Parents’ Fears Could Kill Their Kids

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Parents, we worry. A lot. About money, about the future, and especially about our children. The thing is, we might be worrying about the wrong things, especially when it comes to our kids.

For the past few decades, parents have packed their kids in metaphorical (bordering on literal) bubble-wrap. It’s hard to argue that bike helmets are a bad thing. Elbow pads? What’s the harm? And requiring background checks for daycare workers, teachers, coaches. Sure, who wants to be the mom whose kid suffered the worst imaginable at the hands of a convicted felon?

But these kinds of worries — and the precautions designed to assuage them — have added up over the years and the end result has been we parents — and the society that encourages all of this — are doing more harm than good.

Take this study released by Living Streets, a U.K. advocacy group that is pushing people to get out of their cars and walk. In partnership with Parentline Plus and Living Streets annual Walk to School Week, the charities’ surveyed nearly 9,000 adults (1,244 parents) and asked, among other things, what they fear most for their kids. The unsurprising answer for 60 percent of the parents was death in a road accident or abduction and murder. Barely 5 percent worried about their kids’ future health.

But here’s the punchline: parents fears are killing their kids.

While only a one in a million chance a child will be killed by a stranger there’s a one in three chance their inactivity now will bring them to an early death later. Keeping them indoors and safe, discouraging outdoor play, driving them to school every single day — all of that is contributing to a future of poor health.

Kids don’t have to walk to school to be active, naturally. But it helps. And chances are, according to this survey, your child isn’t active enough anyway. The survey showed that parents greatly underestimate the amount of activity young children need. They also greatly underestimate the amount of exercise their own kids get. In the U.K., 68 percent of boys are not getting the recommended seven hours of physical activity per week and 76 percent of the girls are not.

But here’s the problem. This fear of abduction and tendency to be overly protective of children is a couple of generations old. Growing up in the 80s, I certainly had more freedom to roam and run around unsupervised than my three kids do. Like, 100 times more. At the same time, we weren’t nearly as free as my own parents had been. And this tendency to pull back and not trust children and include a grown-up in every, single activity kids do has only compounded over the years.

And it’s no longer just a personal decision. Society — and the law, in some cases — has stepped in to tell parents that they’ll be arrested or worse for giving their kids more room to move around, more freedoms, more activity.

Lenore Skenazy was creamed two years ago when she let her son ride the subway — alone. He was 9 at the time, an experienced rider. He got home safely.

This mother dropped her kids off at the mall and left two 12-year-olds in charge. For that, she was paroled for a year (and also creamed by the public — especially other parents).

Which brings us back to how we parents are killing our kids. Through inactivity. What are we supposed to do? Sign them up for sports seven days a week? Set aside time every day to go to a park and let them run around and climb and play? Add hours on to the daily school drop-off and pick-up by actually walking with them everyday to school?

The Living Streets folks are working to change the infrastructure of how we live, getting more sidewalks, crosswalks, and hybrid transport modes (walk-and-ride bus systems, for example). And that’s what it will take. Not just a shift in what parents think the greatest risk to their kids is, but what society thinks it is.

Skenazy, who loves poking sticks in that (secured and safe-for-children) lion’s cage, has proposed parents just take back control, throw the misguided caution to the wind, and set these babies free. Last Saturday, she called for parents to drop their kids off at the park and leave them there.

And then take the subway home?

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