Yet another Helicopter parent article

[Acklander]

Shoomp shoomp shoomp. Hear that?

That’s the sound of helicopter parents hovering over their children, worrying every second of the day that terrorists could strike Johnny's school or a stranger will snatch Jane from the bus stop.

Scary stuff. But it turns out most parents are worrying about all the wrong things.

"These worries that we have are so rare," says Christie Barnes, mother of four and author of The Paranoid Parents Guide. "It’s like packing a snow shovel in case it snows in Las Vegas."


Based on surveys that Barnes collected, the top five worries that parents are, in order:

Kidnapping
School snipers
Terrorists
Dangerous strangers
Drugs
But how do children really get hurt or killed?

Car accidents
Homicide (usually committed by a person who knows the child, not a stranger)
Abuse
Suicide
Drowning
Why such a big discrepancy between worries and reality? Barnes says parents fixate on rare events because they internalize horrific stories they hear on the news or from a friend without stopping to think about the odds the same thing could happen to their children.

"I’d love it if every news story came with a little warning at the bottom that said, 'Even though this is very tragic, this is 1 in 10 million, 1 in a million or 1 in 20', " says Barnes.

This unnecessary worrying, she argues, is detrimental to parents. The stress worry-wracked parents endure can harm their health and their relationships with other adults. Also, focusing on rare dangers distracts parents from the dangers that matter.

As for children, Barnes says that overprotectiveness will hurt them in the long run by making them less resilient. "We’re teaching them to be helpless," she says. "And because we’re so afraid of the world, we’re teaching them to be afraid of the world."

So, what’s a worried parent to do? Barnes has a simple prescription: helmets and seatbelts. Yup, that’s right, helmets and seatbelts. "I know it sounds boring," she says, but according to her research, making kids wear protective gear and buckle up in the car cuts kids' chances of death by 90 percent and their chances of serious injury by 78 percent.

"We think worry means that we love our kids," Barnes says. "So we’re kind of fooling ourselves to think that all this research and all this worry we’re doing is actually love… because it isn’t."

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2010/08/30/129531631/5-worries-parents-should-drop-and-5-they-should

 

[Acklander]

Maybe if enough people read articles and books like this, we can stop bringing tween age boys into the ladies room to "keep them safe" ????

 

[MushyMushy]

My sister is one of those worriers. She can imagine any number of horrific scenarios happening to her kids, and she will tell them in great detail what could happen -- and she'll especially use it to try to get them to behave. An example of that is, the kids were turning a light on and off and she went on and on about it being able to catch the house on fire, and then proceeded to tell them what a fire would do to the house and them.

My niece is 13 now, and when she was younger she used to be a pretty fearful kid and worried about all these oddball things. But now she has swung in the opposite direction and fears NOTHING. I think hearing all these constant fears from her mother has made her believe that nothing can happen.

I think moderate caution is a good thing.

 

[Acklander]

I think moderate caution is a good thing.

exactly - be aware, but still live your life.

Now, I'm older and when going through school we never had the stranger danger classes. Yes, I was aware of the occasional news report of bad things happening, but I didn't dwell on it.
My youngest sister did have the stranger danger classes when she went to elementary school so she is much more paranoid about the dangers of bad things. I wonder if, by having the class at such a young age, and being told - "BEWARE-STRANGERS POSING AS NICE PEOPLE WANT TO KIDNAP YOU!!!!" made her hyper aware of terrible things lurking around every corner. Maybe that's why the helicopter parenting is a new thing - all those kids are being parented by parents of the Stranger Danger generation

 

[DWGal210]

Oh, this article sounds JUST like one of my aunts & my cousin. This little girl (12 years old now) is terrified of everything, and her parents do nothing to dissuade these thoughts - they almost encourage her to be scared.

In particular, the line that really hit home in that article was about kids can't fend for themselves, are so sheltered, etc. This is my young cousin to a T. I fully expect her to be living at home as an adult; nit because of any valid reason but because her parents have raised her to be totally dependent on them. Not surprisingly, this is how my grandma raised my aunt....and the end result is not pretty. I do feel bad for my cousin but I fear it's too late.

 

[Hannathy]

maybe if enough people read articles and books like this, we can stop bringing tween age boys into the ladies room to "keep them safe" ????

amen!!!!!!

 

[princesspiglet]

Maybe if enough people read articles and books like this, we can stop bringing tween age boys into the ladies room to "keep them safe" ????

Amen! I am so tired of seeing this. My daughter and I were in Hersheypark this weekend and we were sitting on a bench outside of the restroom entrance. I saw a dad, mom and two boys- about 9 and 11 walk towards the door. Instead of going with their DAD- the boys went with their mom into the women's restroom! ***??? Here is my 8 year old daughter embarrassed to go into the bathroom now because there were boys older than her in there with their mothers!

Stop it people!!! They are not going to be molested in the bathroom with 30 other men in there watching!!

