Читать книгу Free-Range Kids - Lenore Skenazy - Страница 13

Is there one single reason we are so much more scared than our parents? One person, place, or thing that left us so shaken that we spend literally four times as much time supervising our kids than our own moms and dads did in 1975? Yes, and I'll give you a hint:

It has white hair, seems to be on CNN about twenty-six hours a day, and has piercing blue eyes so brimming with empathy that you want to hold him tight and co-parent that baby of his.

Of course, it's not just Anderson Cooper that's driving us crazy with fear about crime. But he's part of the problem, just like cable news is, and local news is, and whatever we call the “news” that clickbait leads us to is. And also Law and Order, and Law and Order, and Law and Order, and the other Law and Order. The one with the special victims. Or, as TV historian Robert Thompson says, “The Law and Order for people who like to see crimes that are grossly sexually fetishized and practiced on children or vulnerable adults.”

What's not to like?

The problem with all these shows, from the news to the dramas ripped from the news, is that they present us with a world so focused on the least common, most horrific crimes that we get a totally skewed picture of what it's like out there. How skewed? Let's take a look at one week's TV offerings. Not whatever's on YouTube's Beheading Channel. (There must be one, right?) Just plain-old TV.

Well, hmm. During the particular week I looked at, you could watch a double murder on The Mentalist. That's nice. Then it says there's a “dismembered, headless body” discovered on Bones. I guess Bones did some test marketing and realized that a merely dismembered body might lose some viewers. (“Forget it! If the head's still attached, I'm not watching.”) Then there was CSI: NY. The episode I watched showed, oh, a guy's stomach sliced open because he swallowed a key. And a body dredged up from a swamp. Then there was a woman almost drowned by a madman in a bathtub, but she survived—only to stumble around and accidentally impale her breast on a towel hook. (I hate it when that happens.) On the local news right after that, there was a guy on fire, and a guy who plunged to death, naked. And that night's Law and Order re-run featured a fourteen-year-old girl raped by a Serbian war criminal. Well, we didn't see the actual rape. But we saw her going, “Mph! Mphmmph!” through the duct tape over her mouth as the leering guy reached for her thigh. (She was, of course, bound with a phone cord—like anyone still has a cord phone—and blindfolded.)

I'll get to real news shows in a minute, because we all know how they can make you feel totally depressed about the world. But less attention has been paid to the fact that even these so-called entertainment shows (Rape! Bondage! Towel-hook impaling! That's entertainment!) end up changing our whole outlook.

The problem is that once we see horrific images, only half of our brain takes the time to say, “Wow. That makeup person did an incredible job with those puncture wounds. And hats off to the wonderful writing staff!” (If, indeed, any part of the brain ever thanks writers.) The other half of our brain just takes in those gruesome images wholesale and files them under “Sick World, comma, What we live in.”

In his book The Science of Fear, Daniel Gardner explains that once an image gets into that “reptilian” part of the brain, not only can you not shake it, you also can't extricate it from all the other images and feelings jostling around in there, either. After all, it's only been the last hundred years or so that the brain has started seeing realistic-looking images (TV, movies) that weren't directly applicable to its fate (lions, spears). So it hasn't figured out yet how to separate the real from the manufactured. Especially whatever's manufactured for Liam Neeson.

Thus, the fight-or-flight, feel-it-in-your-guts reptilian brain treats a Joker trailer and the nightly news as one and the same. So when we are faced with a situation we think might be risky and we are trying to figure out what to do, it starts rummaging through all the horrible stuff it has seen and comes to the conclusion, “Jeez Louise! Look what can happen! Run for your life!”

