The FBI Says: Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid for Your Kids

Hi Readers: Firsts off, thanks to all of you who sent this in: The very first app the FBI is releasing to the public. It’s the “Child ID App,” allowing you to store your kid’s photo, height and weight in one easy-to-retrieve place, and to forward this info instantaneously to the authorities. It was developed, according to the FBI’s site, to put “Child Safety In Your Hands.”

After all, the site notes: “A child goes missing every 40 seconds” — that’s 800,000 kids a year. “Many never return home.”

My question: Does the FBI read its own statistics? Because I do. And from what I read, about 115 children are kidnapped by strangers each year. Of these, 50 are murdered. We live in a country of about 60,000,000 children age 15 and under. So the idea that “many” children never return home makes sense, if by “many” the FBI means 1 in over a million. And while perhaps a child goes missing once every 40 seconds (I know I went missing when I hid in the closet as a tot), one goes missing permanently, due to a stranger abduction, once a week.

Of course, even once a week is terrible. Heart stopping. No one would ever say otherwise. But by offering this app to America, the FBI is reinforcing the idea that children are in constant danger.  It feels as if the FBI has raced to fill a need that doesn’t exist while feeding a fear that’s already out of control. Maybe even at FBI headquarters.

Because as the FBI should know better than anyone, crime is DOWN since when most of us parents were kids (check out the charts toward the bottom of this link). It just doesn’t feel safer when the nation’s top crime agency is telling parents that children are disappearing, perhaps forever, all day long. That is a very scary thought, the kind that makes parents think they can’t ever let their kids out of their sight.

What is the down side to an app like this?  I mean, it IS nice to have a photo of your child available, if only so the pretzel lady at the mall can say, “Oh, your little boy is just on the other side of the kiosk!”

But the app comes with a tie to the  National Child Identification Program, which provides a physical kit to gather your child’s pictures, fingerprints, personal characteristics, and DNA “to keep with you in case of emergency.” What kind of emergency would that be?

Well, it’s not the kind when your kid is goofing around on the other side of the pretzel kiosk. It’s the kind when your kid’s body is decomposing.

Even granting that this app may indeed be helpful in some very rare, worst-case-scenarios (and not just running our law enforcement officers ragged with false alarms), turning it into just a handy-dandy thing you’d want to carry with you — the parental equivalent of a jack — makes it feel as if murdered children are as common as flat tires. The consequences of that dread are real, and I’m not just talking about obesity, diabetes and depression as we park kids at home, to be “safe.” There are other costs: Empty streets, because parents are too afraid to let their kids play. A line of cars in front of the school, because parents believe their kids aren’t safe to walk. Children never  organizing their own game of kickball, or climbing a tree, or riding their bike to a friend’s house, because the FBI is telling parents that every 40 seconds one of them will disappear.

I try not to have a knee-jerk negative reaction to safety products because I love some of them — like safety belts, and helmets. But when the product’s benefits seem slim and the societal repercussions loom large, I say: Keep a photo of your kids in your wallet and go about your day. And FBI? Get a grip. — Lenore

Children’s Sidewalk Chalk Drawing Outlawed

Hi Readers! Get a load of this — little kids in Australia have been found guilty of violating graffiti laws with their chalk drawings on a sidewalk outside a cafe. This might not be such a Free-Range issue except for this:

Mayor Ben Stennett visited the cafe yesterday as anger mounted. Almost 200 people have signed a petition to support the drawings, which [cafe owner] Ms White is happy to erase each day.

“The mayor said they would like to issue us a permit but can’t because it raises health and safety issues, in case somebody fell over a child on the footpath or into the street,” she said.

Can we PLEASE stop catastrophizing this way in every situation? If the kids are an accident waiting to happen while they draw on the sidewalk, aren’t they an accident waiting to happen while they just stand on the sidewalk, too? After all, someone could bump into them! A car could jump the curb! A dog could chase them into the street! And inside the cafe, a patron could spill boiling tea on them. Every situation can be dangerous if you think about it hard enough. Why use THAT as an excuse to curtail childhood? — L.

An Umbrella Story

Hi Readers — Here’s a little rant from Down Under, on a rainy day:

Dear Free-Range Kids: In keeping with Free-Range tradition, my two girls aged 7 and 5 walk to school. Okay, I confess, the school is at the end of our block – they don’t even have to cross a road to get there, and it’s only about 200 yards away!

Today, it was pouring with rain. While climbing in the car and doing a quick school drop-and-run might work in normal families, I have three other (younger) children, so I made the executive decision that the girls would still walk, in raincoats and carrying an umbrella.

