 1983 made for TV movie called Adam. Adam is kidnapped and murdered. Based on a true story. It was watched by 38 million people on its first airing and rebroadcast in 1984 and 1985. Each time a list of missing children was listed with a phone number to call with any info. Adam’s father was John Walsh---later the host of America’s Most Wanted. The only thing I really remember about that show was John's habit of referring to any criminal as "this punk" like Dirty Harry. 

Then beginning in 1984 there were the milk carton kids. Have you seen this child? But for all of that campaign’s attempt to raise awareness of stranger danger, many of the missing milk carton kids were abducted by estranged family members, not strangers. But the milk cartons somehow didn’t cause people to fear their family more, only strangers.  

Oh….and of course abduction fears seem almost inextricably linked with pedophile fears. Here too the risk is often misplaced. Children are far more likely to be molested by—you guessed it-- a family member than a stranger.   

But again, does anything I’m saying matter? The fact that these cases, however rare, do happen instill such a terror and panic in parents that there’s just no fighting it? But it's undeniable: if we are guided by the facts, we will start to fear family members more and strangers less. 

But fear of the latter seems to have changed the way we raise children. I know this much: when I was a kid a kidnapper would have had ample opportunity to nab me. I walked to and from the bus stop from as early an age as I can remember. I would ride my bike around the neighborhood often by myself, sometimes with other kids. We would go for walks through the neighborhood and wander through the woods. Are you sitting down? Sometimes we got lost in the woods! All without a single adult to be seen. And not a single adult had any technological way to contact us. If we went to the mall, I would go my own way and meet my mom at an agreed upon time from a pretty early age. I was into the record store and the video store and the bookstore as opposed to, you know, women’s clothing stores and flower shops. I can remember my brother and I seeing Return Of The Jedi in the theaters while my mom went to see Flashdance I think. I was 10. But what was going to happen to you in a movie theater? Innocent times indeed.

And during adolescence, it was all about the parties in the woods for many Gen Xers. These were sophisticated grain alcohol tastings. At night. The bonfire providing the only light. Again, zero adult supervision—unless the cops showed up and broke it up. That peppermint schnapps or Purple Passion wasn’t going to pour itself out.

But I was never once scared by any of these things. As a kid I was more afraid of ghosts under the bed than getting kidnapped. As a teenager I was scared of rabies after reading about it for biology class, but zero stranger fear to speak of. And why would I? I lived in Ellington, CT. A town with a ridiculously low crime rate. Obviously, nothing was going to happen to me. In "bucolic" Ellington, the most famous story of a child coming to a bad end involved Samuel Knight: run over by a wheelbarrow. Stay away from wheelbarrows and you would live happily ever after. 

And I think most parents across America believed the same thing. Yes, the made for TV movies and milk carton brigades were slowly beginning to erode confidence, but mass panic hadn’t sunk in yet. The Suburban Dream was still alive. This is why you lived in the suburbs. Good, safe schools and a safe town where you could let your kids play and wander freely without any worry. Just be home in time for dinner. The way my parents raised me and the way most kids of my generation were raised would lead to a Facebook mob engaging in mass shaming and/or an arrest for neglect today. What is now called “free range parenting” was how everyone parented. Sometimes my mom would go in a store and…………ready for this…….we would wait in the car. Scandalous!

All I can say is I think I’m glad I grew up when I did. I grew up without the slightest fear that walking down the street was dangerous or even walking through the woods alone was risky. With parents seeming so hypervigilant today, I have to imagine some of that rubs off on kids and the outside world seems like a more dangerous, scary place even if you live in a quiet little town. Or even if kids aren’t afraid themselves, they still have to live a life in relative captivity. That can’t be as fun. And what must parenting be like? Always a hard job, is it now 10x more anxiety inducing? No wonder the birth rate is at record lows!

Fear is almost impossible to avoid. We’re hard wired for it. Goes back to our caveman days when we had to be vigilant against hungry lions and panthers. But the key is to be afraid of the right things. I’m not much better at this myself. I went on a lot of trips growing up but I haven’t boarded a plane since I was 18. If I actually had somewhere to go or someone to go with, I might do it but the thought of it makes me scared. It shouldn’t. The odds of dying in a plane crash are 1 in 5 million. You’re not only more likely to die in a car crash, you’re more likely to be struck by lightning or killed by a shark. Drive your kid to school because it's safer than letting them walk to school or the bus stop? Nope. It bears repeating: they are more likely to die in a car crash on the ride to school than to get kidnapped walking to school.     

