It’s scary being a parent, and I don’t just mean worrying about whether your kid is going to eat too much candy at Halloween. There are so many ways for kids to, you know … die.
Or so it seems if you ever go on the ol’ internet. Drownings, abductions and auto accidents are only average click bait these days when it comes to the premature passing of young children, compared with crazy risks I’d never thought of being afraid of until they happened to some poor family.
The idea of a child being taken by a crocodile from a beach at a resort or falling into a gorilla’s enclosure at a zoo is the stuff of nightmares. Luckily, there’s a way to avoid imagining what it would be like if it happened to your child: denial, public outrage and parental shaming.
We human beings love to think that things happen for a reason, and if a child is harmed in some horrible way, we want to assign blame. Because if we assign blame and become morally outraged enough, that means it can’t and won’t happen to us or ours. Our sense of superiority is to the point that even leaving a kid alone for a second creates a sense of moral outrage.
I suffer from an overactive sense of empathy. I can and do imagine myself in the place of parents who are witness to or even an unintentional cause of accidental injuries to their children. I’m not a live-in-fear type of guy, but I am afraid of making the big, dumb mistake that results in pain or harm coming to one of my kids.
I like to believe I wouldn’t go on a boat without everyone in my family wearing life jackets (“Mother dies in Lake Powell saving 3-year-old son”).
I hope I’d obey warnings and keep my kids away from the water in Florida. Hopefully, I’d have hands on my kid and prevent him from jumping into a gorilla’s habitat.
But what if it was my day to make a stupid mistake?
What about the dad who was working in the yard when his 8-year-old son somehow fell headfirst into a washing machine inside the house and drowned; should he have anticipated that?
My wife doesn’t like to hear about these cases. I study them. I want to know all the ways a parent can make a fatal error, hoping then that I’ll see my moment of stupidity coming and prevent it.
But I do believe that all the moral outrage out there is a sign of a seismic shift in our society. It’s frowned upon for us to leave our kids alone in a park, or for them to ride a bike alone to school, or any one of a number of activities that are now deemed dangerous and even morally reprehensible.
A study by UCI researchers published in August reveals a bit about why we’re all so outraged by behavior we used to find acceptable. The researchers, Ashley Thomas, Barbara Sarnecka and Kyle Stanford, discovered through clever testing and surveying that “the less morally acceptable a parent’s reason for leaving a child alone, the more danger people think the child is in.”
Despite the risk being the same in all cases, participants in the study thought children were in significantly greater danger when the parent left to meet a lover, for example, than when the child was left alone unintentionally. But even in a case in which the child was left alone because the mother was hit by a car while returning a shopping cart, results showed that people believe leaving the child alone was morally wrong.
In an interview about the study on npr.org, the researchers say they think “something called the availability heuristic clearly plays a role.” The more you hear about something happening, the more frequently you think it happens. We get 24/7 news coverage when a stranger abducts a child, so we think it happens a lot. Statistics show that it doesn’t, but that doesn’t stop us from being terrified of it.
One of the takeaways from the study is “don’t be so judgy when you know your judgments are being influenced by things besides actual evidence.”
The study helps make clear that we need to stop overprotecting our kids, no matter how hard that may be: “If kids are never allowed to take any risks or have any independence at all … they can’t become adults who are ready to deal with problems and navigate the world,” researcher Ashley Thomas concludes in the NPR story.
Any parent with a 30-something millennial still living at home can empathize with that frightening thought.
