I have been talking about this with some friends lately who are expecting their first child in June. [Mrs. P and I are trying…so no news there yet] but we were talking with our thirty-something friends about all the worrying going on by parents of the last couple decades, beginning I would say in the early to mid-90’s.
For a little back story I am in my 30’s so I came of age in the 80’s and I distinctly remember my mother kicking me outside every Saturday morning telling me to go play in the woods or something. I’d go round up some friends and we’d go make a fort or something in the woods. I’d get called for Lunch [sometimes] and then to come in for dinner. No problem.
Today, people have a hard time bringing their children to a playground for fear of germs or pedophiles. The Purellcompany must be doing very well fiscally, but I worry about what their message on their website telling the world - Imagine a touchable World. Huh? Touchable? To me this seems to *promote *fear and instill and attitude that everything is so full of germs if you don’t use their products your children and you will have E-coli by the end of the month.
Obviously I see nothing wrong with caring for your children’s safety. This is a given instinct that is within us all - what I wonder about is how much worrying is too much, and how much worrying is unwarrented. I’m sure this is an individual thing and all mothers are different, but for someone who does not have children yet, I notice an aweful lot of mothers taking extreme measures to protect their children. Measures that even 15 years ago were unheard of. In fact I just heard of a Bill out of MA I think where they want to institute a mandatory helmet use for sledding. :eek: Sledding? What did we do for all those years with no helmuts?
Looking at causes for this phenomenon, I blame the internet as one potential cause. With the age of internet-diagnosing and up-to-the-minute information at your fingertips I think parents are over-informed with sometimes false information. Before the advent of the internet people did not have access to the amount of information that is out there today. It seems companies and marketing firms are instilling people through ads and internet marketing with a sense of fear. Are there more germs today than in the 80’s? Are there more pedophiles today than in the 80’s? I don’t know - but there seems to be a hyper-vigilance against germs and child protection that has grown over the last decade or so.
What do you think? Should I just wait until I have a child and see how my feelings change? Or is there some merit to the supposed hypersensitivity of parents today?
Germophobia is one of my personal pet peeves, and I got my degree in microbiology, so I’m well aware of how many disgusting and horrible ways there are to die from little invisible critters getting inside you. I think part of it is the spread of information without a concomitant spread of the ability to think rationally about that information, and a big part of it is companies like Lysol and Clorox who prey upon these fears. You watch any commercial for their cleaning products, and it’s like something out of a horror movie - designed to stimulate fear and then promise to make it all better. I hate them.
I agree in general about the fear of bugs – my friend also works in micro/immunology and they told her expose the baby to everything so he gets strong. That’s why she lets the dogs lick his runny nose. :eek: But on the other hand, all it takes is one resistant bug to kill your kid, like my other friend.
And maybe pedophilia is more out in the open now and a more visible fear? Even when I was a kid (I’m 40) we didn’t discuss it and I didn’t say anything when inappropriate things happened to me. Now the topic is broached and kids are told to report.
Its not necessarily as bad as it appears from outside. Certainly there are those parents. But my kid wanders off into the woods (he is ten) for hours on end with his friends - and most of his friends are permitted to wander with him.
But the other day this exchange happened.
“Mom” says my dear son “can I go up to the park with Matt and Andy?”
“Sure.”
Five minutes later he comes back.
“Mom, can you go up to the park with us?”
“No, I’m busy, why?”
“Andy’s mom won’t let him go up to the park unless there is an adult.”
“Well, that’s Andy’s Mom’s problem then, not mine. You and Matt can decide if you’d rather go to the park or play with Andy. But I’m not babysitting her kid because she is paranoid.”
Its worse when they are really little and the first - eventually the VAST majority of parents realize that they cannot live a decent life with their kids in an insulated bubble. And by the time they are twelve, they buy their kids skateboard ramps.
I find that people in general are more fearful these days. My parents, for example, never locked the front door unless they were going away for a few days when I was a kid; later, they locked the door at night, but not during the day.
Most people I know now of my age (40s) lock their doors during the day, and some keep them locked all the time - even if they are home.
Has Toronto actually gotten more dangerous, or is it just that we have grown more paranoid? Maybe a bit of both. Same goes with kids.
I agree that people are overly worried about germs today, though I’m not certain how much of it has to do with the Internet, promotion of antibacterial products or just an obsession with sterile environments. I’m sure it has to do with a lot of factors, perhaps even the advent of “helicopter” and competitive parenting.
