Our media discourages parenting by spreading baseless fear
Timothy P. Carney
Check out this headline, subhead, and lead paragraphs on People magazine’s website:
An 8-Year-Old Girl Was Kidnapped From a Wash. Mall in 2018. She Was Just Found Alive in Mexico Aranza Maria Ochoa Lopez, then 4 years old, was kidnapped on October 25, 2018, from a Vancouver, Wash., shopping mall A girl who was abducted from a Washington mall and taken to Mexico more than four years ago has been found alive, authorities announced. According to the FBI, Aranza Maria Ochoa Lopez, then 4 years old, was kidnapped on October 25, 2018, from a Vancouver, Wash., shopping mall.
The image painted here is clear: A human trafficker nabbed this child and took her to Mexico.
The truth is something different. This kidnapping was like 99% of all kidnappings in the U.S. — the kidnapper was a family member, and there was a nasty custody dispute.
In this case, the kidnapper was the child’s biological mother, who did not have custody. The mother was with Aranza on a supervised visit and fled. Nothing about that fact makes the ordeal fine for the child or the custodial parents, but it makes it a lot less scary for the average reader.
American media try to convince parents that around every single corner, a trained kidnapper is lurking, waiting to grab their child and traffic her into Mexico. This terrifies parents and convinces them that they need to behave like Secret Service agents and to see every stranger as a threat.
This is obviously destructive of neighborliness and makes parenting 100 times more work than it should be. What’s worse is that mindset affects even those parents who are more reasonable. Here’s a typical story from the LetGrow website, run by Free-Range Parenting advocate Lenore Skenazy, about a man who brought his daughter to Costco, where they sat down for lunch.
I sat her down at a table, and I made perhaps two trips to get us drinks from the soda fountain, to get napkins, and to put ketchup and mustard on the hot dog. Each time I was gone maybe 30 seconds and was 20 feet away, able to see her the entire time. She’s four and behaved nicely and stayed put at the table. When I sat down to eat with her, someone sitting behind me tapped me on the shoulder. He said something like, “You know that’s a no-no, right?” Then he let me know he works for Child Protective Services, and that what I’d done wasn’t acceptable. He tried to get me to acknowledge wrongdoing and say that I wouldn’t leave her sitting by herself again. I said something non-committal, as little as possible, and he left us alone.
I’m convinced that this paranoid mindset is fueled by scaremongering media like People magazine. They are harming children and parents alike.