Bob Livingstone, LCSW

Used by permission from The Therapist

July/August 2007

Take a look at present-day suburbia— what do you see? Neighborhoods filled with children, most of them playing indoors, usually by themselves. When they do engage in activities outside the home—soccer, baseball, martial arts, music lessons—today’s suburban children get shuttled from the house to the playing field or studio by their moms or dads in the family car. They return home the same way, once they have finished their structured activities, and after eating dinner with their parents, they do their homework, often in front of a computer, and then go to bed.

They mingle very little on a daily basis with their neighbors’ children, and their tight after-school schedules allow little time for spontaneous play.

Free time remains at a premium for parents, too, in modern suburban families, although they may ordinarily take a moment before or after dinner to catch a glimpse of the evening news. And the broadcast will routinely lead with another disturbing story of a missing child or headline the latest release of a sexual predator from state prison: Is he in your neighborhood?

Good news may not sell newspapers, or news stations, but local and cable television news programs often seem in their reporting to prey unduly on any parents’ worst fear. That fear, that their child may come to harm at the hands of a deviate, prompts parents to schedule, structure,and supervise their children’s activities all the more intensely. Almost nightly, local newscasts stoke parental anxiety. But, is this increasingly elevated level of anxiety perpetrated largely by the media, justified?

Brooks Jackson, director of FactCheck. org, thinks not: “My recollection is that the chances of a child being abducted and killed by other than a family member (such as a divorced parent) are less than being struck and killed by lightning. These tragedies are much more rare than people realize.”

Richard J. Estes, a University of Pennsylvania professor of social work and the author of The Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children Despite popular notions to the contrary, strangers commit fewer than four percent of all the sexual ”

Abduction of children by strangers is in fact statistically uncommon, as a September 1, 1995, In 1985 the Denver Post won a Pulitzer prize for its series of articles revealing the truth about the child abduction scare. Reporters Diana Griego and Louis Kilzer found that 95 percent of missing children are runaways (most of whom come home before three days have passed) and that most ”

The spring 1998 edition of The Future of Children, published by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, similarly points out: “Many more children run away or are asked to leave their homes than are abducted, and very few children are abducted by strangers—only 200 to 300 stranger kidnappings are reported each year.” While “the thought of your child being kidnapped, raped, and murdered may be horrible,” writes James Alan Fox in the Boston Globe article “The Bogeyman in the Green Car” on July 21, 2002, “in statistical terms it is hardly one of the greatest perils that children face on a daily basis—even if and when a serial predator is operating in the neighborhood. consider these facts,” Fox continues:

• A child is more likely to be killed in a fall off a bicycle than by being grabbed off the bike by a rapist/murderer. Still, parents are more apt to keep their children at home in“protective custody” than to enforce the use of helmets.

l• More children are killed each year by playing with their parents’ loaded guns. Yet, parents are more apt these days to lock up their children for safekeeping than to lock up their firearms.

• With 50 million children in the United States under the age of 13, the likelihood of anyone child ending up like Samantha Runnion (a five year old girl who was kidnapped,raped, and killed by a stranger) is literally one in a million. Despite the facts and regardless of the literature and statistics, reason retreats in the face of fear. Parents plead that kids need special protection, and more of it, because the crime rate has continued to rise over the years. Adults commonly claim that the danger of a child or anyone else being physically assaulted is much more likely today than it was when they were kids. But does the crime rate in the past decade support the claim? Actually, according to a recent FBI report, since 1965 major crime in the U.S. has been on the decline. Associated Press writer Michael J.

Sniffen reported in an article on October 17, 2005:

• The nation’s murder rate declined last year for the first time in four years, dropping to the lowest level in 40 years. Experts said local rather than national trends were mostly responsible.

• The rates for all seven major crimes were down and the overall violent crime rate reached a 30-year low, according to the FBI’s annual compilation of crimes reported to the police.

• There were 391 fewer murders nationwide in 2004 than the year before. The total of 16,137 calculates out to 5.5 murders for every 100,000 people.

• That’s a decline of 3.3 percent from 2003 and the lowest murder rate since 1965, when it was 5.1 percent.

