Scaring children to death

A couple of days ago, my ten year old child's teacher asked his class to write on the recent murder of the two year old by gang members. I was horrified, and went into the school to talk to the teacher about how completely inappropriate it was for ten year olds to even be having to think about such a subject, let alone write about it. The teacher confessed that she hadn't even thought about it from that perspective.

Today I came across an article by Peggy Noonan, on We're scaring our children to death. Even though it was written for an American audience, it's also very relevant for New Zealand.

Children are both brave and fearful. They'll walk up to a stranger and say something true that a grown-up would fear to say. But they are also subject to terrors, some of them irrational, and to anxieties. They need a stable platform on which to stand. From it they will be likely to step forward into steady adulthood. Without it, they will struggle; they will be less daring in their lives because life, they know, is frightful and discouraging.

We are not giving the children of our country a stable platform. We are instead giving them a soul-shaking sense that life is unsafe, incoherent, full of random dread. And we are doing this, I think, for three reasons.

One is politics — our political views, our cultural views, so need to be expressed and are, God knows, so much more important than the peace of a child. Another is money — there's money in the sickness that is sold to us. Everyone who works at a TV network knew ratings would go up when the Cho tapes broke.

But another reason is that, for all our protestations about how sensitive we are, how interested in justice, how interested in the children, we are not. We are interested in politics. We are interested in money. We are interested in ourselves.

I'm going to give the teacher a copy of the above article after school today. I need it to sink in that it is not her job to terrify my child, and that by doing so she was doing more harm than good.

Lindsay Mitchell has a post up related to this subject, on how if babies are brought up in a stressful environment, they never recover.

[...] Sue Gerhardt, in her book Why Love Matters, blames the hormone cortisol which floods the brain of a baby exposed too often or too long to stressful situations. From then on it will either over- or under-produce cortisol whenever the child is exposed to stress. Too much is linked to depression and fearfulness; too little to emotional detachment and aggression. Study after study emphasises the importance for these children of forming emotional bonds with adults ...

Lindsay relates this back to those children in state-care, but, children in child care are just as vulnerable. I'll never forget the description given to me by a child carer of how babies coped with being put into daycare. The babies knew they weren't with their parents, so shut down emotionally. Their faces would change as they were handed over by their parents and would only reanimate when their parents came back to get them.

I had a similar experience with my first born when he was three months old. My husband and I went out for three or four hours leaving him in the care of my sister. My sister loved him and enjoyed being with him and he knew her. But as soon as I came back home, he took one look at me and burst into tears as if to say that he thought I'd abandoned him. So, I never left him with anyone again, until he was much older.

That's really what adults forget; that children are not adults, that they are still emotionally as well as physically immature. They rely on us to protect them, to make them feel safe, to make them ready for the world. If they are constantly bombarded with terrifying stories, they will feel very, very unsafe in the world. And people who feel unsafe have a need to control their environment and to control others in order to feel safe.

If we keep going in this way, our political systems will continue to be used to control everyone's lives - probably in a way that is worse than now.

So, if you have children, turn off the tv (especially the news), don't let them see the paper and be careful of what's on the radio. Whatever you do, do not, under any circumstances, even if you believe it to be true, terrify your children of what will happen because of global warming. Do not even think of showing children Al Gore's propaganda film, the Inconvenient Truth. Protect your children from the horrors being broadcast over the media. Our future and theirs, depends on it.