The Media-Parent Connection: Overplaying Fear - How It Hurts and What We Can Do About It

Take a look at present-day suburbia—what do you see? Neighborhoods filled with children, most of them playing indoors, usually by themselves. When they do engage in activities outside the home—soccer, baseball, martial arts, music lessons—today’s suburban children get shuttled from the house to the playing field or studio by their moms or dads in the family car. They return home the same way, once they have finished their structured activities, and after eating dinner with their parents, they do their homework, often in front of a computer, and then go to bed. They mingle very little on a daily basis with their neighbors’ children, and their tight after-school schedules set aside no time for spontaneous play.

Free time remains at a premium for parents, too, in modern suburban families, although they may ordinarily take a moment before or after dinner to catch a glimpse of the TV evening news. And the broadcast will routinely lead with another disturbing story of a missing child or headline the latest release of a sexual predator from state prison: Is he in your neighborhood?

Good news may not sell newspapers, or news stations, but local and cable television news programs seem often in their reporting to prey unduly on any parents’ worst fear. That fear, that a child of theirs may come to harm at the hands of a deviate stranger, in turn commonly prompts parents to schedule, structure, and supervise their children’s activities all the more intensely. Almost nightly, local newscasts stoke parental anxiety. But is this increasingly elevated level of anxiety, perpetrated largely by the media, justified?

Brooks Jackson, director of FactCheck.org, thinks not: “My recollection is that the chances of a child being abducted and killed by other than a family member (such as a divorced parent) are less than being struck and killed by lightning. These tragedies are much more rare than people realize.”

Richard J. Estes, a University of Pennsylvania professor of social work and the author of The Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, concurs: “Despite popular notions to the contrary, strangers commit fewer than four percent of all the sexual assaults against children.”

Abduction of children by strangers is in fact statistically uncommon, as a September 1, 1995, Statistical Assessment Service Report from George Mason University notes: “In 1985 the Denver Post won a Pulitzer prize for its series of articles revealing the truth about the child abduction scare. Reporters Diana Griego and Louis Kilzer found that 95% of missing children are runaways (most of who come home before three days) and that most of the rest are child custody disputes.”

The spring 1998 edition of The Future of Children, published by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, similarly points out: “Many more children run away or are asked to leave their homes than are abducted, and very few children are abducted by strangers—only 200 to 300 stranger kidnappings are reported each year.”

While “the thought of your child being kidnapped, raped, and murdered may be horrible,” writes James Alan Fox in the Boston Globe article “The Bogeyman in the Green Car” on July 21, 2002, “in statistical terms it is hardly one of the greatest perils that children face on a daily basis—even if and when a serial predator is operating in the neighborhood. Consider these facts,” Fox continues:

Despite the facts, regardless of the literature, notwithstanding the statistics, reason retreats in the face of fear. Parents plead that kids need special protection, and more of it, because the crime rate has continued to rise over the years. Adults commonly claim that the danger of a child or anyone else being physically assaulted is much more likely today than it was when they themselves were kids. But does the crime rate in the past decade support the claim?

Actually, according to a recent FBI report, major crime in the U.S. has since 1965 been overall on the decline. Associated Press writer Michael J. Sniffen reports in an October 17, 2005, article:

Yet crimes against children remain a major news staple. The sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests may to a degree have warranted the media rage it prompted in recent years, but it did not indicate a general trend. “After uncovering a criminal conspiracy in the highest levels of the U.S. Catholic church involving the sexual abuse of children,” reads a 2002 report from the media-watchdog agency Accuracy in Media, “the media are now reassuring the American people that abductions and murders of children by child predators are rare.” Rare they may be, but it is the abductions and murders themselves—not the reassurances that they are rare— that make headline news.

“The abductions and searches have become a staple of cable television news, which may give the public the impression that there has been a sudden rash of abductions and murders of children,” writes William Booth in the Washington Post. “But according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, there appears to be no significant increase in the number of child abductions.”

And Newsweek advises: “Terrified parents, take comfort: there is no epidemic. Wrenching as these cases are to the victims’ families and friends, there has been no real increase from the 200 to 300 kidnappings each year by strangers that a 1990 federally funded study found.”

