I never fail to be amazed when someone puts incidences of child sexual abuse on the same footing as aggregated reports of car accidents, large and small, as if one were no more horrible than the other.
Not quite sure what you're getting at here
Fair enough. I'll try to break it down for you: you can't fairly compare rape of a child to a car accident. I haven't seen risks "overstated in the media", although I certainly have seen the term "helicopter parent" tossed around mighty freely in reference to parents that are simply more cautious than free-range parents. There's no call for excessive hand-wringing over media reports on child sexual abuse compared to car accidents, either. Child rape involves a sensational and heinous crime, whereas few car crashes do. It's simply false to imply that people somehow care less about avoiding car crashes because they watch their kids to avoid, among other things, child sexual abuse, or that their priorities are out of whack. I'm sorry if that paragraph got a little long.
A comparison of child rape to a car accident in this context is especially senseless in light of the huge amount of money poured into preventing and mitigating car crashes, when I would say that the first and best line of defense against child abuse is caring, watchful parents. While some money is spent every year on educating the public about abuse, etc., I'm sure that it doesn't compare to the amount spent on auto safety.
It would be interesting to discover just how many incidents of child abuse are prevented by watchful, nearby parents, as ABQMom seems to have witnessed first-hand; of course those incidents don't, and would never, wind up in any statistics cited by free-rangers. Yet free-rangers feel entitled to spout statistics (often in misleading ways) without consideration given to the preventive effect of watchfulness by mainstream parents. Never is there a discussion of the possible effects if everyone let their kids go without supervision at a young age, just halcyon memories of a bygone time when things were better without those dang helicopter parents.
The Free Range Kids idea, to the extent that it's new at all, boils down to a different choice as to safety levels for kids, coupled with a sneery attitude toward anyone who chooses more safety. It's nothing new, except for its extremity in intentionally skirting the edges of what many consider to be child abandonment or endangerment, and its in-your-face attitude. And in its proponents' attempts to push their movement, they routinely rely on false assumptions and fallacy. Lenore Skenazy sure seems to have hit on a gold mine with her idea, though: capitalize on the "helicopter parent" meme with a catchy new name, and follow up with merchandise.
I'm not out to convince anyone to protect their children to what I consider to be an appropriate level against a horrible, life-changing event such as child rape, as well as other ills of neglect. There aren't enough hours in the day for me to parent my own kids, let alone everyone else's.