Now, if you're wondering why our reptilian brains would be making us more scared today than our parents’ reptilian brains made them just a generation ago, one reason is that when your parents were growing up, they weren't awash in quite this level of gore. They weren't seeing dead bodies with realistic towel-hook holes in them. They weren't seeing all those autopsies CSI popularized—if that's the word—or horrific dismemberments or decaying bodies dredged from the river. In fact, says TV historian Thompson, “I don't think there's a single episode of Law and Order that could have even been shown before 1981.” That's because, until then, graphic images like the girl with the duct tape, rapist, and phone cord were taboo. In fact, they were the stuff of porn.

What happened?

In 1971, the rules changed. From 1929 up to that point, says Thompson, broadcasters held themselves to a code of conduct so strict that they couldn't even use the word “pregnant.” They couldn't use bad language. They couldn't show a toilet bowl on TV. (That's why the Ty-D-Bol man was always, confusingly, in the tank.) Through the Great Depression, a world war, two nuclear bombs, and the civil rights movement, the material you could hear on the radio and see on TV stayed pretty much the same. Tame. Then, in 1971, along came All in the Family.

That groundbreaking show became a huge turning point in our media and our culture. Every week, All in the Family broke another taboo. It talked about impotence, molestation, constipation. It flushed a toilet! And the ratings went through the roof. It became the number-one-rated show for five years straight—a feat never surpassed, though the Cosby Show did, later, tie it (a can of worms we will leave unopened for the rest of our days).

Naturally, broadcasters said, “Number one for five years? Let's make five thousand of these!” So they started throwing in all the sex and grit and bodily functions they could. As did TV news. And let's not forget that, that being the 1970s, plenty of social upheaving was going on outside the boob tube, too.

In 1981, things changed dramatically again, as cable TV came into its own and started segmenting the hitherto mass audience. You wanted to watch women writhing in leather bustiers? You had your MTV. Or your Playboy Channel. Or your HBO. Whatever. You had a lot of channels. You wanted weepy stories of women with unusual diseases? You had Lifetime. And if you wanted news all day long? You turned on CNN.

Let's stop here and think about what that meant: an entire twenty-four hours to fill with news. Every day. How on earth could you keep people watching the same channel for hours on end?

There is one proven and tested way. Pick a sensational tabloid story and treat it seriously, earnestly, gravely, as if all you really want is the best for your viewers. Repeatedly broadcast the same heart-wrenching footage, looping back again and again, right after this message, to create a sense of the most compelling, continuing, crying-shame story ever to dominate a news cycle. A story so gripping, viewers would feel almost guilty turning it off. A story you could drag out (like this paragraph) for hours and hours, days and days, even if you had only tiny crumbs of info to add. And to date, the best story anyone has ever found turns out to be … a missing child.

“Missing kids are everybody's fear,” said a cable exec I can't quote by name because she's still in the biz (even though she's not happy about it). “Especially when there's a story with somebody who looks normal.” (Apparently “normal” = “middle- to upper-middle-class white person,” in TV executive speak.) “People really respond to that. They think, ‘That could be me.’”

The granddaddy of this programming was the 1983 two-part mini-series, Adam, based on the story of Adam Walsh, a six-year-old boy who was abducted from a Florida Sears and beheaded in 1981. It makes me sick just to type that.

The series about him—a ratings blockbuster—introduced America to Adam's dad, John Walsh, who appeared with his wife at the end of the show with photos of other missing children. Walsh became a crusader for children's safety and went on to host America's Most Wanted. He also helped found the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Quite likely you came of age eating breakfast with those kids.

“The whole milk carton phenomenon begins at this time,” says Thompson, referring to the phenom of dairies printing the photos of missing children on their cartons—without even clarifying whether the child was kidnapped by a stranger (extremely rare), taken by a divorced parent in a custody dispute (more likely), or had simply run away (also quite likely). Mornings became pretty somber as we ate our Frosted Flakes with the milk carton kids staring us in the face. In fact, it began to feel as if millions of kids were being taken, willy-nilly, across the country. And all together, this set the template for our modern-day fear of abduction.