However conclusively the facts may argue that the chance of a child being abducted by a stranger is less than slim, they do not abate parents’ fears. Some parents, of course, may be unaware of documented facts or unconvinced by statistics. Others may simply not be reassured by evidence that is continually being undercut by poignant stories about missing children on the evening news. The media feed parental fear, and as it grows, so does the impulse to ensure the safety of the child through more structure, more supervision, more isolation. The parents’ impulse is misguided. For their children, meanwhile, the consequences—as we shall see in a consideration of the following most common four of them—are counterproductive, and may prove to be even hurtful.
*
Children rarely play outside unless they are participating in a structured, adult-supervised activity.

Parental fears over their children’s safety frequently translate into over-protection. So it is that many suburban parents simply do not allow their children to play outdoors, alone or with other children, unless an adult is present. This restriction on children’s playtime can adversely affect how they perceive the world outside the home. It becomes a frightening place, whereas the home, in contrast, represents for them an always-safe haven. Children thus internalize their parents’ fear, which may then manifest itself in numerous nonconstructive ways—in a lack of confidence, for instance, or in low self-esteem, a resistance to entering new situations, or the avoidance of social interaction.

Furthermore, because a house or apartment affords no opportune setting for rigorous physical activity, it hinders the expenditure of children’s considerable energy and colors their moods. They become “difficult.” Pent-up energy may erupt in angry outbursts, whereas long hours at sedentary pursuits, most likely in front of a computer, may produce lethargy.

The limitation of children’s free time to solitary activities inside the home also prevents them from developing important survival skills like thinking on their feet and responding capably in unexpected circumstances. Children who have never had the opportunity to experience a world beyond the confines of the home—a chance to interact in a sphere unsupervised by adults—will find themselves without the necessary intellectual and emotional resources in the event that they should get lost or suffer an injury or face some other emergency. Parents can of course instruct their kids on what to do in such situations, but nothing can take the place of real-life experience in learning fundamental survival skills.

Children spend increasingly more time indoors engaged in sedentary activities.

Watching television, playing computer video games, Instant-Messaging—sedentary and solitary pastimes—have become as popular with the children who engage in them as they are with parents, who advocate them as alternatives to outdoor play. Indoor activities allay parents’ fears, as they do, after all, keep children safe from the reach of predators and abductors. No doubt, such activities can benefit a child, too, but in excess their effects can be negative—to a shocking degree.

As children in the American suburbs have become more and more sedentary in their pastimes, it is not surprising that obesity has reached epidemic proportions among their age group in the U.S. According to the American Obesity Association, “Approximately 30.3 percent of children (ages 6 to 11) are overweight and 15.3 percent are obese. For adolescents (ages 12 to 19), 30.4 percent are overweight and 15.5 percent are obese.”

While television may offer educational programming as well as entertainment that is tailored for children, it also and far more frequently affords them opportunities to view violence on screen. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) finds that “kids in the United States who view violent events, such as a kidnapping or murder, are also more likely to believe that the world is scary and that something bad will happen to them.” Television, then, can compound to an irrational and harmful degree the parental fears that children may have already internalized. Violence on television also provides objects for those fears, and in objectification lies aggression, hate, bigotry, and rage. AAP “research also indicates that TV consistently reinforces gender-role and racial stereotypes. Studies show that TV viewing may lead to more aggressive behavior, less physical activity, altered body image, and increased use of drugs and alcohol.”

Of course, violence also characterizes many video games, which in their virtual reality enable the child to participate as a virtual player in their virtual mayhem. Again, the effects on the child can be disturbingly (and not virtually) negative. In “The Impact of Home Computer Use on Children’s Activities and Development,” an article by Kaveri Subrahmanyam, Robert E. Kraut, Patricia M. Greenfield, and Elisheva F. Gross in the fall/winter 2000 edition of The Future of Children Journal, the authors point to “recent survey data show[ing] that increased use of the Internet may be linked to increases in loneliness and depression. Of most concern are the findings that playing violent computer games may increase aggressiveness and desensitize a child to suffering, and that the use of computers may blur a child’s ability to distinguish real life from simulation.”

