The helmet perfectly symbolizes childhood today. Nothing is safe, kids should be wary of everything, pass the Ritalin. This phenomenon would be laughable if it weren’t so serious.
“Summertime,” goes that wonderful old song by the Gershwins, “and the livin’ is easy.”
Well, it used to be, anyway. This past one seemed fraught with peril, as they usually do, these days, for parents. Allergies, skin cancer, air pollution, injuries, drownings, heat stroke, West Nile virus … oh my.
Gone are the golden afternoons of my own childhood, when I left the house without a hat, or sun screen, to noodle about on my bike (without a helmet) and play hide-and-seek in the bushes (without benefit of mosquito repellant or pedophile spray) and invariably stayed out until supper (which consisted of fattening foods).
Now, my children cannot exit my home from May through October unless they are dressed in the equivalent of a hazmat suit.
2 thoughts on “Fear is Shaping Our Children”
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Hmm, I hope this is meant to be as tongue-in-cheek as it sounds.
The ozone layer did not have such a huge hole in it that people were as worried about sunburn (and skin cancer). Whole countries that almost never worried abotu skin cancer before now have it at high rates.
West NIle Virus did not exist, and certainly not as the threat it is to actual, modern, relatively well-off (when compared to the rest of the world) North AMericans. Likewise avian flu and the like (if that is even part of how it is spread – people don;t really seem to know).
Stranger assault is still relatively low-occurrence when you look at the threat from friends and family members. People talk about assault by familiar people more now, but it still happened even back when we were kids. And if you lived in a city, then you learned all about stranger danger, even back in the early 70’s.
My kids wear helmets because I don’t trust drivers (or other bicyclists, since friends run into friends). When we were little (35-40 years or more ago), there were not more cars in North America than there are voting age people. Commutes were not so far, meaning people were less likely to be driving when so tired or so intoxicated.
As for dinner? We eat a lot like I did when growing up at our house. I don’t worry about real sugar, because we don’t add it to most of our foods (sure, cookie dough from scratch!), and we don’t buy a lot of prepared foods loaded with three of the first four or five ingredients being some form of sugar. So, when my kids want candy at reasonable and appropriate times, we typically let them have some. As for fat? Parents should know (though many don’t) that a certain amount of fat is necessary for developing brains to form myelin and other positive ‘nerve transmitter action materials’. If we didn’t feed our kids so much junk at home, then we wouldn’t need to worry so much about what percentage calories come from fat in their food at school. (I am just glad knowing that my kdis eat anything at school -whether it is from home or hot lunch – and that they are not throwing it all away and then being tired and hungry an hour later!) We ate crap (no, not literally!) at school when I was growing up. We ate crap sometimes at home too. But our parents also had too much trouble feeding us all to begin with, to be loading down our plates and insisting we eat it all every night (even when we didn’t take it).
Our kids wear helmets. They wear sunscreen if they are in swimsuits or if we are sure they will be spending more than an hour exposed to direct sunlight (especially with typically under-exposed skin). But our kids go out and play all the time (on their own! gasp!), know what real dangers to watch for, and can go in and out of our neighbors’ homes to play with all kinds of children, because we have know our neighbors, know a bit about their parenting philosophies, and know what signs to watch for when we think kids are in danger (ours or a neighbor’s).
Just some observations of my own.
It should only take one visit to a spinal cord injury unit to convince a person — whether bi-cyclist or motor-cyclist — to wear a helmet. (Then again, years ago when I worked at a Boston-area VA Hospital, I had people tell me that the reason why they didn’t wear a helmet while riding their motorcycle was so they WOULDN’T survive an accident, only to spend the rest of their life in a VA spinal cord injury unit.) Parents should also insist that their child wear a helmet … and the right way, that is, not sliding off the back of their head, which offers absolutely no protection to the frontal cortex. When I’m on the Southwest Bike Path and I see what I see, it makes me want to scream.
Jeff used to bring this point home in his Intro Psych classes by throwing a melon up in the air and letting it hit the floor. Splat! “This is your brain. This is your brain without a bike helmet in an accident.” That sort of thing.