That fear, as I'll say again and again in this book, bears no relation to reality. The statistics cited by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children itself show that the number of children kidnapped by strangers holds pretty steady over the years—about 1 in 1.5 million. Put another way, the chances of any one American child being kidnapped and killed by a stranger are almost infinitesimally small: 0.00007%. Put yet another, even better way, by British author Warwick Cairns, who wrote the book How to Live Dangerously: if you actually wanted your child to be kidnapped and held overnight by a stranger, how long would you have to keep the child outside, unattended, for this to be statistically likely to happen?

About seven hundred and fifty thousand years.

(And after the first hundred thousand years, you couldn't really consider them a “kid” anymore.)

But if we rarely heard about kidnapped children before the 1980s—with the exception of the Lindbergh baby—they have since become a staple of TV. A particular child's story that captures the public's interest can go on for months—sometimes years. Between Elizabeth Smart, Jayme Closs, and Maddie McCann, we all feel as if we “know” someone who disappeared. We've watched their home videos. We've “met” their families on TV, or seen the mini-series. And because we've heard about them so much, their stories start to seem tragic, yes, but not totally surprising. They fit perfectly into a worldview that says, “Just another example of kids getting snatched and killed.” Our brain has stored all the other stories before it, so each new one just confirms our belief that child abductions are happening all the time.

So now, when you're thinking about whether you could ever let your kids hang out by themselves in the video game department at Target—which is where we'd deposit ours, because otherwise they'd moan and groan the whole time we were trying to concentrate on various Mr. Coffee features—you automatically think about Adam Walsh snatched from the Sears. Even though that was in 1981. Even though, every day, millions of parents go shopping with their whiny kids, and the kids wander off for a while, and the parents panic and then they find them in the toy department and everyone's OK. It's hard to remember, but we should: the likelihood of something truly tragic happening is, thank God, extremely low.

Now let's look at how the folks in the TV biz work to make us feel otherwise.

“As a former TV news producer,” a dad confessed in an email to Free-Range Kids, “I can tell you that news is all about fear. Sometimes, the first criteria we used when judging a story involving children or families was, ‘Is it scary enough?’”

When the answer was “no,” that didn't necessarily kill the story. It just changed the way it was reported—and teased.

“A tease has to hit people in their heartstrings, where you know your words are going to have some impact: their personal safety, or the safety of their family,” said another former TV news producer, Thomas Dodson. “It has to grab the viewers’ attention, and you have a very short time to do it.”

So instead of saying, “If your child is under age three and you happen to have shopped at that little toy store on Elm Street where the proprietor bought some funky wooden blocks from Finland, please note that these could pose a choking hazard if your kid put several of them in his mouth at once, which he probably wouldn't, since they taste bad,” you would say (according to Dodson): “A massive recall of toys! Is something in your child's toy box on the list?”

(To which, by the way, a friend once remarked: “If something that terrible is out there, threatening my children, why the hell are they making me wait till eleven to find out?”)

TV stations love those toy recalls because that way their newscast gets to scare people (good for ratings) while also doing a public service (good for the soul). It's like exposing OSHA violations at a strip club.

Now maybe there is some point to telling us the most anguishing stories of our day, every day. But I was a reporter for twenty years, and I'm still not quite sure what that point is. Is it to warn us about a dangerous neighborhood? That's helpful, I guess. Or to remind people to look both ways when crossing the street or to drive safely? Can't overemphasize those. Is there an exploding pacifier out there that we shouldn't buy? Tell all! But, as former Tucson anchorwoman Tina Naughton Powers says, “On local news, it's ‘Good evening and welcome to death, doom, and destruction. Here's what didn't happen to you today, but it could so we'll keep you in fear!’”

So when Anderson Cooper hosts an hour-long special on missing children, as he has done, he never says, “First off, remember: this will probably never, ever, ever happen to you. In fact, it's almost exploitative that I'm even here talking about it.” No, he turns to the camera with those devastatingly earnest eyes and says, “It is every parent's nightmare.”