• The four major violent crimes—murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assaults—declined from 1.38 million in 2003 to 1.37 million in 2004. That produced a 2.2 percent drop in the violent crime rate to 465.5 crimes per 100,000 people—the lowest since 1974, when it was 461.1.

Yet crimes against children remain a major news staple. The sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests may, to a degree, have warranted the media rage in recent years, but it did not indicate a general trend. “After uncovering a criminal conspiracy in the highest levels of the U.S.

Catholic church involving the sexual abuse of children,” reads a 2002 report from the media watchdog agency Accuracy in Media, “the media is now reassuring the American people that abductions and murders of children by child predators are rare.” Rare they may be, but it is the abductions and murders themselves— not the reassurances that they are rare— that make headlines.

“The abductions and searches have become a staple of cable television news, which may give the public the impression that there has been a sudden rash of abductions and murders of children,” writes William Booth in the Washington Post. “But according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, there appears to be no significant increase in the number of child abductions.” And Newsweek advises: “Terrified parents, take comfort: there is no epidemic.

Wrenching as these cases are to the victims’ families and friends, there has been no real increase from the 200 to 300 kidnappings each year by strangers that a 1990 federally funded study found.”

However, conclusively, the facts may argue that the chance of a child being abducted by a stranger is less than slim, they do not abate parents’ fears. Some parents, of course, may be unaware of documented facts or unconvinced by statistics. Others may not be reassured by the evidence that is continually being undercut by poignant stories about missing children on the evening news. The media feeds parental fears, and as it grows, so does the impulse to ensure the safety of children through more structure, more supervision, and more isolation. The parents’ impulse is misguided. For their children, the consequences are counterproductive and may prove to be hurtful.

Children rarely play outside unless they are participating in a structured, adult-supervised activity. Parental fears over children’s safety frequently translate into over-protection. So it is that many suburban parents simply do not allow their children to play outdoors, alone or with other children, unless an adult is present. This restriction on childrens’ playtime can adversely affect how they perceive the world outside the home. It becomes a frightening place, whereas the home, in contrast, represents a safe haven. Children internalize their parents’ fear, which may then manifest in numerous nonconstructive ways—in a lack of confidence, for instance, or in low self-esteem, a resistance to entering new situations, or the avoidance of social interaction.

Furthermore, because a house or apartment affords no opportunity for rigorous physical activity, it hinders the expenditure of children’s considerable energy and colors their moods. They become “difficult.” Pent-up energy may erupt in angry outbursts, whereas long hours at sedentary pursuits, most likely in front of a computer, may produce lethargy.

The limitation of children’s free time to solitary activities inside the home also prevents them from developing important survival skills, like thinking on their feet and responding capably in unexpected circumstances. Children who have never had the opportunity to experience a world beyond the confines of the home—a chance to interact in a sphere unsupervised by adults—will find themselves without the necessary intellectual and emotional resources. Parents can, of course, instruct their kids on what to do in such situations, but nothing can take the place of real life experience in learning fundamental survival skills.

Children spend increasingly more time indoors engaged in sedentary activities. Watching television, playing computer video games, and Instant-Messaging—sedentary and solitary pastimes—have become as popular with the children who engage in them as they are with parents. Indoor activities allay parents’ fears, as they do, after all, keep children safe from the reach of predators and abductors. No doubt, such activities can benefit a child, but in excess, effects can be negative—to a shocking degree.

As children in the American suburbs have become more sedentary, it is not surprising that obesity has reached epidemic proportions among children. According to the American Obesity Association, “Approximately 30.3 percent of children (ages 6 to 11) are overweight and 15.3 percent are obese. For adolescents (ages 12 to 19), 30.4 percent are overweight and 15.5 percent are obese.” While television may offer educational programming, as well as entertainment tailored for children, it also and far more frequently affords them opportunities to view violence on screen. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) finds that “kids in the United States who view violent events, such as a kidnapping or murder, are also more likely to believe that the world is scary and that something bad will happen to them.” Television, then, can compound to an irrational and harmful degree, the parental fears that children may have already internalized.

