Last Child in the Woods: About the search for safety being one of the reasons behind the growing nature deprivation of children… http://amzn.com/156512605X

Parenting in an Age of Paranoia: A Small Manifesto
http://www.quinnnorton.com/said/?p=284

@John Cox, great point about the nature of news! I was just talking to Dan Goldstein about what it would take to establish as a journalistic convention the reporting of actual numerical probabilities whenever reporting on risks.

This explains why news outlets have always sucked as sources of well-reasoned, contextualized information. Thinking of them that way is a category error.

Before I learned about this I was really frustrated by the news. You hear all these stories about the triumphant Fourth Estate and how things used to be so much better, but it’s just not true. It’s a projection about the good old days every bit as false as lionizing the morals of the past, or the music from when you were young. CNN and FOX didn’t invent yellow journalism and more than The National Inquirer or The New York Post or The Sun invented the scandal sheet.

This doesn’t make the news less dangerous, though. Our brains are wired so that sensationalism works, and it’s really hard to fault people for selling an effective product. By ‘effective’ here I mean something that people pay attention to, and not something that necessarily informs them. Contextualizing events, like this article does, is really difficult when the human brain is set up to pay tons of attention to the novel, or when it’s set up so that emotional responses shut down rational ones.

Also, great question about kidnapping for ransom in places like South
America. I’ve heard it’s a real problem, but without knowing the numbers,
who knows what that means.

As Sharad just pointed out elsewhere, kids dying from being left in hot cars is a
“real problem”, “record numbers of children dead”, etc:
http://dreev.es/hotcars

The numbers seem to be the same order of magnitude as child abductions but there’s a push for legislation on sensors and warning systems for detecting kids left in cars.

The right answer to that is that, sure, we could save a few kids’ lives by requiring these systems in cars but, well, it’s not enough lives to be worth the cost and hassle.

I guess there’s just no way to say that! Instead it will get argued against (assuming sanity prevails at all) disingenuously with things like “it’s technologically infeasible” or “the false alarms and false sense of security could lead to more deaths”. (I mean, come on, if we can put a person on the moon we can make a car that you can’t forget a baby in!)

I’m fascinated by the question of what it would take for it be accepted as conventional wisdom that a human life, even a child’s life, is only worth so much. In one sense, people already understand this. Like going to soccer practice is worth the risk of driving there. That simple, straightforward trade-off is incoherent if the kid’s life has infinite value. It’s also perfectly intuitive to people that NASA-level solutions to the baby-in-a-hot-car problem are too much.

Though these examples have astronomically smaller chance than even child abductions. When does “almost never” become “never”?

One more thought: in other countries, children of wealthy parents might have a legitimate fear of kidnapping. Or is that overblown by media too?

For all intents and purposes, chid abductions by strangers simply don’t happen.

I’m suggesting that it’s rare enough that it’s literally not worth taking precautions against. Like it’s not worth wearing a helmet when playing underneath trees, even though we know for a fact that a child’s life could have been saved if we did so.

Child abduction is admittedly a bit bigger risk than tree attacks but the cost of the precautions you can take (which involve instilling a fear of people, or a stifling level of supervision) is bigger than the cost of wearing helmets when playing under trees.