Jennifer O’Connell: Escape the anxious parent trap

Paranoid parenting isn’t about actual risk: it is about our need for control

It is a typical Monday morning in the small, suburban Californian town – village, really – that we now call home. As I drop my kids to school, the news is full of stories of Hannah Graham, a British student who had been attending the University of Virginia, who vanished recently after a night out. In a local cafe, I have a conversation with a woman about the recent mountain lion attack on a six-year-old boy on a trail five miles away. Flicking through my phone over coffee, every story seems to be about the myriad dire threats facing our children: carrying heavy backpacks, being driven in carpools, encounters with unsuitable apps, mysterious respiratory viruses, injury by lawnmower and scalding by hot seatbelt buckles.

By 11am, I’m already in a state of heightened anxiety, convinced that if I get all three of them through to bedtime with no one being eaten by a lion or maimed by a burning belt buckle, it will be a miracle.

The threat posed by mountain lions may be region-specific, but the general air of constant, low-level panic surrounding childhood is not: I've experienced it in Australia and in Ireland too. An American writer, Kari Anne Roy, blogged recently about how she had been reported to social services for allowing her six-year-old son to play unsupervised outside their Austin home. He was 150 yards from her front door, sitting on a park bench, when a neighbour came and marched him home, before calling the police. Afterwards, Roy wondered aloud: "What will the Always On Screens Generation be like when they're adults? When they weren't afforded the ability to play and explore and test limits and problem-solve; when everything was sanitised and supervised?"

It is a valid question. We're so busy worrying about our children being groomed by paedophiles or falling off playground equipment that we haven't given much thought to a far more pressing eventuality. What happens when a generation of children raised in what Hunter S Thompson called the Kingdom of Fear – children whose every waking moment is frantically scheduled, as though boredom itself is a dangerous predator – grows up, and becomes a generation of anxious, co-dependent adults, lacking the resilience to intelligently and safely navigate the world?

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The soundtrack to the modern childhood is a constant thrum of anxiety: warnings about strangers, technology, sugary foods, too much red meat and too few vegetables, traffic, sun exposure, germs, apps. In reality, the world is a safer place for children now than it has been at any time – in the US, the odds of a child being kidnapped and murdered by a stranger stand at about 1.5 million to one. They're about three times more likely to be struck by lightning, a paper in the Utah Law Review recently noted.

But paranoid parenting isn’t about actual risk, or even about our children’s needs: it is about our need to control every aspect of their lives. Let’s do our children and ourselves a favour and let go a bit. How will they learn to cope with risk if we spend all our time trying to eliminate it from their lives?

Mind the gap: four inches makes all the difference

There is perhaps no geographic entity more furiously contested in the history of humankind than the four inches of space between your airline seat and the one in front of it.

I have flown thousands of miles in the past four months, much of it with a newborn baby on my lap – and all of it in economy class – and finally I think I understand how someone could be petty enough to come to blows with another passenger over those precious four inches.

It happens more often than you’d think: three flights had to be diverted during a single week at the start of September when fisticuffs broke out on board over the right to recline (none of them involving me, although there were times I was tempted). In at least one incident, the passenger in the row behind was using a Knee Defender, a €17 device that prevents the seat in front from reclining, prompting several major airlines to ban them.

When otherwise sane individuals are throwing punches – and being thrown off flights – over four inches of legroom, surely it’s a sign that sardine economics have gone too far.

Some airlines, including United and Virgin, now allow you to pay for those extra four inches and the right to recline in a new section, a kind of no-frills version of premium economy that can cost €45-€100 on top of your standard fare.

On every flight I took recently where they were available, the extra-legroom seats were fully booked. Are you listening, Michael O’Leary?