As parents we are beset by irrational fears, and at the very top of the Irrational Fear Pyramid, for many parents, is the fear that our child will be kidnapped. I cannot count the number of times I have heard this topic discussed among otherwise calm and intelligent people. A parent will often interject a half-hearted excuse along the lines of “I know this is silly to worry about, but . . . .” Whenever you hear a statement start in this way, you can ignore everything in front of “but.” It’s what follows that matters. And what follows is usually something like “I could never forgive myself if anything happened to my little boy,” or “Did you see that article in the newspaper last week about the little girl who . . . .”
This would be nothing more than a source of mild annoyance, except that irrational fear leads to real world consequences. Parents who themselves played in drainage ditches and empty lots when they were kids, far from any adult supervision, have grown up to be hyper-protective parents who don’t let their own children out of their sight. Their children suffer accordingly. Unstructured, unsupervised time alone with other children—what used to be known as playing outdoors—is one of the joys of childhood, and is crucial to a child’s physical and social development. But the fear that our child might be kidnapped, and all the other anxieties that make us hover over our children, have virtually ended unsupervised play.
It’s easy to see how we got to this state of affairs. Fear sells newspapers. The media, news outlets, and internet are quick to pick up any story of a child in jeopardy. Amber Alerts jar us out of our routines. On the exceedingly rare occasions when a child is actually kidnapped by a stranger, it is national news for days, weeks, sometimes years. We’re only human, so we immediately imagine what it would be like if the same thing were to happen to us and our children.
Statistically speaking, getting kidnapped by a stranger is about the least likely of all disasters that could befall your child. My favorite statistic on this is from Warwick Cairns, who calculated in “How to Live Dangerously” that if you were trying to get your child kidnapped by a stranger, you would have to leave the child outside and unattended for, on average, 750,000 years before a kidnapper would come by. But statistics are useless for combatting irrational fears. Statistics speak to the brain, while fear speaks to the gut, and the gut always wins.
I use kidnapping as a stand-in for all of the horrible but rare catastrophes that we fear will befall or children if we leave them unsupervised for even one minute. These include suffocating in abandoned refrigerators, falling down wells, contracting rabies, and drowning by being sucked against a swimming pool drain. My point isn’t that these never happen, it’s that the chances of it happening to your child are so slim that—again, in a purely rational world—your fear of them would never stop you from letting your child do something fun.
Happily, none of our daughters was kidnapped. This, despite our letting them walk on city streets—alone, in broad daylight, out of our sight—to the drugstore to buy candy when they were eight and six years old. The day I taught Katie to ride a bike, once she got the hang of it, I sent her riding around the block all by herself. She was five years old. Again, there was no kidnapping. Maura once got lost for about fifteen minutes when she took a wrong turn running back to our hotel room. We immediately alerted the hotel staff, and our panic meter was heading toward the red zone, when she showed up escorted by a kind-hearted staff member. She curled up on the bed and stuck her thumb in her mouth, and when I cuddled her and said “Oh, Momo, we were so worried about you,” she burst into sobs, but she was otherwise unharmed. I blush to admit that we were once half an hour late to pick up Claire at the public swimming pool when she was nine year old. By the time we got there, the pool was closed and she was waiting by the gate, unsupervised and forlorn, and yet, she was not kidnapped. Over the 23 years when we were raising our girls, there were other examples of such parental neglect, and yet, somehow, our girls were never kidnapped or molested by strangers even once.
Of all the supposedly reckless actions we took, some might say the worst was sending them wilderness canoeing with Camp Widjiwagan. This is a camp that takes kids as young as 12 into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness of Minnesota. Here’s the set up: You put them on the bus, and they drive four hours north toward the Canadian border to base camp. After a couple days of orientation and training, they head into the BWCAW in canoes, with a few other campers and one or two college-age counsellors. They're gone and out of touch for days or even weeks at a time. No roads, no cars, no electricity, no phones, no toilets, no adults (other than the college-age counsellors). If they stick with the program and go back every summer, by the time they graduate from high school they are going on six-week trips down whitewater rivers in the Canadian arctic, the deepest wilderness in North America.
Isn’t that dangerous? I suppose so. There are bears, whitewater, and big lakes. One mother told me that she could never let her sons do that, because of fear that the counsellors would molest her boys. Happily, she got over it, her sons went to Widji, had great experiences, and best of all, were not molested. Another mother did not let her daughters go because she thought they would be exposed to lesbian counsellors who might “convert” her girls. I am not making this up.
So, sure, there are dangers. But the risk of kidnapping is the least of them, and the risks of bears, counsellors, and lesbian conversions are not far behind. In fact, the biggest risk in sending our girls to Camp Widjiwagan, statistically speaking, was the driving to and from camp and the trailheads. If you want to put your children at risk, then put them in your car and drive around. That’s a lot more dangerous than paddling through the wilderness. Statistics vary, but the sources I found say that there are about 100 child abductions by strangers per year in the United States, and almost all of them end in the safe return of the child. Likewise, bear attacks are exceedingly rare—just a few per year on average—but oh, the publicity! In almost 100 years of operation, Camp Widjiwagan has never had a fatality. By comparison, although automobiles are getting safer all the time, more than 600 kids die in car crashes every year in the U.S.
Meanwhile, the benefits of sending your children wilderness camping are immeasurable. They deal with bad weather, sunburn, clouds of biting insects, lousy food, and going to the bathroom in the woods. They paddle canoes for hours a day, and when they aren’t paddling the canoes they are carrying them and the rest of their gear across portages, from one lake to the next. They curse, they laugh, they sleep in tents, they don't shave, and f they bathe at all it is by jumping in cold lakes. You would think they’d hate it, and a some of them do, but the rest of them come back taller, stronger, happier, healthier, and more confident. The magic is especially powerful for the girls, because they are bombarded by a culture that encourages them to be quiet and to focus on looking pretty, and tells them that they are weaker than the boys. Ha! Try telling that to a group of teenager girls who have just returned from two weeks in the wilderness, where they have successfully relied on nothing but their own strength, teamwork, wits, and skills to get by. It's a long-lasting inoculation against our junk culture.
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