Weekend Kindness
Reaching Others Through Kindness

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This past year we had a missionary to the Ukraine over to our house after the Sunday service, and as we got to talking about the differences between here and there, he told me that one of the big differences is crime.  He told me how that he lets his children take the subway to and from school and other locations– by themselves.

Lenore Skenazy did the same in New York City.

In letting her son find his way home (a 45 minute adventure) with $20, a map, and the general direction, this author gave her son self confidence– the ability to feel grown-up.  She also gave herself (unknowingly, we’re lead to believe) a lot of press coverage.

Who would let their kid go on the subway alone?  Who would let the child out of their site?  Isn’t this neglect?

I’ve been thinking through this phenomenon a lot lately as I ponder my children growing up.  I sit down and talk with the older generation and I hear stories of people in my hometown  leaving their children in their baby carriages while going in to the supermarket to shop.

My dad would leave home in the morning, go off to find friends, and perhaps not return until the streetlights came on.  The baseball field was at the other end of town.  Even in my own childhood, my neighbor would leave home (perhaps telling his parents where he was going), but come over to my house to spend the day, and we’d be out bike riding until his father whistled him home at night.

Today, there’s not much time that my kids aren’t in my or my wife’s sight.

The upshot: Drive through most suburban streets and it’s as if the kids have been vacuumed up with the lawn trimmings. How did this happen? How did it become too scary to let kids be kids?

“TV,” says Trevor Butterworth, an editor at the media watchdog group stats.org. “Cable TV exists to scare the pants off you.” That’s how it gets you to stay tuned. And what is scarier than a kidnapped kid-no matter how far away?

Thanks to a steady stream of those stories, it starts to feel as if kidnappings are happening all the time, on a Schwinn near you. But they’re not, says David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire. “Crimes against kids are down to levels we haven’t seen since the early ’70s.”

“‘Stranger danger’ cases are the ones that make the big headlines,” says Corwin Ritchie, executive director of the Iowa County Attorneys Association. “But that’s not the typical child-abuse case. The typical case involves an acquaintance of the child.”

The fact is, children are 40 times more likely to die in a car accident, and that doesn’t stop us from driving them to karate. Car accidents, after all, are still considered exactly that-accidents. But we blame parents, the way we used to blame rape victims, for “letting” anything happen to their children. If tragedy ever befell our child, we wouldn’t just be heartbroken. We all know we’d be there on CNN with a pseudo- sympathetic host asking, “Why? Why did you let her scooter to her piano lesson?” And then they’d cut to a commercial to build the tension.

The only flaw I can see in this reporting is causality.  Are crimes down to levels since the early ’70s because we’re keeping our kids closer?  And if so, doesn’t this make the opposite point of the article?

In any case, the problem is that though our children may be “40 times more likely to die in a car accident”, it’s hard to justify letting them be the one statistic– the one that’s kidnapped– when you have the ability to stop it.

Somewhere in there’s a healthy balance.  We just need to find it.

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