I'm a terrible flyer. Not a nervous flyer, a bloody awful one. I hold my breath and say my prayers during take-off then I sweat at the slightest bit of turbulence. At the most miniscule change of noise or lighting I will check that every single steward shows no signs of concern. In my mind, of course, I'm seeing one of those high-profile, tragic airline crashes happening to me. Then, when the suffering is over and I'm back on firm ground, I happily engage in road travel in Asia, where my statistical chances of meeting sudden death are far higher.
You know where I'm going with this, but if you're a parent without a phobia of flying, you too may getting your sense of risk equally confused when it comes to childcare.
The video you see on the right is a typical example of scaremongering disguised as safety advice. It plays on our correct fear that we cannot control every aspect of our child's behaviour and emits a subliminal message that whatever you do, your child's sense of wonder and trust cannot be erased. Wonder and trust means innocence, innocence means danger, danger is bad. You must stop it.
Closely related to these viral "Fear this!" clips are the guilt messages that circulate social media like clockwork. Often they are simple hoaxes but equally often they're simply a twisted truth designed to distort the proportion of risk and touch on guilt that we may already feel, such as spending too much time on social media, to the neglect of our offspring.
Let's get a few things clear at this point. Yes, there are risks to our children that we can reduce with due diligence. Yes, of course it's right to worry about abduction. The nightmare scenario of losing a child is healthy to some degree because it reflects our deep need to protect and nurture and I feel it as much as the next parent. But, like my fear of air travel, our sense of terror can be misguided.
The massive, massive majority of the public are not paedophiles waiting to snatch our beloved kids away. The man smiling at your child on the high street is thinking nothing more than how adorable he looks. The lady at the swimming baths taking a photo of two children is recording her own happy memory for Facebook, nothing more. (This is what I explained to the lifeguard at our hotel pool last month after he thunderously blew his whistle, jumped from his ladder and pointed a finger in my wife's face as she took a snap of our own kids.) Best of all, when a toddler is lost in the shopping mall, she is overwhelmingly likely to find an adult to care for her until her parents arrive.
At least, that should be the case unless said adult is too terrified of being accused of sinister motives, thanks to our culture of fear that we are so hell-bent on spreading across social media. When we fall over ourselves in desperation to spread hoaxes, issue warnings and join groups that threaten death on anyone who messes with our kids (which is really just another expression of our fears and maternal instincts), what we're really doing is expressing our own uncertainty about communities, towns and cities that are seeing their demographics changing faster than ever before, thanks to politicians who seek to gain from it.
Fact: drowning is as big a risk to your baby as anything else. God forbid, should anything sinister happen to your child, it's likely to be someone you know responsible. Most of all, your driving is probably the single most controllable variable affecting your offspring's safety, alongside water safety. This is one case where the statistics really don't lie.
So why then, do we not spend more time disseminating information on swimming pool accidents or the risks of incorrectly fitted booster seats to each other? (Although placing your precious one on in the back seat is a far greater contributor to crash survival than fitting a child seat). It's almost certainly related to our sense of control. When we drive with our hands on the wheel, we feel totally empowered. When we watch our child swim, we sense we can intervene at any time. The moment we stop to indulge our habits like chatting or checking our phone messages in either of these situations is when the worse could happen, but we don't register that risk in our thoughts. Habits can be killers, too.
That's not to say threats don't evolve. Communities in certain areas of England can be forgiven if its people respond to alarming sexual abuse and child grooming scandals by being overcautious. The work of online paedophile hunters has highlighted the growing danger of internet child grooming and I dread the day my kids are old enough and stubborn enough to want total internet privacy. The technology is still young enough that norms, consequences and risk levels are still hard to accurately assess. However the principle remains the same: we have to find balance.
Consciously seeking to shut our toddlers away from the wonders of the world and contributing to the sense of a society that treats everyone like a child-killer until proven otherwise could be as damaging to younger generations as anything else. How we deal with that and work back towards any sense of trust and unity in our western communities is going to be much,much harder than sharing a few warnings on Facebook.
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