Fear Raising Incompetence.

I have repeatedly talked about fear on this blog. I have talked about wishing to be courageous in my own decisions, about the foolishness of letting our decisions be made through irrational fear. I've mentioned such things as white people crossing the city limits into Detroit locking their car doors, and people not going to Mexico (a country of three quarters of a million miles) because of there being dangerous parts to Mexico.

My latest example is a facebook post that went as follows,

"This woman came into my bar 20 mins ago w/her 6 yr old son, gave him $3 for food & left him here. Told him to walk back down the block & find her when he's done."

This was described repeatedly by different people as abuse, neglect. People suggested calling the cops, that the child should be taken from her, and that the mother should be punched in the face. The"abuse" happened at 2pm on a Saturday at this bar in Ann Arbor, MI, a leafy collegiate idyll. The block that the boy would have to walk is 50 yards with no street crossings to Main Street, made famous by Bob Seger.

Now, I walked to and from my primary school by myself in England, about half a mile each way, past a train station and across the High Street, returning to a house with no parents. I am sure I was doing this at six years old. I can remember when my school was over the masses of school children not entering a line of SUV's but walking home from school. On the weekends I would walk to the local park, Bushy Park, and spend hours playing in the park alone . Apparently, according to a pretty standard group of American people I was abused, neglected and should have been taken away from my mother, who just so happens to have been a teacher.

So, why is leaving a six year old to eat some food by themselves in a restaurant and then walk along a sidewalk viewed as abuse and neglect? The most common worry was that they were left with strangers, who might abduct them. So let's look at this rationally. There are 75 million children in the USA and 115 of them are abducted by non-family members. Each year in the USA a child has a .000153% chance of being abducted by a stranger. You have two hundred times that probability of being killed by lightning this year. Children are in more danger from the sky than from strangers.

Now, this is the situation in general, but what we have is a downtown restaurant on a Saturday afternoon. The waitstaff knows who the mother is. Can you imagine what would be the reaction in any restaurant if a stranger tried to take a child away? Those who wish to abduct children don't wait on busy streets in the afternoon, or in upscale bars, they take them from playgrounds and schools and hospitals. The child was in far, far more danger being put in a safety seat and driven to the area than he ever was in a restaurant or walking down the street. Several times more children a year in safety seats are killed in car accidents than are abducted by strangers.

So, we have a totally ridiculous and irrational fear. Why is it so acceptable? What are the consequences of the prevalence of this irrational fear of strangers? It is acceptable in the same way that spending $100 million per person killed in 9/11 to prevent future terrorism attacks is acceptable but paying $100,000 per person a decade to provide health care to the uninsured is not acceptable. Terrorism is scarier than disease because it is unpredictable, sudden, happens to almost nobody and is intended by others. Abduction is scarier than car accidents because it is unpredictable, sudden, happens to almost nobody and is intended by others.

Yes, if something is the result of the harmful actions of others but never happens it is scarier than an accident that happens often.

What are the consequences of acting as though if you leave your child around strangers bad things will happen? It means that your child will consider strangers dangerous. What is the best thing for a child in danger to do? That's right, find someone to help. Why are people frightened of Muslims, Mexicans, blacks/whites, men? It's because they have been taught that people they don't know are frightening. So one of the consequences of this prevalent attitude is the inculcation of xenophobic fear in our children.

Now, I personally think this was excellent parenting. A child was taught that it is capable of doing things independently, such as paying for food, walking down a street and recognizing his mother. As children get older introducing them to situations where they take care of what they can take care of for themselves gives them the idea that they can do such things. The alternative produces the idea that the child is not capable of what they are actually capable of doing. The result of that is "children" in their twenties, living at home who can't do their own laundry, get themselves a job, fix anything, or cook their own food. What you get are children without the basic education to take care of themselves, who inaccurately think they are special and amazing, and who fear and hate difference.