‘Stranger danger’ paranoia reflects a deeper fear
Timothy P. Carney
Fear is the tone of the day.
Specifically, fear of others dominates American culture. Our media, social media, and unspoken philosophy train us to see others as criminals, liars, vectors of disease, or even pathogens themselves.
Helicopter parenting is one fallout of this misanthropic fear. We subconsciously assume that millions of well-trained child abductors are spreading across the sidewalks and playgrounds of our country and that there are no good neighbors or citizens anywhere.
The New York Times this week ran a letter from a grandmother upset that her daughter and son-in-law let their 9-year-old walk home from the bus stop, a quarter-mile away.
“They live in a fairly safe suburb,” grandma admits, “but the situation seems dangerous to me. My concern is the constant traffic of gardeners, painters, and delivery people through the neighborhood who could harm her.”
This may sound ridiculous to you. Or it may sound prudent. You never know who’s out there! Or, I’d never forgive myself if something happened!
Fine, but the odds of a 9-year-old in a safe suburb being abducted or assaulted by a stranger in a six-minute walk is near zero. If you tried to eliminate all such totally-improbable-but-still-possible-and-horrific threats from your family’s lives, you would never do anything. You wouldn’t have children.
And that, I believe, is one reason for our current baby bust: fear.
First, there’s the practical matter: If you think you need to constantly supervise your child until age 12, you cannot have more than two children — if you can even have that many. Going from man-to-man to a zone is too big of a leap if you adopt the Secret Service Agent approach to parenting.
The problem goes deeper: It takes a village to raise a child, and so you have to trust your neighbors if you’re going to get the whole child-having business. We don’t trust our neighbors if we fear them. So the only things we can undertake are “zero-trust” endeavors.
Read the popular media, and you see this zero-trust, autonomy-maximizing mindset everywhere. Here’s a New York Times op-ed on how a 50/50 custody agreement and non-marriage is the optimal arrangement for parents because it’s “very tidy and businesslike.”
Here’s a Washington Post parenting columnist (who once wrote about how your “nice neighbor” is just as likely to be a serial killer) asserting flatly that neighbors who help you raise children are “imaginary.”
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And this points toward an even deeper level of fear: If you don’t think other people are good, why would you think your own child would be good? If you think humans are a net negative, why would you add to the deficit created by humankind?
The fear in grandma’s letter is, on the surface, fear of a gardener-child-abductor. I think it’s actually a manifestation of a deeper fear, and that fear’s most important consequence is our retreat from marriage and family formation.