The Cautionary Example as Parenting Tool

Both Rogier van Bakel http://www.bakelblog.com/nobodys_business/2006/05/building_a_gene.html
and Radley Balko http://www.theagitator.com/archives/026559.php#026559
link to a KATU report about restrictions on children on playgrounds. It seems that even running is considered too dangerous in some quarters. Tetherball and dodge ball? Are you high? Someone could get hurt! Swing sets? Death traps, I tell you! Merry go rounds? Centripetal forces start with c, that rhymes with d, and that stands for death. Apparently some 17 kids get killed every year in playground accidents, and 200,000 get injured. I don’t know if this includes all the skinned knees and minor lacerations and contusions such as I used to get every day of my life as a kid.

Are today’s kids are made of glass, or what? I don’t think a day went by when I was a kid on the playground when I didn’t get a big honking knot on my head, get the wind knocked out of me, draw blood, or get a bruise or shiner. I rarely broke a bone or required stitches or medical attention of any kind. I used to try to stay awake at night because I heard that you might die if you went to sleep with a concussion, and I always had some kind of head trauma.

Fortunately, no kid of my immediate acquaintance ever got permanently maimed or disabled or killed while playing. Whenever a kid got seriously hurt or killed anywhere in the country, our parents would use their situation as a cautionary example. “Did you hear about that kid who got electrocuted climbing on the power lines?” my Dad might ask. Then he would point to the lines and explain how they were dangerous and juiced up and how I should never touch them, even if they were on the ground. Dead kids in abandoned refrigerators died so that other kids might learn from their fate and live. Kids with hands blown off by blasting caps or fireworks really brought home the need to be careful with explosives. Drowned kids showed us that water safety was no joke.

There was a famous case of a cub scout who wandered off in the Smokies and was never found. His name was Dennis, and his case reinforced in me the advisability of staying on the path and sticking with the group. My Uncle used the demise of the unfortunate Dennis to teach me some orienteering tips and what to do if I ended up lost in the woods.

The stories of tragic accidents that befell other kids instilled in me in a concrete way a healthy respect for gravity and an awareness of a wide variety of hazards. These lessons continue to serve me even today.

Recently, those kids in Jersey who suffocated in a car trunk might have served as an example to others, except that the focus of the story was on how car companies should foresee that kids would lock themselves in trunks and how the police should have looked in the trunk. For a few days after that story hit, I checked my trunk for dead kids before setting out. I would not want to have to explain how they got there if I were pulled over. I hope that some parents used the event to instruct their children (a) not to lock themselves in trunks, and (b) how to use the safety latch if they nonetheless found themselves in a trunk.

Nowadays, it seems that kids have very few cautionary examples to edify them. When tragedy strikes, the focus of the narrative seems to be on childproofing and idiotproofing the universe rather than instructing children in how to mitigate the risks associated with living in a potentially dangerous environment. Some parents I know are extremely reluctant to expose their children to the facts of their mortality and vulnerability and to rely on their children’s survival instinct and pain avoidance to help keep them safe.

It’s a terrible thing to lose a child or for your child to be disabled or disfigured, but it is also terrible to restrict your children so much that they hardly ever see the light of day or engage in healthy, albeit risky, play.

The cautionary example is a wonderful parenting tool. My family used it as an instrument of control and even fabricated examples where convenient. I was a great lover of roasting ears and would eat as many off them as were set before me. After I ate four ears one time, my grandmother casually mentioned how a boy down the road some years earlier had eaten five ears of corn and died on the spot. I stopped at four ears.