Sometimes, children ensconced in “safety seats” die in car accidents. It happens, despite the fine engineering and considerable effort put into making the safest environment possible. No child safety seat can change the fact that a severe enough collision, with sufficient intensity and violence, can kill every occupant of a vehicle, instantly, regardless of mechanical protections. No amount of safety features, standard or otherwise, can change this.It is the simple and beautiful cruelty of physics, as with so many other laws that have nothing to do with human jurisprudence, that they can and will snuff human lives, without regard for fairness, with no appreciation for innocence, and no emotive consideration of age.
Even those areas that we fancy are within our control are without guarantee… a crapshoot, even. Eat right, sleep 8 hours a day, exercise regularly, don’t smoke – and you will still find yourself at risk for innumerable ailments, even those that your lifestyle is designed to prevent.
Despite the clear risk that the world presents, even through the mundane daily tasks of breathing, eating, and driving to work, we rarely hear calls to outlaw driving or to tightly regulate what sort of food people eat. We rarely hear such calls for a good reason – we recognize that we cannot eliminate the risks, and any attempt to regulate necessary and inevitable by-products of being alive would be both fruitless and absurd.
In light of this, legislators, pundits, prosecutors and developmental psychologists please take note: there is no way to make the world, or the internet, 100% safe for children. Nor is it (in my opinion, anyway) even desirable to try. Instead of looking at how to make the world safer for children, perhaps the better question is: “How do we better prepare our children for an unsafe world?”
The problem really isn’t the content and marketing slant of our various forms of media, despite what various politicians and “family values” types often crow about. True, TV programs, movies and video games are more violent, more sexually explicit and filled with “foul language” to a greater extent than they have ever been before. These technologies are all relatively young, though, and thus cannot be blamed for ills of society that existed prior to the invention of the technologies themselves (to paraphrase comedian David Cross – “Remind me; what violent video games did Hitler play?”).
Often lost in the debate surrounding internet pornography and children, which is generally couched in a need to protect children from the harmful effects of viewing pornography (or, far more threatening where children are concerned, participating in it) is the fact that there are other materials on the Net that have equal, if not greater, potential for having a damaging effect on the minds of children.
Riddle me this; suppose you walked into your child’s bedroom unannounced, and discovered him looking at an age-inappropriate website. Which of these would concern you the most?
A) A “white power” site, filled with rantings about the supposed inferiority of a given race of people;
B) A “how to” website, in this case detailing how to build a low-intensity radiological device (“dirty bomb”);
C) A porn website, featuring videos in which two men penetrate a single woman vaginally and anally, simultaneously.
While I can certainly see why item C would be cause for alarm (and, hopefully, cause for a most awkward and uncomfortable conversation to follow), from the standpoint of our society as a whole, and the continued existence thereof, I would argue that a kid being exposed to double-penetration for the first time is less threatening than the prospect of some budding Tim McVeigh sitting there in his bedroom learning the tools of the terror trade.
It is also my firm belief that your child would be better off, in any case, if he/she had already received the benefit of some knowledge of the world’s assorted sources of confusion and fear, before he/she encounter such on his/her own.
We all want kids to have a chance to be kids, to get lost in the playful fantasies of youth, and to frolic unfettered by the crushing concerns and beguiling stress of the adult world. At some point, though, childhood ends, and it serves no one for children to reach adulthood completely unprepared to confront ugly realities and harsh truths.
In other words, sheltering your children is not the same thing as protecting them; in fact, too much sheltering leads to them being wholly naïve, and the state of blissful ignorance is a perch from which the fall of disillusionment is very long, indeed.
So, while your child certainly doesn’t need to be watching double-penetration videos in between episodes of Sponge Bob, it doesn’t do him/her any good to reach High School believing that the stork delivers babies to the hospital, either.
This brings us, however, to an act that today’s parents appear to be entirely uncomfortable with – parenting. It’s as though they’ve all been convinced of the tired old cliché/book title, “It Takes a Village to Raise a Child,” and at the same time have become convinced that they don’t live in the same village as the child!
There’s no way around it; as a parent you brought that child into the world, and you are responsible for its upbringing. Will the child be honest and forthright, or will it weasel and fib? Will your child accept responsibility for its own words, actions and fate – good and/or bad – or will it shirk personal accountability, and reflexively seek an external force to blame for its predicaments?
As the parent, the answers to those questions are almost entirely up to you. I say “almost” because neurochemistry, heredity and innate ability have a role as well – but none of those are the creation of Hollywood filmmakers, television executives, stand-up comedians, or internet pornographers.
You, the parent, are the only filter that has a reasonable chance to succeed. You cannot shield your children from content, but you can arm your child with the benefit of context – by informing them, educating them, guiding them. In short, parenting them (yes, there’s that dreaded word again).
Rather than focusing efforts on ways to sanitize the world for your child’s protection, consider that you might be better served to prepare them for the world’s unsanitary things. Maybe the thought of terrorists will be less frightening given some perspective on how few of them there are, how little support they have in the world, and how unlikely it is that you and yours will ever be a victim of a terrorist act.
And maybe, just maybe, the first time your child sees someone put a penis in someone else’s mouth, or vagina, or anus, they will be less frightened if they no longer call the penis a “Wee Wee.”