I also think they’re over-concerned with safety. Taking certain preventive measures (putting knives away, knowing in general where your kids are and when they might come back) is reasonable, but you can’t wrap them in bubble wrap and expect that when you release them into the big, bad world that they’ll be able to do anything for themselves.
Setting aside for a moment whether the new parental vigilance is warrented I think the main reason for it is the changes in the mass media.
When I was child in the 70s and teenager in the 80s there was no 24 hour news monster to be fed so local stories tended to remain local. Now rare events from all over the world are reported instantly to the whole world, making them seem less rare. There are more parenting magazines and websites too creating the need for content on parenting topics and “How to Keep Your Kids Safe!” from germs, bullies, cars, etc. are always going to find an eager audience.
This has created a culture where you feel like all your peers think you are a lousy parent if you don’t follow the norm and most people feel very vulnerable around the area of parenting.
One reason I am more protective than my parents were is seeing how vulnerable I was as a child. When I was five I walked almost a mile alone to school (Uphill both ways, I do not lie! And there really was snow sometimes!). By the time I was nine I was allowed to ride the bus and subway into Washington DC and go to the Smithsonian museums by myself.
There were A LOT of traffic near misses and bad judgement on my part as a kid that make my blood run cold when I see my own children in my place. There were a few creepy encounters with adults who probably had bad intentions. Nothing bad ever did happen, but I see now how many times it was just dumb luck that it didn’t.
We are better informed about rare but horrifying risks. Now that we know about them can we disregard them just because they are rare? It’s hard. I do let my 10 and 7yr old roam the neighborhood alone, but they wear bicycle helmets dammit. I worry far more about cars than pedophiles.
Phlosphr have you ever read The Fourth Turning by William Strauss and Neil Howe? Something about my impression of you as a poster makes me think you would like it. Its scope is actually much larger than cyclical fluctuations in parental protectiveness as the generations revolve, but it does have a very good theory on that.
As for its larger topic, it was published in 1996 and has proved terrifyingly prophetic.
Thank you folks, very good stuff. Carlotta I have not seen that book, however, it rings a faint bell - but I just read Joanna Macy’s Great Turning which goes into similar themes, talks about paradigm change from industrial growth society to life sustaining society. I’m going to pick up the book you recommended. Thank you!
My elderly mother at 78 is still a germophobe despite her masters in biology, and my bout with endocarditis last year didn’t help things, although amazingly enough I didn’t become paranoid. There are trillions of germs in the air around us, on every surface and on and in our bodies. There are more bacteria cells in a healthy human body than human cells by an order of magnitude.
On the gemophobe thing, I’ve become a bit more of one since our 3 year old developed a form of asthma triggered by getting the common cold.
I never even knew that could happen.
The first trip to the emergency room & subsequent week long stay in the hospital was pretty terrifying. Though the inhalers deal pretty well with it now, it means what to others is merely a sniffly nose is to our kid (and therefore us) a bit of an ordeal. Hopefully he will grow out of it.
Until you become a parent, you have no idea the terror in loving something so fragile so much. I think it has always been there, but these days people are having fewer kidsand technology has improved so that more things seem to be under a parents control. Today’s parents overuse Purel, parents of past generations made kids swallow castor oil. The boogeymen change from era to era, but the fear has always been there.
I’ve noticed a lot of conversations about “helicopter parents” here lately and I guess I don’t have a well-informed opinion, not being a parent myself. I do notice that many of my students are spoiled and do not take responsibility for their own actions, and that their parents do “hover” quite a bit. However, I am more bothered by the lack of parental supervision/involvement in a lot of ways. Some examples:
-Unsupervised children in stores and parking lots. I regularly see children riding skateboards and bikes in crowded parking lots and hanging out in stores. In our area, the residential neighborhoods are at least a few miles from the retail areas, and sidewalks are almost non-existent, so it isn’t like it’s in the zone of places a kid can hang out near the house. Generaly I’m seeing kids age 8-12. When I was a kid we walked up to the convenience store all the time, and it was no big deal, but this isn’t what I am noticing. A couple times I have even seen a manager of a store or restaurant have to call police because some kids have been left there for a long time.
