Children's Fears-Big and Small

Talking to Your Kids in Tough Times: How to Answer Your Child's Questions About the World We Live In
by Willow Bay

PART I

Why Parents Panic

IF YOU WERE DESIGNING a world in which it was easy to raise kids, you wouldn't pick the one we're living in here in America. If you wanted certain material advantages you'd pick this one, but if you were trying to make it easy on parents you wouldn't. When I heard Robert Evans, a clinical and organizational psychologist and director of the Human Relations Service in Wellesley, Massachusetts, say this, I felt a sense of relief. No, it's not just my imagination, being a parent is harder than it used to be. Raising children is challenging, exciting, and rewarding. It has always been that way. But these days it has become an increasingly complicated and nerve-wracking task.

It's clear parents are shaken by the world we live in-and the world our children will grow up in. We're often startled by the questions our children are posing and many of us are struggling to find the “right” answers. And it leaves me wondering: Why is this so hard? Is it a problem that's unique to this generation of parents-a sign of the times we live in? Are we missing skills that our parents had? Do we need new parenting skills for these new times?

We Live In Safe Times That Feel Scary

We are the safest nation in the world, living in the safest times in our history. Nevertheless, these safe times often feel very frightening. It doesn't seem to make sense. Statistically speaking we live longer, healthier, more protected lives than ever. Our life expectancy, for example, has risen considerably in the last decade alone. Scientific and technological breakthroughs have reduced risk in nearly every area of life. Yet, one of the consequences of the information age is that we contend with a tidal wave of information about potential danger-from scientists, the media, and even our own government. We consume a near daily media diet of warnings of danger. There are scores of new products designed to keep us safe, but also myriad product liability lawsuits to compensate us for injury. Remember the hot McDonald's coffee? Who knew we were in grave danger from the contents of a styrofoam cup? Similarly, the medical community trumpets breakthrough cures for illness even as it uncovers new diseases. Is it any wonder we're anxious?

As if all of that were not enough to keep us on edge, we have the all-too-real memories of the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history. September 11 shook this nation to its core. We now have new color-coded security alerts from the Department of Homeland Security that will warn us of the level of risk from a terrorist attack. Operation Iraqi Freedom, as brief as it was, also raised new fears that involved bioterrorism or chemical attacks. And this country, vowing never to be caught off guard again, remains on alert for additional terrorist attacks-biological, chemical, or nuclear. We are facing new threats as a nation. And we are facing new demands as parents.

New Threats for New Times

Of course each generation faces its own set of dangers and has to deal with them. I didn't do “drop and cover” drills in school as did children of the Cold War era. And while I'm sure that my parents tried to shield me from news reports about the Vietnam War, those reports came neatly packaged on the nightly news. They were not available in real time, live from the battlefield twenty-four hours a day. “Even during other wars,” says Diane Levin, author of Teaching Young Children in Violent Times: Building a Peaceable Classroom, “the media was not such a presence in family life and childhood. It was not constantly bom-barding us.”

Memories from our childhood, and the parenting we received (back in the days when it was called raising children), guide us when we raise our own children. We act on instinct shaped partly by those early memories. At times, we do as our parents did. (How many times have you said to yourself, “I can't believe I said that. I sound just like my mother!”) And at times, when we have unpleasant or unhappy memories about the parenting we received, we intentionally do just the opposite. “You use a lot of your own experience as a child that's just kind of embedded in your consciousness or subconsciousness,” Levin explains, “but here we have a whole new set of threats to our safety and the safety of our children to contend with. This is a place where parents have not had anything in their past to help them deal with it, so they don't have anything embedded in their prior experience.” In the case of some of the new twenty-first-century threats we are facing, we simply do not have the guideposts from our own childhood to show us the way.

More than a lack of guideposts, we no longer have a road map. Increasingly, in this country, we create our own path through life, no longer following the one our parents took. Evans offers this explanation: It's harder to raise children than it ever was because most of what we associate with advances in American life is actually making it harder to know how to raise kids. Most of the world lived, and still does, in settings where there are relatively few choices for a child's life, and therefore there is a high level of certainty for the adults raising him or her.

In a primitive fishing village-the men fish, the women dry fish-you have a son or daughter and you know what they have to learn. There's no choice of a career but there is high certainty of parenting. We flip that around. Any kid in America should be able to become anything and live any lifestyle-freedom is high, but consequently the predictability for an adult is very low. And the world keeps changing-just five years ago if you had a kid in college who was heading into high tech, you'd have been very happy, because you would have had no idea that the technology sector was going to crash, that the companies were going to go bust, and there'd be a 25 percent vacancy rate in the San Francisco Bay area. Similarly, just five years ago who would have imagined a toddler talking about planes crashing into buildings real planes? Or having to sign permission slips allowing your child's school to give her potassium iodide tablets in the event of nuclear fallout from a terrorist attack? Or watching a security guard search your child's backpack at a Yankee game? Just as our world is changing, so are our families, and our neighborhoods-two of the anchors we rely on as parents. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics, seven out of ten women with children under age eighteen worked outside the home in 2001. More and more parents leave children with caretakers, nannies, relatives, or in daycare. Increasingly, our neighbors do the same. “There's nobody left to do the homemaking-I don't mean that in an Ozzie and Harriet sense, I mean to make the house a home. I don't care who does it or how they do it together, but we have fewer places where that happens,” Evans notes. He adds, “We have people reinventing the wheel because nobody lives in a neighborhood anymore-even if they're fairly close to another house. We don't live in places where if I see your kid misbehaving outside my house, I go speak to you. And I can't count on you to do the same if my kid's misbehaving. So we're each left more alone to do this, more on our own. It's hard to know how to parent kids.”

Copyright © 2003 by Willow Bay

About the Author

WILLOW BAY has reported for CNN as the anchor of Moneyline News Hour, co-anchored ABC's Good Morning America/Sunday, and worked as a correspondent for ABC news and NBC's NBA Inside Stuff. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two sons.