Media scares parents

The controversial “dead kid bowl” ad played during this year’s Super Bowl raises some controversies about parents and anxiety for their children’s safety and well-being. Becoming a parent you dawn the mantle of having to make good choices, within reason, to ensure that children are safe and even happy. But accidents can happen on a dime. Media images that warn parents what can happen and that define accidents as preventable situations are probably not much help to anyone. Uninvolved parents will ignore the images or ads, whereas parents who are already prone to worry will hone in on the details, as if the worst case scenarios confirm their worst fears. Hovering parents will simply hover more, and probably cause agitation rather than a sense of security in their kids.

I’m a parent prone to over worrying and keeping my children on a short leash with a story. When my girls were young, and the youngest only 3 years old, we went to a pool party lunch at my friend’s house. My youngest daughter loved the water, but wasn’t a safe swimmer and needed to wear a flotation jacket. As we played in the water together I noticed her frustration and her fascination with the bigger kids jumping off the diving board. After we left the water and had lunch, another family joined us. It was time for us to leave and for the other family to start swimming, when one of the children asked where my youngest daughter was. I didn’t even blink before running to the pool because I knew she would have made her way there to try a diving board jump. The others didn’t know why I ran towards the pool at fast gallop, nor why I threw myself in. At the bottom of the pool, eyes still open, I saw my submerged daughter. I pulled her up, and shook the water out of her, and we all went home suffering a bit of shock. What I learned was how lucky I was — we all were. 30 seconds more and it could have been over. The lesson did not learn was to try to be more vigilant because I have always been over protective to a fault. That day, my daughter must have slipped away in the time it took to turn around and pick up our bag.

What this event tells me is that some accidents are unpreventable. No warning ads can stop some children from having drowning accidents, whether in a bathtub or a pool. Such an ad might even inflict pain on parents who have lost a child in the blink of an eye.

I’ve noticed that news reports of vehicle collisions in the media are no longer called “accidents” but rather, “crashes.” It may be that the media is trying to liven up the story with an action word, yet the change also takes away the notion that collision was unexpected or not deliberate.

News media images and reports, let alone paid ads by private companies and corporations can scare us to death rather than scaring us into adopting safer practices. Scare mongering is dangerous to parents, children and families. A blog like ours can be a small voice in the media storm in favour of protecting parents from inappropriate, and even cruel blaming and shaming.