Rethinking safety culture: Part 2

Why the increase in childhood anxiety?

Recently, my wife and I sat like a couple of old coots on a park bench to eat a hamburger and chips in the summer sun. As we ate, we looked on a metal and plastic playground and I was reminded that 30 years prior I had participated in a volunteer effort to build an earlier version of this playground. Unlike the current version, it had been made of pressure treated wood. A year after we built it someone, believing that the kids would gnaw on the wood and drop dead of the preservative, ordered our efforts destroyed and the plastic version to be erected. As it turns out, I am still ticked by that decision and the wasted money and effort. To provide context for my peevishness, in my youth I and a friend would play squirrels and we ate pieces of wood from a creosoted railway tie. In our minds there was “white and dark meat” just like at Christmas dinner. If you think wood preservative is nasty, try the molasses of creosote. 

The playgrounds of my youth were much less prepossessing than those of today. They consisted of a single piece of equipment known euphemistically as the “merry go round”. The merry go round consisted of a steel pole from which hung 4 chains connected to a galvanized metal hoop. The play consisted of three or four kids hanging onto the hoop and another kid would spin the hoop until the centrifugal forces of the rotating merry go round overcame the frictional forces of the gripping hands sending the owners of the hands flying airborne and horizontally until gravity brought them to a four-point landing on the pavement. So much for “merry”. If the road burn was not too painful, we would gleefully run back for more. We made ripped jeans popular long before they became an expensive icon of teenage lassitude.

In contrast to the carefree nature of my childhood, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt (The Coddling of the American Mind) have identified that anxiety and suicide ideation are increasing threats to increasingly younger kids in the United States.  These authors make a strong argument that the early childhood wiring of the brain is being truncated by overly protective parenting and the effects of the safety culture.  Further, they make the provocative argument that increases in anxiety correlate very well with access to Facebook and smart phones starting in 2007.  We might be able to infer that the suicidal thoughts come from the anxiety but where does the anxiety come from? 

For the entirety of my childhood the Doomsday Clock was stuck at two minutes before midnight.  It was generally accepted that a thermonuclear explosion could take us out at any moment.  I don’t remember feeling any anxiety related to this.  There was never any discussion with my friends about who would or would not make it into the bomb shelters.  It didn’t occur to me until much later that those who were to be excluded likely weren’t included in the membership discussions.  I suppose that might have caused some anxiety had I thought of it earlier.

Not that long ago, a well-educated young woman explained to me that she and her husband were considering not having kids because the world was so unsafe that it seemed wrong to bring new life into it.  Trying to be sensitive and non-intrusive, I suggested that her premise was wrong on the basis that it has never been safe to bring children into the world.  I likely shouldn’t have used the word “narcissism”, but it seemed to fit.  I also suggested that she repay her parents the $200,000 it cost to raise her because she likely existed for the purpose of providing grandkids. It wasn’t my most successful conversation but the young couple now have three kids so who knows.

Lukianoff and Haidt do a very good job of making their argument and tying the existence of cancel culture and campus safe spaces to the overly protective childrearing practices of their parents.  They do an equally good job of demonstrating how important unstructured and “rough and tumble” play is to the development of important neural pathways in the brain and the maturation of young children.  Their argument is not so much an appeal to less screen time as it is to the deprogramming of young lives.  “Stop with the incessant resume building!  Your three-year-old doesn’t need to be doing homework!”, is a recurring theme.  It is great news that unstructured play will solve many of the anxiety problems of today’s teens and it certainly accords with my experience.

It was common for my friends and I to leave home in the morning with a sandwich and be home for supper after spending the day tramping through the bush and doing whatever came into our minds to do. Our parents never knew where we had been and, for the most part, neither did we. Never once did I hear my mother say, “Gosh I didn’t know where you were, and I was so worried.” Mostly my homecoming was greeted with a cuff and an admonition to wash my hands.  At school recess, the most popular unstructured play was “wall fighting” in which two young knights would engage in chivalric jousting to see who could knock the other off the six-foot high and six-inch wide concrete wall by slapping at the legs of the other.  Our male teachers would routinely supervise the periodic fights that broke out on the playground.  Rather than prohibit the fights, they would ensure that the appropriate rules were followed and only step in when first blood was drawn.  As an aside, I happen to believe that gang violence has been exacerbated by not training adolescent boys to properly establish their place in the pecking order of young male society.  However, when I made this argument as a candidate for the local school board election, the room buzzed with sharply drawn breaths and one mother called me “frightening” and a “Nazi”.  I thought that was a bit over the top and might have contributed to my crushing defeat.  Come to think of it, I had a few other fabulous ideas that also didn’t rise too high towards the firmament. Who knew that the return of the strap was such a “third rail” topic?

In raising my kids, I ensured that we had regular dog-pile fights and “let’s throw the kids into the couch to see how far they will bounce” sessions.  I certainly enjoyed it and think they did too.  Our trampoline was never draped with protective netting because my son thought it would get in the way of his experiments with elasticity.  Jumping onto the trampoline from twenty-five feet up the adjacent tree, he was as curious as I about how high he would rebound.  Pretty high as it turns out.  As a teen he snowboarded off the roof of the house so that he could practice his aerial tricks.  I could talk about our much anticipated, annual mud fights that made the Braveheart battle scenes look like the teddy bear’s picnic, but you get the picture.

In discussing the phenomenon of helicopter parenting I think Lukianoff and Haidt give short shrift to two important topics.  The world has changed since my childhood and, unlike these authors, I think the increased parental fear of abduction or molestation is rational.  In his examination of antebellum American life, Alexis de Tocqueville compares the freedoms given to young, single girls in the US and France.  In America, girls had their maximum freedom before they were married, and they were expected to settle down after marriage.  In France it was the opposite.  Girls were handcuffed to chaperones prior to marriage and given freedom after marriage.  He accounted for this distinction by the fact that American males who attempted to violate the chastity of young girls were to be found hanging from gallows while there was effectively no punishment for rape in France.  I wonder if the past 50 years have moved us toward a more French approach to dealing with child molestation.  Today we cause our children to be handcuffed to chaperones because we refuse to deal suitably with their abusers.  It is just a thought.

The second topic not adequately dealt with by Lukianoff and Haidt in my view is the stabilizing influence of the mother-father relationship.  My mother died when I was 31 years old, and it was tragic, but I survived.  I was 39 years old when my father died, and the impact on me was considerably greater.  My first thought when my dad died was “Who will look after me now?”  That is a narcissistic and stupid thing for an independent 39-year-old to think.  But, having thought it, I began to wonder about the 3- or 5- or 14-year-old child who loses a parent to death or divorce or abandonment.  What kind of separation anxieties must they feel? Considering this experience, I believe that the greatest contributor to my sense of security as a child, even in the face of imminent thermonuclear annihilation, was my unwavering confidence that mom and dad would be there for me when things got out of control.  In the unlikely event that I were to discover that my parents went through patches of “let’s stick it out for the kids” then I would be eternally grateful that they did. I recognize that there are instances when parents must separate for reasons that are prudential to the kids, but exceptions generally prove the rule.  I also recognize that kids are resilient, but their resilience is in direct relation to the confidence they have that mom and dad will be there when life gets weird. 

It is terrible indictment of our modern culture that increasing numbers of kids are anxious and suicidal.  But for once it seems that the solution is well within reach.  As more parents commit to each other even if only for the sake of the kids and more dads playfight and encourage unstructured roughhousing, it seems more kids will have the confidence to say, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” And perhaps there will also be less need for “safe spaces” for anxious, twenty-year-old university students raised in a safety culture distorted by the false promises of electronic social media.