Such negatives are unlikely to lessen as computer use continues to grow among America’s younger generation. An October 23, 2005, New York Times article by Mireya Navarro, “Parents Fret That Dialing Up Interferes With Growing Up,” states: “A report on teenagers and technology released this summer by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that teenagers’ use of computers has increased significantly. More than half of teenage Internet users go online daily, up from 42 percent in 2000, the report said; 81 percent of those users play video games, up from 52 percent.”

Not only are more teens using computers to access the Internet and to play video games, and to do their homework, but they are also using them for more hours of the day. Furthermore, by multitasking they can simultaneously utilize several technologies and thus compact more content into the hours they spend at their sedentary indoor play. “As new technological devices beckon—Apple recently rolled out an iPod that can play video—young people are not necessarily shedding old media,” reports Navarro. “A survey of 8- to 18-year-olds by the Kaiser Family Foundation this year found that the total amount of media content young people are exposed to each day has gone up by more than one hour over the past five years, to eight and a half hours. But because they are multitasking, young people are packing that content into an average of six and a half hours a day, including three hours watching television, nearly two hours listening to music, more than an hour on the computer outside of homework (more than double the average of 27 minutes in 1999) and just under an hour playing video games.”

Suburban America’s teens are turning into technology junkies. In my own practice, I have discovered that children who daily spend several consecutive hours playing video games indeed develop an addiction to them. Moreover, when their parents finally do decide either to limit or to eliminate their children’s video game playing, the kids suffer withdrawal symptoms similar to those of drug addicts who suddenly stop using. Kids who quit the video-game habit are likely to experience increased irritability, difficulty sleeping or eating, erratic mood swings, and angry outbursts.

Another pastime increasingly popular among technologically savvy children and teens is communication on the computer by Instant-Messaging. No longer does the young suburban girl plea for her very own Princess phone (now she’d want a mobile), as Instant-Messaging has become the preferred mode for kids who want to keep in up-to-the-minute touch with friends and acquaintances. While sending their messages in cyberspeak across cyberspace, these kids are probably multitasking and at the same time Googling a topic on the Internet to complete their homework as well as listening to the latest music download through headphones. The nature and the quality of such communication are worrisome. Among children, Instant-Messaging seems to be replacing both telephone conversation and face-to-face interaction, which more readily allow for immediacy and intimacy with one’s friends.
Is it possible that kids have begun to value more their connection to the e-world through their iPods, Macs, and PCs than they do their bonds to close friends? Has the instant displaced the intimate? Will the quick electronic message pass for the shared immediacy of conversation between friends?

Children rely on parents and the family car rather than public transportation to travel to and from activities outside the home.

Kids’ activities these days have become so strictly structured and tightly scheduled that parents find themselves daily—several times daily—playing chauffeur. They drive the kids to school in the morning and pick them up in the afternoon. After school and on weekends they chauffeur the kids from activity to activity, from the soccer game or practice to the music lesson or martial arts class or dance studio or pony club. Parents assume this role willingly, for how could a child travel more safely around town than in the family car. (Nor do suburban parents today ordinarily share chauffeuring duties; car pools are uncommon, and observation any day at, for instance, the soccer field would demonstrate one child to a car to be the apparent rule. The transport thus disallows any interaction to and from the activity between the child and a peer.)

Rare as it is for children to actually walk to school or the soccer field, it is even rarer for them to utilize public transportation. In twenty-first century American suburbia, parents drive their kids everywhere. There are more downsides to this practice than the high cost of gas.

Parental chauffeuring leads children to take for granted that their parents, and the family car, are at their beck and call. Driven in comfort—and from the parents’ point of view, safety—according to their schedule’s demands, chauffeured kids fail to appreciate the time, the effort, and the money expended in getting from home to school to Little League or ballet. Having been made so totally dependent upon their parents to take them from place to place, from event to event, not surprisingly kids become resentful if a parent is not available for chauffeur duty. One fourteen-year-old boy informed me that he had not played in his soccer game that week because his parents were out of town. They were not there for him, he contended; and he was angry. Evidently neither the boy nor the parents even thought to consider an alternative plan to get him to his game.