Well, my 7 year old  stickler for the rules was distraught. “But Mummy, we’re not allowed to have umbrellas at school.”

When I asked her why on earth not, she said it was, “Because someone might get poked in the eye. Really. We’re really not allowed.”

There were two ways of looking at this rule that make it ridiculous. Firstly, someone might get poked in the eye??? Really? How about a rule that says “Put all umbrellas on your bag hooks when you arrive at school,” or, “No using umbrellas as weapons!”?

Secondly, they are making the assumption that children either do not need an umbrella to get to school in the rain (because they are driven) or that the parent who walks with them can walk the umbrella home again. No accounting for the children who walk alone. Wait – there are children who walk alone? Really? Isn’t there a rule against that?

Poor Miss 7 had to flout the rules and walk to school with her umbrella.  — Janet in Australia

Janet adds that, miraculously, all the children’s eyes remained in their sockets,

Why “Worst-Case Thinking” Gets It Wrong

Dear Readers — Oh my god, this is a BRILLIANT essay by security expert Bruce Schneier. He’s a guy who thinks a lot about terrorism, but his words will make sense to all of us who are concerned with the difference between real danger (which we’d like to guard against) and “worst-case thinking,” which over-reacts to unlikely scenarios. Listen to this Schneier-ism:

There’s a certain blindness that comes from worst-case thinking. An extension of the precautionary principle, it involves imagining the worst possible outcome and then acting as if it were a certainty. It substitutes imagination for thinking, speculation for risk analysis, and fear for reason. It fosters powerlessness and vulnerability…”

Just like people who assume if their kid goes out to play, she MAY be kidnapped, so she probably WILL be kidnapped, so why take that awful risk? That’s the kind of worst-case thinking that leads folks to believes they can never let their (soon to be preyed upon) kids out of their sight. And listen to this:

Worst-case thinking means generally bad decision making for several reasons. First, it’s only half of the cost-benefit equation. Every decision has costs and benefits, risks and rewards. By speculating about what can possibly go wrong, and then acting as if that is likely to happen, worst-case thinking focuses only on the extreme but improbable risks and does a poor job at assessing outcomes.

So true! The “cost” of a child going outside is never measured against the cost of staying in. In other words: “Why risk my sweet child’s safety?” is never countered by, “What does my child GAIN by walking to school, and playing outside, and  becoming street-smart and self-reliant,” etc. etc. And then there’s this!

Of course, not all fears are equal. Those that we tend to exaggerate are more easily justified by worst-case thinking. So terrorism fears trump privacy fears, and almost everything else; technology is hard to understand and therefore scary; nuclear weapons are worse than conventional weapons; our children need to be protected at all costs; and annihilating the planetis bad. Basically, any fear that would make a good movie plot is amenable to worst-case thinking.

And that’s the only point I disagree on. Because if a fear would make a good television plot, it works, too.

Finally, regarding our inflated sense of doom, regarding our kids (and everything else):

…worst-case thinking validates ignorance. Instead of focusing on what we know, it focuses on what we don’t know — and what we can imagine.

And then he quotes the venerable Frank Furedi, author of Paranoid Parenting (a seminal book in my house):

“Worst-case thinking encourages society to adopt fear as one of the dominant principles around which the public, the government and institutions should organize their life. It institutionalizes insecurity and fosters a mood of confusion and powerlessness. Through popularizing the belief that worst cases are normal, it incites people to feel defenseless and vulnerable to a wide range of future threats.”

Thank you to so many readers who sent this in. The essay really puts everything in focus: When we jump to the worst case scenario AND assume that because we can PICTURE it, that’s proof enough it could happen,  we are living in a nightmare.

And thank you to Bruce Schneier for helping to wake us up. — Lenore

What if you leave your child at home while you get milk and a bomber comes by?

All Gardeners are Perverts, Part I

Hi Readers — Here’s the latest “help” on the way for kids threatened by those terrifying thugs: community gardeners. In Denver, people can rent small plots on school grounds to grow what sound like “victory gardens.” But now — after 25 years of this program — suddenly anyone who plants on school property is required to undergo a criminal background check, or get out.

Said one participant, quoted by the Denver Post’s Mike McPhee, “Where  did we go so wrong that if you potentially have contact with a child you have to have a background check? ”

Where indeed? That is what Free-Range Kids examines all the time: How we came to distrust almost everyone, and fear for our children almost all the time, and discourage the very thing that keeps us all safest: community-mindedness. This gardening story is just the tip of the iceberg (lettuce). — Lenore