Fear Mongering

When my wife became pregnant with our first child, like most other well-educated middle class moms-to-be, she bought the book What to Expect When You Are Expecting and later the book What to Expect The First Year (I think that is the title) and has even bought a book about the toddler years. In my perusal of the books, I came to one inescable conclusion--these books are meant to scare the hell out of mothers.

Tucked amoung all the helpful hints about how to deal with backaches, sore feat and shifting centers of gravity, came warning about various dangers of eating certain foods, partaking in some activities and the worst-case scenarios of minor ailments. Instead of actually providing information and comfort to women, I think these books add to the stress level unnecessarily. But these books are just the tip of the iceberg in the fear-mongering industry aimed at parents. John Podhoretz discusses the fear industry and how much the media perpetuates the fear.

Parents are anxious about their children, and when there is no immediate threat to their offspring, their anxieties will seek out something else to worry about. A potential threat may be more anxiety-provoking, in a way, since it causes no worrisome symptoms that can be treated.

The insidious quality of these potential threats is that the putative consequences will appear years if not decades later, like an invisible and silent ticking time bomb.

Reports about these possible hazards represent a new kind of voyeuristic bad news. It used to be said, "if it bleeds, it leads." In other words, acts of violence were news.

Now the mere threat of potential injury to children is news - because parental anxiety gives such stories exactly the kind of addictive kick that the news business desperately wants to generate in its audience.

And then there is the fact that even a skeptical and relatively new parent like me can't just dismiss these worries out of hand, the way I did before I had kids.

Look, I worry about my kids, every father does. But I don't obsess about their safety. The fact of the matter is that I was raised in an age when car seats weren't mandatory, bike helmets were unheard of (and I have a scar on my head to prove it) and that no one new about all the "dangers" now lurking about on the off chance they can possibly increase the potential for breast cancer because of some compound that may or may not have seeped into their bottles. I turned out OK as did most of my peers (although I suspect a few were dropped on their heads--but I have no proof as their parents are talking).

The fact is that scaring parents is big business. Hundreds of books and thousands of studies have comsumed billions of dollars to make parents worry about something that affects less than 1 tenth of one percent of babies. Parents are constantly bombarded by this warning and that concern. The media makes Himalayas out of soem minor report dealing with six kids in the United States "Your's Could Be Next!!!"

I find there is enough to worry about my kids jumping off their bed into the dresser or trying to be a trapeze artist on a tree branch that is far more likely to happen than being contaminated by bisphenol A. There are enough common dangers to so concerned with remote possibilities.

Worrying about all these "dangers" takes the fun out of being a dad and who wants that.