Free-Range Kids. Lenore Skenazy
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All in the Family broke another taboo. It talked about impotence, molestation, constipation. It flushed a toilet! And the ratings went through the roof. It became the number-one-rated show for five years straight—a feat never surpassed, though the Cosby Show did, later, tie it (a can of worms we will leave unopened for the rest of our days).
Naturally, broadcasters said, “Number one for five years? Let's make five thousand of these!” So they started throwing in all the sex and grit and bodily functions they could. As did TV news. And let's not forget that, that being the 1970s, plenty of social upheaving was going on outside the boob tube, too.
In 1981, things changed dramatically again, as cable TV came into its own and started segmenting the hitherto mass audience. You wanted to watch women writhing in leather bustiers? You had your MTV. Or your Playboy Channel. Or your HBO. Whatever. You had a lot of channels. You wanted weepy stories of women with unusual diseases? You had Lifetime. And if you wanted news all day long? You turned on CNN.
Let's stop here and think about what that meant: an entire twenty-four hours to fill with news. Every day. How on earth could you keep people watching the same channel for hours on end?
There is one proven and tested way. Pick a sensational tabloid story and treat it seriously, earnestly, gravely, as if all you really want is the best for your viewers. Repeatedly broadcast the same heart-wrenching footage, looping back again and again, right after this message, to create a sense of the most compelling, continuing, crying-shame story ever to dominate a news cycle. A story so gripping, viewers would feel almost guilty turning it off. A story you could drag out (like this paragraph) for hours and hours, days and days, even if you had only tiny crumbs of info to add. And to date, the best story anyone has ever found turns out to be … a missing child.
“Missing kids are everybody's fear,” said a cable exec I can't quote by name because she's still in the biz (even though she's not happy about it). “Especially when there's a story with somebody who looks normal.” (Apparently “normal” = “middle- to upper-middle-class white person,” in TV executive speak.) “People really respond to that. They think, ‘That could be me.’”
The granddaddy of this programming was the 1983 two-part mini-series, Adam, based on the story of Adam Walsh, a six-year-old boy who was abducted from a Florida Sears and beheaded in 1981. It makes me sick just to type that.
The series about him—a ratings blockbuster—introduced America to Adam's dad, John Walsh, who appeared with his wife at the end of the show with photos of other missing children. Walsh became a crusader for children's safety and went on to host America's Most Wanted. He also helped found the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Quite likely you came of age eating breakfast with those kids.
“The whole milk carton phenomenon begins at this time,” says Thompson, referring to the phenom of dairies printing the photos of missing children on their cartons—without even clarifying whether the child was kidnapped by a stranger (extremely rare), taken by a divorced parent in a custody dispute (more likely), or had simply run away (also quite likely). Mornings became pretty somber as we ate our Frosted Flakes with the milk carton kids staring us in the face. In fact, it began to feel as if millions of kids were being taken, willy-nilly, across the country. And all together, this set the template for our modern-day fear of abduction.
That fear, as I'll say again and again in this book, bears no relation to reality. The statistics cited by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children itself show that the number of children kidnapped by strangers holds pretty steady over the years—about 1 in 1.5 million. Put another way, the chances of any one American child being kidnapped and killed by a stranger are almost infinitesimally small: 0.00007%. Put yet another, even better way, by British author Warwick Cairns, who wrote the book How to Live Dangerously: if you actually wanted your child to be kidnapped and held overnight by a stranger, how long would you have to keep the child outside, unattended, for this to be statistically likely to happen?
About seven hundred and fifty thousand years.
(And after the first hundred thousand years, you couldn't really consider them a “kid” anymore.)
But if we rarely heard about kidnapped children before the 1980s—with the exception of the Lindbergh baby—they have since become a staple of TV. A particular child's story that captures the public's interest can go on for months—sometimes years. Between Elizabeth Smart, Jayme Closs, and Maddie McCann, we all feel as if we “know” someone who disappeared. We've watched their home videos. We've “met” their families on TV, or seen the mini-series. And because we've heard about them so much, their stories start to seem tragic, yes, but not totally surprising. They fit perfectly into a worldview that says, “Just another example of kids getting snatched and killed.” Our brain has stored all the other stories before it, so each new one just confirms our belief that child abductions are happening all the time.
So now, when you're thinking about whether you could ever let your kids hang out by themselves in the video game department at Target—which is where we'd deposit ours, because otherwise they'd moan and groan the whole time we were trying to concentrate on various Mr. Coffee features—you automatically think about Adam Walsh snatched from the Sears. Even though that was in 1981. Even though, every day, millions of parents go shopping with their whiny kids, and the kids wander off for a while, and the parents panic and then they find them in the toy department and everyone's OK. It's hard to remember, but we should: the likelihood of something truly tragic happening is, thank God, extremely low.
Now let's look at how the folks in the TV biz work to make us feel otherwise.
“As a former TV news producer,” a dad confessed in an email to Free-Range Kids, “I can tell you that news is all about fear. Sometimes, the first criteria we used when judging a story involving children or families was, ‘Is it scary enough?’”
When the answer was “no,” that didn't necessarily kill the story. It just changed the way it was reported—and teased.
“A tease has to hit people in their heartstrings, where you know your words are going to have some impact: their personal safety, or the safety of their family,” said another former TV news producer, Thomas Dodson. “It has to grab the viewers’ attention, and you have a very short time to do it.”
So instead of saying, “If your child is under age three and you happen to have shopped at that little toy store on Elm Street where the proprietor bought some funky wooden blocks from Finland, please note that these could pose a choking hazard if your kid put several of them in his mouth at once, which he probably wouldn't, since they taste bad,” you would say (according to Dodson): “A massive recall of toys! Is something in your child's toy box on the list?”
(To which, by the way, a friend once remarked: “If something that terrible is out there, threatening my children, why the hell are they making me wait till eleven to find out?”)
TV stations love those toy recalls because that way their newscast gets to scare people (good for ratings) while also doing a public service (good for the soul). It's like exposing OSHA violations at a strip club.
Now maybe there is some point to telling us the most anguishing stories of our day, every day. But I was a reporter for twenty years, and I'm still not quite sure what that point is. Is it to warn us about a dangerous neighborhood? That's helpful, I guess. Or to remind people to look both ways when crossing the street or to drive safely? Can't overemphasize those. Is there an exploding pacifier out there that we shouldn't buy? Tell all! But, as former Tucson anchorwoman Tina Naughton Powers says, “On local news, it's ‘Good evening and welcome to death, doom, and destruction. Here's what didn't happen to you today, but it could so we'll keep you in fear!’”
So when Anderson Cooper hosts an hour-long special on missing children, as he has done, he never says, “First off, remember: this will probably never, ever, ever happen to you. In fact, it's almost exploitative that I'm even here talking about it.” No, he turns to the camera with those devastatingly earnest eyes and says, “It is every parent's