Like public transportation, for example. Only most suburban children do not use—or even know how to use—public transportation systems. They have never hopped a bus, ridden a streetcar, or traveled by subway. They have never learned their suburban bus or train routes; they don’t know how to figure out fares. Because they have always had their mom or dad and the SUV, they have not acquired some significant life skills. Taking public transportation not only familiarizes children with their own town and surrounding communities, it also helps them to develop ability in reading maps, identifying landmarks, and determining directions. Perhaps even more importantly, mastery of their public transportation system gives kids mobility and independence, which in turn further build their confidence in themselves.

Children enjoy the company of their friends mostly on playdates arranged by their parents.

Playdates became a staple of America’s suburban culture sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s. A play session prearranged by parents for their children, the playdate may take place at a child’s home or, not unusually, at a movie theater or park. Playdates enable parents to organize for their children a block of adult-supervised time in which the kids can interact relatively freely with their friends.

In the 1980s, when the cost of living generally, and of housing especially, skyrocketed, professional men and women, many of them also parents, found themselves working increasingly longer hours, often into the evening or later. At this same point in our social history, television newscasts headlining crimes of violence were significantly on the rise. Unsettled, parents became hypervigilant. And playdates helped to assuage their fears. For on playdates, under adult supervision, their children could enjoy their friends without causing their parents undue anxiety over their safety.

Increasingly, playdates have become the only way that children are able to make friends. The friends they make, however, are often determined by their parents, as it’s the parents who arrange the playdates. Parents may ask their children whom they would like to include in the playdate, but after that it’s the parents who initiate the process, by contacting the parents of the invitees, and who complete it when they supervise the occasion they’ve arranged. Children play no role in the process of organizing a playdate. They do not call their friends on the phone about an activity they might enjoy together. They do not set up the time; they do not arrange the place. They therefore fail to acquire, often until they’re well into their teens, some basic social skills. They don’t learn, either, how to work through rejection when they are told by a friend that she or he does not care to join the party or attend the event.
Nor do they learn spontaneity in play, as any freedom they experience on these adult-supervised occasions is contained within a structure. One thirteen-year-old girl related to me an interaction she had with a friend that was, in her words, “old school.” The friend, it seems, arrived at her house unannounced, evidently so that they could enjoy together some unplanned play. Her friend’s unscheduled visit, she said, threw her mother totally for a loop. By whim is not the way kids play these days.

Limiting children’s play solely to the playdate eliminates from play two of its most essential values: spontaneity and creativity. In spontaneity lies the joy of unexpected discovery; and in creativity, the means of shaping and sustaining it. Creative play among children taps the resources of their imaginations. It enables them to build castles and forts against boredom. It gives them wizardry. The playdate contains them in scheduling, structure, predictability, and supervision.

How can we change what is happening here?

1. Remind yourself—and assure your children—that they are not in constant danger.
2. Help your children master life skills like how to interact socially, how to tap their spontaneity, how to protect themselves, and how to get from one place to another.
3. Expect your children to take responsibility for getting themselves to and from their activities.
4. Ensure that your town has a convenient, safe public transportation system.
5. Limit or eliminate electronics as your children’s at-home pastime.
6. Insist that your children play outside every day; join with them in their play.
7. Insist that your children arrange their own playdates.
8. Evaluate your current living situation: Is it worth it to work eighty hours a week and to have little or no contact with your kids? What are your choices?
9. Get to know your neighbors and plan community activities.
10. Become a community activist to improve your family’s quality of life.

Bob Livingstone, LCSW, has been a psychotherapist in private practice for almost twenty years. He works with adults, teenagers and children who have experienced traumas such as family violence, neglect and divorce. He works with men around anger issues and adults in recovery from child abuse. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Redemption of the Shattered: A Teenager’s Healing Journey through Sandtray Therapy and the upcoming The Body-Mind-Soul Solution: Healing Emotional Pain through Exercise (Pegasus Books, Aug. 2007). For more information visit www.boblivingstone.com.

This article is scheduled to appear in an upcoming issue of The Therapist, the publication of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists (CAMFT), headquartered in San Diego, California. This article is copyrighted and has been reprinted with the permission of CAMFT. For more information regarding CAMFT, please visit www.camft.com.