Or am I wrong to say parents fear the wrong thing? There’s one obvious big difference between my generation and today: the Internet. We were told it was an Information Superhighway that make us all smarter and better people. Meanwhile the blog has been reduced to the meme. No one reads articles before commenting. No one proofreads their posts. (Or, even worse, they do proofread). And…………….is the Net a Creeper Superhighway? Clearly it does give strangers with bad intent a better avenue to earn the trust of kids. Before you needed to join the priesthood or become a schoolteacher for that, but now you can work any old job! (Sorry—bad joke). There was a case in Farmington about a teenage girl and some 40 year old married dude just a couple of years ago—they met online. So a case can be made that the freedoms we enjoyed as kids can’t exist today. If that’s the case, it’s just one more reason the Internet sucks. Seriously, has it done far more harm than good or is it just me?       

Also it seems no matter what method of parenting one embraces, there are always going to be critics. Pay too close attention to your kids? You’re a helicopter parent who is preventing your kid from developing independence. Raise your kids with a loose leash? You are neglectful. I just saw an article about the 35^th anniversary of The Breakfast Club. Crap I’m old. It was released on February 15, 1985. John Hughes was just about the spokesman of my generation and he built an entire movie career around the concept of parental neglect. Molly Ringwald’s parents forget it’s her birthday in Sixteen Candles. In The Breakfast Club when we get the big reveal of what Ally Sheedy’s parents did to her, she says, “They ignore me”. Ferris Bueller’s parents had absolutely no clue he had been absent NINE TIMES. Macauley Culkin’s parents go on vacation and oops! They forget him and leave him home alone to fend off burglars. That was just life in the radical 80’s, man!

Life is hard. Too much of something is often bad, too little of something is often bad. Do we now live in an over parented world? Did we used to live in an under parented world? And if life was so perfect the old way, why were all these movies in the 80’s focused on absentee parents and teachers? Again,  I’m glad I grew up with the relative freedom I did, but I do sometimes wish I had been involved in more structured activities. Like I wish I didn’t quit the band in junior high (because it was uncool and for some reason they refused to play a single Motley Crue song). Or I wish I had joined the drama club. Or the school newspaper. All those nerdy things! Maybe today’s kids are pushed a little more into after school and summer activities and that’s an advantage over us more aimless wandering latchkey kids?

As it was at the time, I was a true child of the 80’s because my regret upon graduating high school was completely different from what it is now. I regretted not going to more of those aforementioned parties in the woods. Who wanted to be rehearsing for a production of Our Town in a world where there was underage drinking  in the woods in February? Anyone who thought differently wouldn’t know cool if it hit them in the face.

In the Jonathan Franzen book The Corrections, he wrote about how kids often try to live their lives in polar opposite ways to their parents because they are correcting what they saw as the flaws of their character or their parenting methods. But sometimes maybe you overcorrect. And maybe that’s what we see today in parents. They are overcorrecting because maybe, like Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club, they felt like they were ignored or forgotten so they want to guarantee their kid doesn’t feel the same way. As a kid are you always parented in ways that prevent problems you never yourself experienced?

But how much of all this is rooted mothers’ working? For most of human history, mom stayed home and took care of the kids while dad worked. Even by 1970, only 31 percent of households featured both parents working full time. Today it’s 48 percent. I actually can’t believe it’s that low. All that free unsupervised time we had might have been the byproduct of two parents working being a new thing and society not fully adjusting to it yet. Did women’s liberation lead to children’s liberation?

And is freedom over? I read cops now go on social media looking for posts which tip them off to any underage parties  go and bust them up. That’s cheating. I heard some moms join their grammar school kids for lunch in the cafeteria every day! Or stories about moms who do their college aged kids’ laundry. Me? I went to the school of hard knocks in the laundry game. I was taught before leaving for college. But I probably didn’t pay full attention because I nearly burned down my dorm on my maiden voyage after getting to college. The washer started to smoke and two girls told me they had to stop it. I didn’t realize you couldn’t jam ALL of your clothes in there. But us Gen Xers learned things the hard way and moved on with our lives!

Oh and it seems like if a kid gets a bad grade, the parent blames the teacher! In my generation, parents and teachers always seemed to be in collusion with each other. As it should be 99% of the time. Some teachers were better than others, but I really don’t remember a teacher that was so bad or so unfair that I felt there was no way I could do well if I tried my hardest.

So there you have it, folks. Words of wisdom about parenting form a non parent. You’re welcome. For my next blog I will provide expert tutelage on how to fly an airplane, win a Mr. Universe contest, and swim the English Channel.