David Penberthy: We’re making childhood fears so much worse
Every generation has its fears and every child gets anxious sometimes, but has helicopter parenting created an environment where healthy anxiety is being medicalised, asks David Penberthy.
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This week I had an interesting chat with the leading child psychologist Dr Michael Carr-Gregg about the fact kids are becoming terrified seeing posters for horror movies such as Stephen King’s It, featuring a bloodstained evil clown, in everyday settings such as bus shelters and supermarket advertising hoardings.
The conversation took me back to the most terrifying seven days of my own childhood, when in one of those inadvertently hilarious moments of parenting, my folks thought it would be a good idea to take my sister and I (aged eight and 10 respectively) to see The Elephant Man.
Apart from being crushingly sad and appallingly violent, the film featured the bracing image of John Merrick himself, the poor disfigured soul who was kidnapped and forced to perform in the circus in industrial England before being saved.
My sister and I watched the entirety of this overawing film through our hands in terror and I can remember sobbing when Merrick knowingly ended it all by removing the mountain of pillows on which he slept, aware it would block his breathing so he could finish his life a happy and dignified man after his wonderful night at the opera.
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For a week after seeing the film I slept in my parents’ bed, suffering recurring nightmares where John Merrick would appear before me in everyday settings, removing his hessian sack as he popped up behind the counter at the corner deli, creeping up next to me at the football and emerging from behind the blackboard at school.
These were vivid and enduring memories and the sort of thing which in the more mollycoddling era of 2019 could see my parents denounced for child neglect, although with the benefit of hindsight I am glad they subjected me to such a character-building experience.
Michael Carr Gregg shared an amazing statistic this week. Apparently one in every seven Australian children suffers from some form of anxiety. It is a confronting figure, as it seems the world today is safer than it has ever been, and parents are more attuned to their children’s needs and interests than ever before, possibly to the point of being over-protective helicopter parents.
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If you think back through recent history through the generations, there are so many moments that seem vastly more terrifying than anything we are facing right now.
For my generation the defining fear of our youth was nuclear war, with the most galvanising cinematic moment of my youth, Elephant Man aside, being The Day After, that cheery flick that sought to show how the world would come to a fiery end in the pre-Gorbachev era.
For my parents, the spectre of conscription hung over their teenage years, and their early childhood and the entire adult lives of their parents was framed around a very genuine fear of Nazi or Japanese occupation in Europe and the Pacific.
If you keep going backwards through the generations, things get even worse, especially in terms of health. An English-born mate of mine said he can remember his Dad telling me there were seven kids in his street when he was a boy three of whom died of illnesses that would now be fixed in a day or two with antibiotics.
The last thing the world needs is another column about Greta Thunberg. I wouldn’t want to pile in on the kid as she has whipped herself into quite a genuine state over climate change, as have others, and like her I believe the science.
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Having said that, the prospect of global warming strikes me as both manageable (if we act swiftly and properly), and still vastly more terrifying than the prospect of being bombed within the next three days by the Luftwaffe, or sent to Vietnam against your will to fight in a war.
Why are kids so wound up? My gimcrack theory is they might worry more than ever because we worry too much ourselves.
Parenting is now for many of us an act of hyper-vigilance. That’s not a knock on modern parents, you can understand it, as we have more awareness (albeit misleadingly so in a proportional sense) of the bad things that happen to a minority of kids.
In Adelaide, the mother who was synonymous with the end of a carefree era, Nancy Beaumont, died peacefully in a nursing home two weeks ago. That poor woman went to her grave never knowing the fate of her three kids who disappeared in 1966.
For the rest of us, it’s the gradual and cumulative effect of horrific events such as these that have helped create the modern phenomenon of the helicopter parent.
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The figure shared by Dr Carr Gregg suggests it’s a phenomenon that is having a wholly counter-productive result in terms of children’s happiness.
So too with the proliferation of wellness philosophies being folded into the school curriculum, when a generation or two ago they would be doing home economics, a spelling bee or running around chasing a tennis ball.
It is no longer the done thing to tell people to harden up — and nor should be in a brutal and unthinking sense when people, be they young or old, are ill at ease.
But there is a chance we have swung so far the other way that we are almost creating an environment where moments of natural and healthy anxiety are being medicalised.
That day at the cinema didn’t kill me and whatever anxiety I felt was the result of processing a story of extraordinary cruelty.
I mean, you could argue Mum and Dad might have waited a few more years, or taken us to see Grease or something, but I commend their unorthodox methods, even if they now jar with the temper of the times.