So, the thing is… maybe I'm phobic of counters.
Recently, I took my girls Back-to-School clothes shopping at the mall. It was a particularly busy day there and I found myself clucking around them, trying to keep them safely under my wings. It was a losing battle and at some point, I heard the girls go racing past me, calling out my name. I called to them but didn’t leave my place in line. Suddenly, I heard my name over the loudspeaker. “Barbara Cooper, please approach the nearest salesperson. Barbara Cooper!” I wasn’t panicked. I knew my kids were only one station down from me –I could hear their little voices –but I did have a quick mental slideshow of Potential Horrible Events That Occur to Missing Children. I went to collect them. The salesclerk raised her eyebrows. “We’re VERY glad you are here.”
“Thank you so much for calling me,” I said, resisting the urge to justify my actions.
Ana looked at me, proud of herself. “We did the right thing, Mommy! When I knew we were lost, I went right to a salesclerk, like you said.”
“That was exactly the right thing to do, Ana. Thank you for taking such good care of yourself and Jane, too! I’m really proud of you for being so smart and for setting such a good example for your little sister.”
There was a split second there when I was really conscious of having a choice between scolding her for not staying with me in the first place or bolstering her self-confidence. I still don’t know that it’s the right thing to do, but I chose the latter. I think letting her see my fear every time she’s confronted with something remotely dangerous does more harm than good. Over the fourth of July, for example, my husband tried to warn the kids about potential burns from the sparklers. “They can burn at temperatures up to 450 degrees,” he said. Ana refused to even leave the house after that, even to WATCH the other kids using sparklers. Was a warning necessary? Probably. But if it makes a child so fearful that it prevents her from participating in an adventure, have we overdone it?
I’ve been thinking a lot about how hard it is to teach your children a healthy level of fear versus scaring the pants off of them because it’s been such a hard summer when it comes to missing children and my natural inclination is to keep them even closer to me. It’s just so hard to find the right balance. I’m not sure all those warnings do much good when it comes to social dangers, anyway. My kids are so LITERAL. Maybe all kids are. Oprah Winfrey once did a show about kids and strangers. She gave the Stranger Danger lesson to a bunch of kids and then had people approach them claiming to need help finding their dogs. EVERY SINGLE CHILD went with the stranger to help find the dog. Every single one. It’s like they were thinking, “Well, this guy can’t be a STRANGER. He has a lost PUPPY.”
Do you remember the Boy Scout, Brennan Hawkins, who went missing in Utah earlier this summer? He was found after four days in the wilderness, during which thousands of searchers combed the area. There’s this great picture of him where he’s grinning this big goofy grin as he leans back against his mom and sister after his rescue. He looks just like any other eleven-year-old boy.
Brennan’s story almost seemed like an antidote to the stories of missing children that didn’t end as happily –sickening stories of children being snatched from their beds by pedophiles. But his story almost had a very different ending, had the unseasonably warm weather not held or had he not been found before he was entirely dehydrated. It turned out that he was so afraid of strangers that he hid from the volunteers searching for him!
Among my friends, the consensus is that Brennan didn’t have a lot of common sense. I’d argue that the average eleven-year-old hasn’t had time to gain much common sense, especially in these days of hyper-protective parenting. Maybe that’s the big question: how do we help our kids build confidence by overcoming obstacles and difficulties if we never let them out of our sight? How do we make them fearless in a world that is full of frightening people and dangerous things?
Okay, “fearless” isn’t the right word. One night, after the Tour de France coverage (How ABOUT that Lance!), a show came on about a BASE jumper named Jeb Corliss. BASE jumpers are those people who leap off of buildings and bridges and cliffs, cheating death, more or less. Corliss, who is every parent’s worst nightmare, was diagnosed as “counterphobic” as a child after he started bringing home poisonous snakes, despite being deathly afraid of them. Counterphobia is the near-obsessive need to confront fearful experiences.
The show about Corliss made a big impact on me because there just HAS to be a way to find the middle ground between the Jeb Corlisses and the Brennan Hawkins of the world. We have to help our children to be aware of the dangers without turning them paranoid and cynical.
I honestly have no idea how to do that, though.
Seriously. I’ve been really obsessing over this issue all summer and I can’t seem to come to a conclusion. On one hand, it seems as though the statistics haven’t changed much. There have always been people who have preyed upon children and I guess there always will. But on the other hand, will it matter that the chances of a stranger abducting your child are slim if something happens and you haven’t adequately prepared him or her? Could you live with yourself?
But if we’re so focused on preventing some horrible incident at the hands of a pedophile that we create an entire generation of scared children—children so afraid of the unknown that they can’t even show themselves to rescuers searching for them –are we doing our jobs as parents? Isn’t part of our jobs to help our kids deal with both adversity and adventure, boldly and with common sense? I mean, I don’t want Jane bringing home a rattlesnake at the age of seven like Jeb Corliss but I also don’t want Ana to hide from the people who are trying to help her. There has to be some healthy level of fear between Counterphobic and Completely Phobic.
I don’t want to avoid the topic of Stranger (or Sparkler) Danger, but I also don’t want to rob my children of their courage or their innate drive for independence. I mean, at some point, I want them to go Back-to-School shopping on their own.
Of course, by then I’ll probably be Completely Phobic of what they’ll want to buy…
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(c) Barbara Cooper 2005
Barbara Cooper is the mother of Ana (7) and Jane (4.75). She lives in Austin, Texas and plans to do her OWN back-to-school shopping online.
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