Violence on television also provides objects for those fears, and in objectification lies aggression, hate, bigotry, and rage. AAP “research also indicates that TV consistently reinforces gender-role and racial stereotypes. Studies show that TV viewing may lead to more aggressive behavior, less physical activity, altered body image, and increased use of drugs and alcohol.”

Of course, violence also characterizes many video games, which in virtual reality enable the child to participate as a virtual player in virtual mayhem. Again, the effects on the child can be disturbingly (and not virtually) negative. In “The Impact of Home Computer Use on Children’s Activities and Development,” an article by Kaveri Subrahmanyam, Robert E. Kraut, Patricia M. Greenfield, and Elisheva F. Gross in the Fall/Winter 2000 edition of The Future of Children Journal, points to “recent survey data showing that increased use of the Internet may be linked to increases in loneliness and depression.

Of most concern are the findings that playing violent computer games may increase aggressiveness and desensitize a child to suffering, and that the use of computers may blur a child’s ability to distinguish real life from simulation.” Such negatives are unlikely to lessen as computer use continues to grow among America’s younger generation. An October 23, 2005, New York Times article by Mireya Navarro, “Parents Fret That Dialing Up Interferes With Growing Up,” states: “A report on teenagers and technology released this summer by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that teenagers’ use of computers has increased significantly. More than half of teenage Internet users go online daily, up from 42 percent in 2000, the report said; 81 percent of those users play video games, up from 52 percent.”

Not only are more teens using computers to access the Internet, to play video games, and to do their homework, but they are also using them for more hours of the day. Furthermore, by multitasking they can simultaneously utilize several technologies and thus compact more content into the hours they spend at sedentary indoor play. “As new technological devices beckon—Apple iPods that can play video, for example—young people are not necessarily shedding old media,” reports Navarro. “A survey of 8- to 18-year-olds by the Kaiser Family Foundation this year found that the total amount of media content young people are exposed to each day has gone up by more than one hour over the past five years, to eight and a half hours. But because they are multitasking, young people are packing that content into an average of six and a half hours a day, including three hours watching television, nearly two hours listening to music, more than an hour on the computer outside of homework (more than double the average of 27 minutes in 1999), and just under an hour playing video games.”

Suburban America’s teens are turning into technology junkies. In my practice, I have discovered that children who daily spend several consecutive hours playing video games indeed develop an addiction to them. Moreover, when their parents finally do decide either to limit or to eliminate their children’s video game playing, the kids suffer withdrawal symptoms similar to those of drug addicts. Kids who quit the video-game habit are likely to experience increased irritability, difficulty sleeping or eating, erratic mood swings, and angry outbursts.

Another pastime increasingly popular among technologically savvy children and teens is communication on the computer by Instant-Messaging. No longer does the young suburban girl plea for her very own Princess phone (now she’d want a mobile), as Instant- Messaging has become the preferred mode for kids who want to keep up-to-the-minute with friends and acquaintances. While sending their messages in cyberspeak across cyberspace, these kids are likely multitasking and, at the same time, Googling a topic on the Internet to complete homework, as well as listening to the latest music download through headphones. The nature and the quality of such communication are worrisome. Among children, Instant-Messaging seems to be replacing both telephone conversation and face-to-face interaction, which more readily allow for immediacy and intimacy with one’s friends.

Is it possible that kids have begun to value more their connection to the e-world through their iPods, Macs, and PCs than they do their bonds to close friends? Has the instant displaced the intimate? Will the quick electronic message pass for the shared immediacy of conversation between friends?

Children rely on parents and the family car rather than public transportation to travel to and from activities outside the home. activities have become so strictly structured and tightly scheduled that parents find playing chauffeur. They drive the kids to school in the morning and pick them up in the afternoon. After school and on weekends they chauffeur the kids from activity to activity, from the soccer game or practice to the music lesson or martial arts class, dance studio or pony club. Parents assume this role, for how could a child travel more safely around town than in the family car. Suburban parents today rarely share chauffeuring duties; car pools are uncommon, and observation at the soccer field would demonstrate one child to a car to be the rule. The transport thus disallows interaction to and from the activity between the child and a peer. Rare as it is for children to actually walk to school or the soccer field, it is even rarer for them to utilize public transportation. In twenty-first century American suburbia, parents drive their kids everywhere. There are more negatives to this practice than the high cost of gas.