Then he interviews the parents who lived that nightmare—their boy rode off on his bike, never to be seen again. Then he talks to a “safety expert” who talks about kids getting snatched from their bikes and calls it “a common scenario.”

Common? It is so not common that it almost never happens. About seventy times more kids die by drowning—is that common? Four hundred times more are killed by car accidents. Four hundred for every kidnapped kid. But would you call a fatal car accident common? Tragic, yes. Common, no.

“Not a word about probability has been spoken,” notes The Science of Fear author Gardner. “Having just seen a string of horrifying examples, [one might] conclude that the chances of this crime happening are high.”

In fact, the fear of some crimes is so over the top that the newest wrinkle—actually, not so new anymore—is parents going online claiming to have just narrowly escaped having their kids snatched away.

You've probably seen a Facebook post like this one: “A man came up to us at Sam's Club and asked if the empty cart nearby was ours… . It seemed like an innocent encounter.” Innocent, that is, until the mom and kids head to Walmart and see the guy again. Can you imagine? How terrifying. He was “feverishly texting on his phone but not taking his eye off my daughter.” This, wrote the mom, could only mean one thing: “I have absolutely NO doubt that that man is a trafficker looking for young girls to steal and sell.”

And I have absolutely no doubt that she's wrong.

Why? Well, first of all, these breathless Facebook posts are so similar, they seem to have been stolen (like an innocent child!) from some Breathless Mom Template: First, mention seeing some guy or guys looking at you and your kids at Store A (or Aisle A). Then, mention the guy or guys turn up again in Store B (or Aisle B). Don't forget to mention your incredible “Spidey Sense” that these ostensible “shoppers” were up to no good. To prove it, throw in a completely normal detail as proof-positive of their nefariousness. (“He only had a few items in his cart,” “He kept glancing at his phone,” “His friend was waiting outside with the minivan's door wide open.”) Then, use the following stat, no matter where you live: “And ______ is the #2 city/state in America for sex trafficking!” (Never say it's #1. That's not believable.) Finally, congratulate yourself for, against all odds, saving your kids by either (A) bravely staring down the guy or guys, or (B) asking the store manager to walk you to your car.

These stories sometimes get hundreds of shares and comments like, “Whew! That was close!” and “Glad your mama bear instincts kicked in!” So maybe it actually seems like a good deed to forward them to your own circle of friends, as a reminder to be on the alert.

But this is not spreading helpful information. It's just spreading baseless fear. I asked crime researcher David Finkelhor, this book's best friend when it comes to debunking urban myths about crimes against kids: How many children have been stolen from their parents in public and forced into the sex trade?

He said he has heard of exactly zero. And remember: His entire job is to track crimes against children.

Why, then, do so many moms write these stories? I don't know if they truly believe that they saved their kids from traffickers, or if they just want the adulation that comes from thwarting a close call.

And in fact, it doesn't matter. What matters is to recognize that when someone is writing about a crime that, in the end, did not take place, we can't talk about it as if a crime did take place. It's like me saying, “I saved myself from the chandelier falling on my head by diving under the couch! … And also, I guess, by the fact that the chandelier didn't fall.” Did I save myself? Do I deserve comments like, “Good move!” and “Close call!”

Anyway, for some reason stories of children in peril—real or fictional, on almost any medium—are great for getting attention. And so, day after day, second after second, a vision of the world comes into our lives that is sad, scary, shocking, and totally at odds with the odds. Switch it off, press delete, or find some other way to ignore the drumbeat of doom and you'll probably be a little more at peace. A little less worried about your kids’ safety.

That may sound like I'm saying, “Ignore the awful truth and go live in your little bubble.” But I'm trying to say that that the horror-filled media is a bubble of its own—a soul-freezing, hope-crushing, shoppers-as-psychopaths place. If you lived there, you'd be dead now.

Or at least impaled on a towel hook.