FEAR IS SHAPING OUR CHILDREN

The helmet perfectly symbolizes childhood today. Nothing is safe,
kids should be wary of everything, pass the Ritalin. This phenomenon
would be laughable if it weren't so serious.

"Summertime," goes that wonderful old song by the Gershwins, "and the
livin' is easy."

Well, it used to be, anyway. This past one seemed fraught with peril,
as they usually do, these days, for parents. Allergies, skin cancer,
air pollution, injuries, drownings, heat stroke, West Nile virus ... oh my.

Gone are the golden afternoons of my own childhood, when I left the
house without a hat, or sun screen, to noodle about on my bike
(without a helmet) and play hide-and-seek in the bushes (without
benefit of mosquito repellant or pedophile spray) and invariably
stayed out until supper (which consisted of fattening foods).

Now, my children cannot exit my home from May through October unless
they are dressed in the equivalent of a hazmat suit.

"Don't forget your sun block!" I find myself having to singsong each
morning. "Have you removed the life-threatening peanuts (they can
cause allergic reactions) from your knapsack? Did you remember your
antibacterial soap? Your school meds?"

My out-the-door check list is required by camp counselors and school
administrators, not by me. I'm a mom playing along. I even had an
argument with my 6-year-old son about it, when he brought his bike to
the park but forgot his helmet.

"I can't ride, then," he announced regretfully.

"Of course you can ride," I said. "You're hardly going to fracture
your skull peddling at 2 miles per hour over the grass."

But he has heard otherwise. So, fine. Scary grass. Perhaps we can
kick around a soccer ball and hope that he doesn't break his toe.

I'm a rebel. I'm sorry. I don't think it's right to be conveying to
my bright, robust children that they need to be anxious, at all
times, and never take risks.

A psychiatrist based in Vermont, Paul Foxman, noted this problem in
his 2004 book, The Worried Child: Recognizing Anxiety in Children and
Helping Them Heal, when he talked about the increasing tendency to
preach about health perils to young children: "Teaching about the
dangers of drugs and alcohol to youngsters is supposed to help them
make healthy choices as they mature," he wrote. "But these early
interventions may create anxiety in some children who are not ready
for -- and do not need -- input about such dangers and issues."

Of course they're not ready. They're kids. They have no sense of
context. They can't prioritize threats in their environment. Ghosts
compete, in their minds, with chardonnay and peanuts. What do they
know? It's our job to sort out the relevant fears. And frankly, we're
not handling it very well.

According to the National Mental Health Information Center, 13% of
American children ages 9 to 17 suffer from anxiety disorders in a
one-year prevalence rate. This is a striking increase over the number
of children who felt anxious in the 1950s, as psychology professor
Jean Twenge of San Diego State University points out in her book,
Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident,
Assertive, Entitled -- and More Miserable than Ever Before. The
average child, Twenge told me, reports more anxiety than child
psychiatric patients did 50 years ago.

These are not the children of Beirut and Israel's Haifa, nor of
Afghanistan. These are American kids being terrified of math tests
and bicycles.

"Why," asks California-based child psychologist Madeline Levine, "are
the most advantaged kids in this country running into unprecedented
levels of mental illness and emotional distress?"

In Levine's book, The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and
Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and
Unhappy Kids, she offers some interesting answers.

"Parents are genetically programmed to protect their children from
threats," she says. "Thankfully, the more recent historical threats
to our children's well-being -- malnutrition and devastating
childhood illnesses -- have been eradicated, or greatly reduced. Yet,
levels of parental anxiety remain extraordinarily high."

We worry about our children, which makes them worry, and then --
surprise! -- we treat their worries as a health crisis and medicate them.

There has been a blazing upsurge in psychiatric drug use in children.
The number of prescriptions for anti-psychotics, for instance,
increased fivefold from 1993 to 2002. Ritalin gets doled out like
candy; countless grade-schoolers take anti-depressants.

I wonder what kind of soldiers and citizen heroes we are raising to
meet history's next great challenges if they're made to believe that
they need sun hats and Zoloft just to get through the day.

It is interesting to consider that the so-called Greatest Generation,
which fought in World War II and grew up during the Depression,
exhibited very little fear of bodily injury or death in childhood.
According to a study done in 1933, American children at that time
were most afraid of the supernatural and the dark -- what you might
call normal childhood fears through the ages.

Now, apparently, there is no normal. Everything is frightening.

This is a very tangled web we are weaving. As Levine has observed
about the adolescents in her practice in Marin County, Calif.: "They
are overly dependent on the opinions of parents, teachers, coaches
and peers and frequently rely on others, not only to pave the way on
difficult tasks but to grease the wheels of everyday life as well."

They have not, in other words, been able to fall on the park grass
without their helmets. They have not been allowed to stumble, or to
fail. They are being made to fret about everything and nothing, and
are surprised by adversity. This is not how a generation should be raised.