 

[pooh4evr]

Have any of you ever watched Penn and Teller Bull@#$% show on I think showtime- they had one on last week about stranger danger being BS - it was great- it had people from both sides and a woman whose daughter was taken an murdered - even she agrees that kids are safer now than ever before and stranger abductions are I think 1 in 5 million (# might be wrong- but still very rare) - being aware is good but being paranoid and then putting those fears onto your kids is when it goes too far. -- on a side note we saw penn Gillette at WDW last DEc- on the tea cups with his wife and kids- he is a BIG guy- really had trouble folding into the cup!

 

[lillygator]

Maybe if enough people read articles and books like this, we can stop bringing tween age boys into the ladies room to "keep them safe" ????

maybe - but if it was an area I felt uncomfortable with, my kids would still be with me.

 

[mjkacmom]

I really don't fear that my children will be abducted - they walk to school, play in the neighborhood, my 2 oldest can go anywhere in town alone. My fears are the house catching on fire, car accidents, my kids getting hit by cars, my youngest deciding to jump off of the roof (this kid has little impulse control). My boys go into the men's room.

Okay, ETA, everyone has irrational fears - I try to avoid escalators with my kids, and they make fun of me.

 

[FireDancer]

Based on surveys that Barnes collected, the top five worries that parents are, in order:

Kidnapping
School snipers
Terrorists
Dangerous strangers
Drugs

But how do children really get hurt or killed?

Car accidents
Homicide (usually committed by a person who knows the child, not a stranger)
Abuse
Suicide
Drowning

This is the part that stood out for me. People are so worried about the rare things that might happen they ignore the more likely problems. I remember when we were kids we hears about "stranger danger" when in reality the real danger was from people we knew. It is all happening again with the Internet. People concentrate on the wrong things and it isn't all that hard to know the real dangers if they keep up with what is going on in technology.

This isn't only limited to parenting. Look how many people will drive clear across the country because they are scared to fly when in reality driving is much more likely to result in an accident then flying.

 

[Acklander]

This isn't only limited to parenting. Look how many people will drive clear across the country because they are scared to fly when in reality driving is much more likely to result in an accident then flying.

That's because the plane crash will get much more airtime on the news than the car crash. Even an emergency landing where no one was hurt would make it on the news before a car crash.
If a kid is kidnapped by a stranger it will make national news, but if he falls off his bike and crack his head open, it proabably wouldn't get more than a slight mention in the local papers.

 

[krcit]

I know so many people like this. They won't let their 12 year old stay home alone for an hour but then they are riding their bikes with no helmets

 

[DWGal210]

I know so many people like this. They won't let their 12 year old stay home alone for an hour but then they are riding their bikes with no helmets

I hear ya! I meant to post earlier - the same aunt & uncle that smother their kids also don't make them wear seatbelts in the car. . WTH??? Makes no sense to me.

 

[Magpie]

I really don't fear that my children will be abducted - they walk to school, play in the neighborhood, my 2 oldest can go anywhere in town alone. My fears are the house catching on fire, car accidents, my kids getting hit by cars, my youngest deciding to jump off of the roof (this kid has little impulse control). My boys go into the men's room.

Okay, ETA, everyone has irrational fears - I try to avoid escalators with my kids, and they make fun of me.

Omigosh - escalators! Our library had one right in the middle of the main floor. It only goes up - in order to get down, you have to take either the stairs or the elevator, both of which are in another part of the library. When my daughter was 2 and my son was a baby in a stroller, I looked away for an instant and there she was - riding up the escalator all by herself!

I didn't know what to do! Do I abandon the baby in the stroller, or do I abandon the child at the top of the escalator and take the stroller the long way around to meet her at the top? It was a BIG stroller and there was no way I was getting it up the escalator. In retrospect I could have taken the baby out of the stroller and just left the stroller at the bottom of the escalator, but I wasn't really thinking clearly. In fact, I was standing at the bottom of the escalator shouting at my toddler, "Stay there! Don't go anywhere!"

Luckily a very kind teen/young man saw my problem and dashed up the escalator, picked up my daughter and ran her back down the steps to me. My daughter thought it was the best ride she'd ever had in her life. I really had to watch her after that, because the escalator became like the magical magnet for her. At least until she tripped on one and ripped the knees out of her jeans - then she thought escalators were evil monsters who try to eat children's clothes.

 

[Ember]

Interesting. We did a parent survey in my school district about what parents fear and it came back with overwhelming numbers of parents being afraid of internet sexual predators. So we now have a whole program about internet safety that is taught at every grade level.

Only, the number of cases of something actually happening because kids have met someone on the internet is almost vanishingly small. If children are going to be sexually assaulted, it's almost always by someone the child knows and trusts. Only about 10% of sexual assaults on children is by strangers. And of that 10% only a fraction of cases are internet related. But these rare instances are so heavily publicized by the media that it's sparked a rampage of fear.

I do think we should teach children internet safety. But I'm still shocked that so many parents strongly fear something that is so unlikely to happen. I agree with the article, worry about seat-belts and helmets.

 

[punkin]

School snipers We were in the DC area during the sniper attacks. One was a few blocks from our apartment
Terrorists 9/11: DD(then 9) was in school in Manhattan. We lived in LI. It was a horror that day

Maybe we've been unusually unlucky.