Podcasts have become a staple of my morning routine. Listening makes the doldrums of my daily chores feel enlightened. Yes, I’m wiping down the toilet seat but I’m also learning about the power of expectations or listening to the unlikely story of an aging ex-con who, after reading the autobiography of a holocaust survivor, decided it was time to remove his swastika tattoo. The volume of stories keeps growing and I plan to absorb as much as I can.
Nestled between my NPR staples are a couple of parenting podcasts that I try to catch each week—Slate’s Mom & Dad are Fighting and WNYC’s The Longest Shortest Time. One or both (I can’t remember) mentioned free-range parenting recently and the illusion of danger that modern day American parents operate under.
In a recent article at Salon.com, Harvard psychology professor Dr. Steven Pinker notes that the global rates of violent crime have dropped dramatically throughout the world.
This really hit home with me.
I have been known to wax nostalgic about the days of my youth when I would pedal down my driveway in the early morning hours of a summer day and trek the mile-and-a-half distance to my best friend’s house. We’d run through the woods, ride our bikes to the gas station for candy and disappear for hours on end, until we got hungry and went to one of our homes for lunch, only to launch ourselves back into the great wild world until dinnertime. No cell phones. No helmets.
“Those were the days,” I’ll often say. “It’s a different world now.” Could I sound any more like my Grandmother?
As it turns out, I’m right. It is a different world, a safer world. This report from the Federal Bureau of Investigations places the violent crime rate in the U.S. at an all-time low. An ALL-TIME low. This is not something I would ever have guessed. I don’t watch the news but I do read it and it tells me that unthinkable crimes are happening all around me—that my kids are one moment of neglect away from abduction; that serial killers and desperate people are lurking around every corner, biding their time until I forget how much danger I am in and let my guard down; that I need to fear knocks on my door, strangers and anyone out of my close-knit circle of familiarity; that my kids need me to accompany them everywhere they go.
I could spend all day pondering how it is we got to this place as parents, this place of fear, but we all know the reason. Fear, paranoia, sensationalism—that is what we read about in our Facebook feed, on our Twitter accounts, in our newspapers, and, for those poor saps who watch 24-hour news networks (why people? WHY?), that is what you hear ALL. DAY. LONG. It’s impossible to maintain a reasonable perspective in the presence of all of that noise. My desire for a working knowledge of current events prevents me from insulating myself from the media entirely but I can sprinkle my life as a parent with some much-needed perspective and add a little slack to the rope that links me to my children.
My first slack-adding exercise happened this week when I allowed my oldest (12) to stay home with my youngest (5) while I picked up my middle child (9) from dance class. I feel compelled to justify this behavior but I’m going to squelch that urge and invite you to judge me. All that I ask is that before you render your verdict, you remind yourself of what you were doing at 12-years-old, back in the dark ages when the violent crime rate was higher than it is now and the news was delivered at 5pm, 11pm and on the front stoop each morning in the form of the newspaper.
Me? I was getting paid $1/hour to babysit children much younger than 5-years-old that were not my siblings for hours on end.
Another Gray Hair 