Parental chauffeuring leads children to take their parents for granted, and the family car is at their beck and call. Driven in comfort—and from the parents’ point of view, safely—according to their schedule’s demands, chauffeured kids fail to appreciate the time, the effort, and the money expended in getting from home to school to Little League or ballet. Having been made so totally dependent upon their parents to take them from place to place, from event to event, not surprisingly kids become resentful if a parent is not available for chauffeur duty. One fourteen year-old boy informed me that he had not played in his soccer game that week because his parents were out of town. They were not there for him, he contended; and he was angry.

Evidently neither the boy nor the parents thought of an alternative plan to get him to his game. Most suburban children do not use—or even know how to use—public transportation. They have never hopped a bus, ridden a streetcar, or traveled by subway. They have never learned suburban bus or train routes; they don’t know how to compute fares. Because they have always had mom or dad and the SUV , they have not acquired significant life skills. Taking public transportation not only familiarizes children with their town and surrounding communities, it also helps them to develop abilities in reading maps, identifying landmarks, and determining directions. Perhaps even more importantly, mastery of public transportation gives kids mobility and independence, which in turn builds confidence.

Children enjoy the company of their friends mostly on playdates arranged by their parents. Playdates became a staple of America’s suburban culture in the late 1980s or early 1990s. A playdate is a session prearranged by parents for their children, the playdate may take place at a child’s home, at a movie theater, or park. Playdates enable parents to organize a block of adult supervised time in which the kids can interact relatively freely with their friends.

In the 1980s, when the cost of living generally, and of housing especially, skyrocketed, professional men and women, many of them parents, found themselves working increasingly long hours, often into the evening or later. At this same point in our social history, television newscasts headlining crimes of violence were significantly on the rise. Unsettled, parents became hypervigilant. And playdates helped to assuage their fears. For on playdates, under adult supervision, their children could enjoy their friends without causing their parents undue anxiety over their safety.

Increasingly, playdates have become a significant way that children are able to make friends. The friends they make, however, are often determined by their parents, as it’s the parents who arrange the playdates. Parents may ask their children who they would like to include in the playdate, but after that it’s the parents who initiate the process. Children have little role in the process of organizing a playdate. They do not call their friends on the phone about an activity they might enjoy together. They do not set up the time; they do not arrange the place. They therefore fail to acquire, often until they’re well into their teens, basic social skills. They don’t learn how to work through rejection when they are told by a friend that she or he does not care to join the party or attend the event.

t learn spontaneity in play, as any freedom they experience on these adult supervised occasions is contained within a structure. One thirteen-year-old girl related to me an interaction The friend, it seems, arrived at her s unscheduled visit, she said, threw her mother totally for a loop. By whim is not the way kids play these days.

Limiting children’s play solely to the playdate eliminates two of its most essential values: spontaneity and creativity. In spontaneity lies the joy of unexpected discovery; and in creativity, the means of shaping and sustaining it. Creative play among children taps the resources of their imaginations. It enables them to build castles against boredom. It gives them wizardry. The playdate contains them in schedule, structure, predictability, and supervision.

How can we change what is happening here?

1. Remind yourself and your clients—and assure your children—that they are not in

constant danger.

2. Help parents help their children master life skills, like how to interact socially, how to tap their spontaneity, how to protect themselves, and how to get from one place to another.

3. Guide parents to expect children to take responsibility for getting themselves to and from their activities.

4. Guide parents to ensure that their town has a convenient, safe public transportation system.

5. Help parents limit or eliminate electronics as the children’s at-home pastime.

6. Guide parents to insist that children play outside every day; and encourage them to join with them in their play.

7. Guide parents to insist that children arrange their own playdates.

8. Help parents evaluate their living situations: Is it worth it to work eighty hours per week and to have little or no contact with their kids?

9. Encourage parents to get to know their neighbors and to help plan community activities.

10. Encourage parents to become a community activist to improve the families’ quality of life.

Here is how to heal your own emotional pain.