-With older kids that I teach, ages about 13-15, they wander freely at all hours without ever asking permission. I had a student a few years ago get expeled for drug use and I remember talking with his distraught mother and how she said he would just get his coat and shoes on and walk out of the house, not reutrning for hours. She would ask him where he was headed and he would just say “out.” She was so upset and didn’t know what to do with him. I felt sorry in some ways but a big part of me just wanted to say “He’s the kid. You’re the parent. Act like it lady.”
-Little kids, especially during the summer, going places without an adult. I notice it most in places like the swimming pool or library. I help out at the community center sometimes and we sometimes will send home kids as young as five for not having an adult with them to go to the pool.
I think I could sum it up by saying that I see too many parents not acting like parents.
I think a lot of the worrying about germs these days also has something to do with the fact that there are fewer stay-at-home parents. So if Junior gets sick, someone has to take time off work to stay home with him, which gets expensive – especially if the bug gets passed around the family.
So it might be more of a logistical issue than out-and-out germophobia.
The funny thing is Toronto is probably a lot safer than some of the suburban retreats that they are moving out too. Violence goes in cycles, I think every other generation grows up angry for some reason.
I hate to say it tho, but the parents of those kids that your talking about are us, the ones who smoked in clubs , never wore helmets on anything less than a motorcycle, would have spent part of our lives not required to wear seat belts and would not have thought anything ill about having more than our fair of drink and then driving.
I wonder what collectively scared us so much or is there just a minority of parents who garner media attention for their pet causes and fear of scary men.
I think it shows that people don’t understand the immune system and how it works. One only has to look at polio to see the importance of germs in a child’s immune system.
When I was young I was out of the house by 8:30am in the summer, 'cause my mother FOUND stuff for us to do. There was no sitting around the house.
People have become more scared of things. When I was a kid, only two people I knew had air conditioning. And they were window units. Stores didn’t have air conditioning (well some did, for instance, 7-11 got a LOT of kids in because of their air conditioning, and of course the slurpees).
Now news departments are describing 90ºF (32º) as dangerous. Why? Because it sells and it’s interesting.
I recall once I was taking care of my friends kid. He was at the park, sitting in the mud, dumping it on his head. He was having a ball, while everyone was like “That kid is getting dirty.” I was like 'Yeah kids will due that." That is why I put him in old clothes. When he was done, I threw him in the tub - 15 minutes, who knew. But the kid had fun.
In my day we always had the kid who would “eat anything.” I never recall him gettins sick, well maybe he did, I don’t know.
We flew over our bike handlebars, skinned our knees, and we were smart enough to know Mommy’s pills taste like crap. My mother’s favourite saying “DRINK OUT OF THE HOSE.”
But then someone got sued and that is the REAL reason why things changed. The fear of lawsuits. Doctors don’t diagnose, they “suggest,” and overdiagnose to cover their butts. Who can blame them, I guess?
My parents were never really “germophobic”. I remember playing outside all day during the summer, running around the woods, riding our bikes, plauing in the dirt, etc. The only real warning we had was don’t go any farther than the end of the woods behind the house (almost 3 acres of woods), and don’t ride your bikes on the road (speed limit was 55). This was in the 1990’s. We lived in a rural area, and were the only kids in the area, so we had to make our own fun. Germs or no germs.
It drives me absolutely nuts that my son’s wife is utterly terrified, not just of the germs our granddaughter might bump into, but God-knows-what-else. Everything that goes into the child’s mouth must be tested to make sure it contains absolutely no sugar, peanut product, whole milk, chocolate, yadda, yadda, yadda. The kid has NO known food allergy, but I’m afraid she’s going to develop a bunch of 'em because her body won’t know what any of that stuff is when she’s “old enough” to have them.
As to the OP’s question: Why? We’re not just the benificiaries of the most sophisticated and successful medical professon/industry in the world, we’re the victims of it, too. We have convinced ourselves that complete safety is not only imaginable and desirable, it’s possible. We want fluids and gels to kill all germs around us, laws to end all crime and strife, and technology to remove any and all danger from daily living.
We are so personally removed from “bad shit happens” and simultanously so hyperaware every time a child disappears 1,500 miles away from us, or someone dies of samonella poisoning halfway across the country.
We also do lousy risk analysis as people. The chances your child will be abused by a stranger are really slim, but we rank it really high. And we make HUGE deals out of ‘creepy guy TALKED to my kid.’ Maybe creepy guy had evil intentions - and maybe he was just asking your kid how to get to Maple and Main and wasn’t creepy at all.
