"If you're a parent like me, you know that very little strikes terror into your heart like the prospect of something bad happening to your kid. You literally lay awake nights, worrying about every kind of threat. So, what do you do? Oftentimes, you try to scare them so that they will have a healthy fear as well, and thus protect themselves.Don't talk to strangers! Don't walk alone! Don't even go out of the house!
But this tendency can and is creating a lot of problems today for young people's mental health. Here's a better approach to keeping your kids safe—and happy.
What the science says
According to a 2018 poll from OnePoll and the Lice Clinics of America (not my usual data source, but no one else seems to measure this) parents spend an average of 37 hours a week worrying about their children. You can see the effects of all this worrying in modern parenting behavior. According to a 2015 report from the Pew Research Center, on average, parents say children should be at least 10 years old to play unsupervised in their own front yard, 12 years old to stay home alone for an hour, and 14 to be unsupervised at a public park.
What I think
No doubt these beliefs come from the best of intentions. If you want children to be safe, you should teach them that the world is dangerous—that way, they will be more vigilant and careful. But in fact, teaching them that the world is dangerous is bad for their health, happiness, and success.
The contention that the world is mostly safe or mostly dangerous is what some psychologists call a "primal world belief." A negative primal assumes that the fundamental character of the world is threatening. This used to make a lot of sense in the era of caveman survival, but is much less practical in our modern era.
The psychologists Jeremy D. W. Clifton and Peter Meindl found in 2021 that people holding negative primals are less healthy than their peers, more often sad, more likely to be depressed, and less satisfied with their lives. They also tend to dislike their jobs and perform worse than their more positive counterparts.
What you can do
It is not in young people's interest that we instill in them negative primals. In so doing, we might harm them by making them less happy, less healthy, and more bigoted toward others. To break this pattern, parents—and anyone who interacts with children—should instead work to cultivate a sense of safety. Here are three rules to help you get started.
- Heal thyself. Parents might feed their kids negative primals because they hold such views themselves. Research shows that many parents pass on their anxiety to their children—what scholars at King's College London have called the "intergenerational transmission of anxiety". Take a step back from the toxic media environment and remind yourself that, in fact, being a kid in America has never been safer.
- Be specific and proportional. Grown-ups want to teach young people how to stay safe in the face of threats. However, the research is clear that a blanket attitude of fear can actually make them less able to do so. (Ever heard about the Boy who cried Wolf?). Talk to your children about safety, but make sure you're doing so when it really matters.
- Teach them a positive primal belief. Consider the words of the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu. "Through Love, one has no fear". Instead of teaching our kids fear primals, let's teach them love primals, which neutralize fear and put something good in its place. Let them know that people are made for love—we all crave it, and we can find something lovable in just about everyone we meet. We don't always give it or accept it, because we make a lot of mistakes, but love is what all our hearts desire.
If you want to give your children a rule to live by, love is a much safer bet."
—Arthur Brooks
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