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Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2007 > April > 24 > Entry
Scenes from an American childhood: Fear factor
Freddy Krueger
Remember when kids went to the movies for scary stories that would keep us up at night?
My eight-year-old daughter, Claire, was shaken by something she heard from her friends the other day. It made her afraid to go to be or even play outside.
It was an awful, terrifying story of violence against a child. But you know what I found almost as scary? That it didn’t even occur to me for several days that the story might not be true. And, in fact, as far as I can tell the story is not true.
In today’s America, scary stories are routine. Parents and kids are accustomed to being terrified.
Claire’s been dabbling, with my supervision, in Club Penguin, a social networking site aimed at pre-teens which I wrote about previously.
The story she heard after school, from a friend who also uses the site, was that a Club Penguin member had broken one of the cardinal rules by giving out her home address and a man had come there and killed her three-year-old sister.
It’s a horrible, shocking story that prompted a long discussion with Claire about safety and lots of reassurance that something like this was not likely to happen to her.
It was only days later when I had a thought. If something like this actually had occurred, why hadn’t I heard about it? After all, I work at a newspaper, I write about children’s issues and the news media tends to go wild these days with scary stories about adult social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.
So I went to the Net and began searching for the source of the story. I got nada, nothing. Not a single news story, blog post or Web reference anywhere to so much as a Club Penguin-related bullying case.
You know, I tend to be something of a party-pooper when it comes to tall tales. I’m always the one to debunk a friend’s forwarded e-mail advice about the dangers of static while filling your gas tank or drinking cold water after a fatty meal. If it smells fishy, I go to the urban legends home page, look it up and report to everyone who got the email that the danger is bogus.
So it is a little scary to me that a alleged horrible murder of a three-year-old didn’t even register to me as unusual enough to check out at first.
Still, days later I sat down with Claire and told her I was pretty sure the story was not true. She seemed relieved. She told me she had been afraid to go outside to play since she heard the story and she even had asked her younger sisters not to leave the house for fear they would be kidnapped right out of our driveway.
I’ve written before that the chances are very small that our kids will be victims of the worst kinds of violence. But that doesn’t keep us from imagining they might be.
I’m surprised the horror movie business hasn’t folded. Today you can stay home and be terrified.
(Image credit: www.youthink.com)
Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: Young Children
Comments
By lou
April 26, 2007 5:11 PM | Link to this
I don’t know Scott, what about the child that doesn’t listen and the parent who doesn’t monitor internet usage of the children? What if the child were to give out their address online? Could this happen? Probably. Maybe the story was started by a parent who does monitor the internet and found that the child gave out their home address or maybe set a meeting with someone from the internet, to scary them.By Mary
April 24, 2007 2:21 PM | Link to this
At least Claire does not have a false sense of security and is smart enough to be aware of dangers. It seems weird how we raise children with all their frills, high quality of life as far as material possessions, fancy homes and bedrooms, etc. Then they have to be scared back into a different reality and beyond phony security. Life is not totally secure even when frilly. Unfortunately, every child is a heartbeat away from a bad car crash, a parent who collapses of a heart attack, a tornado or a flood, a deranged gunman, etc. I heard recently of the effects of the Iraq war on its citizens. Stressed out men are buying tons of erectile dysfunction drugs on the black market, sometimes sold by kids, more children are bedwetting, etc. So relatively speaking, I suppose you could say the children and adults of Iraq have a more disturbing reality right now. My husband still remembers bombs and dead ponies in the street when he was a child in Germany in World War II. One of the professors at Virginia Tech survived the Holocaust as a child only to lose his life during the shooting rampage last week. Many Americans have to go to horror movies or make up stories to remind themselves of how fragile life is. I do not need a horror movie to remind me. I know.By Rick
April 24, 2007 12:28 PM | Link to this
Scott, you forgot to mention the fear of assault on students in urban districts.