SubscribeThe Today Show has a cover story today entitled “Mom lets 9-year-old take subway home alone.” The controversy over this — that is, the fact that there is any — is a wonderful example of how poorly people assess risk in modern society. What this woman, Lenore Skenazy, has done to stir up trouble is to make a decision about her child based on reason rather than emotion (specifically fear) — something that seems frighteningly uncommon today. As she puts it:
“It’s safe to go on the subway,” Skenazy replied. “It’s safe to be a kid. It’s safe to ride your bike on the streets. We’re brainwashed because of all the stories we hear that it isn’t safe. But those are the exceptions. That’s why they make it to the news. This is like, ‘Boy boils egg.’ He did something that any 9-year-old could do.”
She’s right. Most of us in our 30’s today remember growing up in the 1980’s — and it involved riding your bike across town, visiting neighbors, and being unattended for relatively long periods of time. Of course there were unsafe areas – there were parts of cities where people alone really aren’t safe — but these are the exceptions rather than the rule. Today, most parents seem to live in fear, convinced that there are criminals lying in wait to abduct children everywhere. It simply isn’t the case — it never has been, and crime rates are lower today than they were in the 80’s! We have not gotten any less safe, we have simply become so afraid that we think we’re less safe. And this culture of fear is damaging and contagious:
“Half the people I’ve told this episode to now want to turn me in for child abuse. As if keeping kids under lock and key and helmet and cell phone and nanny and surveillance is the right way to rear kids. It’s not. It’s debilitating — for us and for them.”
There are a variety of reasons that people believe that their children are under constant threat. Among them are:
- Vividness criterion: shocking anecdotes stick in our memory more than statistics, and they attract our attention. This is both why the media reports on every bad thing happening to a child, and why we remember them.
- Availability bias: when determining how frequently something happens, rather than turning to statistics we turn to how many cases of it we can remember. Since the news reports on every plane crash, but almost no auto accidents, we think of air travel as riskier even though we know the statistics show differently. Since in this age of pervasive news reporting we hear about crime more often, crime must be more common, even though the statistics show differently.
- Fundamental attribution error: when something happens, we tend to overestimate behavioral causes. So when a child is hurt, we assume the parents did something wrong, even if the event is random and exceedingly rare.
- We overestimate risks from intentional causes and underestimate risks from natural causes. This is probably related to the vividness criterion — someone deliberately hurting a child is more shocking than the child being hurt in a bike accident. The result is that we expect people to be malicious a lot more often than they are, and we think children are more likely to be hurt by criminals than by illness or car accident, once again despite statistics showing otherwise.
In truth, the violent crime rate today in the United States is less than half of what it was in the 1980’s! Most of our burgeoning prison population consists of nonviolent drug offenders, and most violent crime occurs in geographically delimited areas. Skenazy is right — the streets and subways of New York City are as safe as they were in 1963. Crime against children is even lower — the simple fact is that the overwhelming majority of humanity doesn’t want to hurt kids and is inclined to help and protect them.
It’s sad how many normal childhood experiences have been lost to this obsession with safety from small risks — just try to buy a chemistry set today even as an adult and compare it with what was available to young children 20 years ago (or to what’s in The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments, now available pretty much only via BitTorrent, which begins by teaching children to use an alcohol burner to shape glass tubing. Today, a children’s chemistry set would never be allowed to contain an alcohol burner… or glass tubing.)
The key is this:
‘The statistics show that this is an incredibly rare event, and you can’t protect people from very rare events. It would be like trying to create a shield against being struck by lightning.’ ”
She said that people ask her how she would feel if one of those terrible and rare events happened to her son. “It would be horrible,” she said. “But you can’t live your life that way; you could slip in the shower.”
When faced by extremely low risks, the rational response is sometimes to disregard them. Sometimes the response to fear of something is, in aggregate, worse than the thing itself. We of course do the same thing with terrorism, and these same biases cause us to misallocate security dollars in industry, too (how many companies have tens of thousands of dollars in firewall and IDS hardware, but no disaster recovery plan?)
