Child-proofing the World

By every measure, children are doing better than ever. Why all the anxiety? And where will it end?

Nick Gillespie from the June 1997 issue

(Page 4 of 4)

The boomers are anomalous for a number of reasons besides their sheer numbers: They tend to be better-educated and wealthier than their parents, predisposing them to greater interest in safety issues. Even more important, says Fine, the boomers grew up with an ideal of home life they found themselves hard-pressed to replicate as they became parents. The 1950s and '60s, he argues, represent a "unique" period in American cultural history because the model--if not necessarily the lived reality--was a relatively isolated suburban household in which the mother was a near-constant presence during childhood. A generation later, he notes, not simply dual-worker but dual-career households had become the new model. Because our parenting ideals come largely from our own childhood experiences, the difference in circumstances leads to heightened anxieties; we are uncomfortable with what we don't know. As parents choose to devote themselves to careers, at the expense of their ideals of childhood, the urge to child-proof the world makes more and more sense.

Another element of the boomers' upbringing that predisposes them to be particularly anxious about their children is what psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey has called the "malignant effect" of Freudian psychoanalytic theory, particularly its emphasis on how early childhood experiences irrevocably shape (or warp) an individual. "I doubt there's been a time in history where there has been the obsession with child rearing that we have now," says Torrey. "Especially from the World War II era on, parents have had an inordinate fear that any little thing they do may permanently misshape their child's psyche." This fear is particularly intense in the boomers, the first generation fully raised under such a supposition.

In his 1992 book, Freudian Fraud: The Malignant Effect of Freud's Theory on American Thought and Culture, Torrey attributes this fear in large part to Benjamin Spock's Baby and Child Care. Spock, writes Torrey, "did more than any single individual to disseminate the theory of Sigmund Freud in America." Through the sale of over 40 million copies of his baby book and his writings in popular magazines, says Torrey, "Spock persuaded two generations of American mothers that nursing, weaning, tickling, playing, toilet training, and other activities inherent in childhood are not the innocuous behaviors they appear to be on first glance. Such activities, according to Spock, are psychic minefields that determine a child's lifelong personality traits, and maternal missteps on such terrain can result in disabling and irrevocable oral, anal, or Oedipal scars. Throughout his career Spock was deeply imbued with Freudian doctrine and in a 1989 interview he acknowledged, 'I'm still basically a Freudian.'"

Spock's vision of parenting, says Torrey, sends a disabling double message. Even as Baby and Child Care famously exhorts the parent to "Trust yourself--you know more than you think," it suggests that any parental misstep will have long-lasting, disastrous effects. The rise of such Freudian-inflected thought has, says Torrey, "made parenting much more difficult because of the generally accepted theory that--to exaggerate it a little bit--if you look at your child cross-eyed, your child will never be the same again."

Where Freudian-inflected thought stresses how "fragile" the psyche is, Torrey argues for its resiliency. Where Freudian-inflected thought stresses the parental role in personality development, Torrey makes a case for inborn temperament and a wider-ranging array of influences. An appendix to Freudian Fraud summarizes more than two dozen studies that attempt to substantiate a link between toilet training and personality traits and finds none (Freud hypothesized that botched toilet training leads to a number of possible "problems," ranging from homosexual orientation to paranoia to a fixation with order). Twin and adoption studies, says Torrey, suggest that "parents have much less effect on their children than we have been led to believe--or would like to believe."

Despite their lack of descriptive or predictive powers--Torrey notes that "except for grossly aberrant events, there is no evidence that the normal developmental events of childhood shape personality traits to any significant degree"--Freudian ideas have become deeply embedded into our culture, "integrated in a very general way." Indeed, we can read much of contemporary popular discourse on children as a sort of mass merchandising of Freudian theory: Since one incident--a bike accident, smoking a joint, a violent TV show--can have such deleterious effects on long-term development, we must be ever-vigilant. As with the young Buddha, "all sorrowful sights, all misery, and all knowledge of misery" must be avoided: The stakes are simply too high.

So, what if the concern for children today is less the product of actual threats and dangers and more an artifact of various unarticulated social forces? What if we are mistaking the inherent difficulties of parenting and childhood for an unprecedented assault upon all that is good, decent, and optimistic in the world? Where's the harm in waging total war on every possible risk facing children, real or imagined? After all, as a society, we are relatively rich, with the time and the energy to devote to making life safer for our charges.

One thing to recognize is that the law of unintended consequences is not repealed when it comes to kids; there is often a huge chasm yawning between stated goals and actual effects. Perhaps, then, it is not at all surprising that most experts agree that removing asbestos exposes students to higher risks than simply covering the stuff up. Or that past-month drug use among adolescents, still well below levels of 20 years ago, began its increase only after a decade of DARE and "Just Say No!" Or that the added cost of a plane ticket for an infant--representing a 50 percent fare increase for a family of three--might cause some parents to travel by car, a far riskier alternative to flying. Or that "soft" baseballs recommended by the Consumer Product Safety Commission actually weigh more than traditional hardballs, and according to sports doctors, apparently increase injuries. (See "Play [Regulated] Ball!," December 1996.)

Children--perhaps more than any other group--represent the no man's land where the private sphere blurs into the public, with all the attendant problems centralized decision making brings. Examples such as car seats and bike helmets suggest that what may be a good idea in the former is likely to become a mandate in the latter. Examples such as airbags and separate seats for infants on airplanes suggest that this is not always such a good thing. When it comes to setting policy, activists routinely use children as hostages, figuratively holding a gun to their temples and proclaiming that if some demand is not met, the kids will get it. It is hard to see how the shifting of more and more parental responsibilities--and costs--onto society at large will increase responsible behavior at any level.

At some point, the rate of return runs into the negatives in cultural terms, as well. What sort of message, we might ask, borrowing a favorite phrase of child advocates, does it send to paint the world in the most horrific terms possible, to see danger and disorder lurking everywhere? Do we best prepare our children for responsible, engaged lives by seeking to child-proof the world? What are the costs (to adults and minors alike) of thinking of our children as little Buddhas who must at all costs be prevented from living in the world they will one day inherit? Will kids imbibe such an ethos and respond by shrinking from the world in all its dangers and opportunities alike, seeking first and foremost to avoid the confrontations, negotiations, and possibilities entailed by a robust life? Or will they rebel against overprotection and take more and more unmeasured risks? Perhaps a harbinger of the second response is the rising popularity of extreme sports and increases in teen smoking (still far below 1980 levels). Whatever happens, it seems likely that extremity will breed extremity.

The Buddha's story may be instructive here, too: Despite his father's desires, he insists on seeing the world beyond the palace walls. The king finally relents, but secretly orders his servants and subjects to spruce up the tour route, to hide poor people, sick people, and old people, to create a scene bereft of physical decay or human misery. The attempt fails and the Buddha forsakes his father's world, first overindulging in all the pleasures of the flesh and then renouncing the body altogether and embracing rigorous asceticism. The legend has it, of course, that the Buddha found enlightenment through the latter route, but there is little reason to believe that the way we talk about our own children will lead to a similarly happy ending.