It goes without saying, or at least parents assume it should, that little fingers should never wrap themselves around a real firearm. Just in case it doesn't, be sure to tell them anyway: If you come across a gun, don't ever touch it, don't ever play with it; run and get an adult. Yet time and time again, there are children who ignore such warnings anyway. Should they happen across a gun, they just can't help themselves...they feel a compulsive need to explore it. And at least part of this is our fault.
As a society, we must own up to the fact that we live in a gun-crazed culture; one where the use and allure of firearms is talked up, romanticized, fictionalized, and broadcast into our homes on an everyday basis. It's not just on TV, either. Many kids have parents who proudly display their gun-toting ways, not to mention older brothers, uncles, and other adult friends. Most adults who own them treat guns as a status of power and authority, further adding to the allure. Then, of course, there are jack-ass fools who show up outside town-hall meetings carrying assault rifles. In the midst of such displays~ what message is a kid to receive?
When children are surrounded by this gun-crazed romanticism with firearms, the lure of a gun can become simply irresistible. It's a classic one-two punch of psychology. We talk guns up and romanticize their power and significance, while simultaneously turning around and telling children' not to touch. There are two surefire ingredients to use to get a child interested in something: 1) Tell them they can't have it, 2) In everything that surrounds them, send a message about how wonderful and powerful that thing which they can't have is.
Some die-hard gun advocates would say the solution to this is of course to provide children with ways for safe gun usage so that they don't feel a compulsion to experiment. Yet this tends to backfire as well, leading to overconfidence and the likelihood that kids will handle a gun when they shouldn't, or 'show off their gun skills with a friend, who also might use it irresponsibly. Not to mention that since gun accidents commonly occur through everyday use, ANY exposure to a gun increases a child's risk of dying and lowers their overall safety, and that of the kids around them. The problem is not the restriction; kids can handle this when the danger is clearly explained to them. It's the romanticism that goes along with it.
Not only is this romanticism unhealthy, it's flat out wrong. The cold hard facts don't lie, and they reveal that a person is around 60 times more likely to use their gun in a tragic manner (murder, suicide, accidental shooting, etc.) than they are to use it for a legal purpose. When you further take police-officer statistics out of the equation and focus on true life or death situations as opposed to simply "legal use" (many states allow the use of a firearm against any felony, regardless of whether a person is actually in danger at the time) and the situation gets even bleaker. In terms of legitimate self-defense, the odds shoot up to at least several hundred to one that a gun will be used tragically rather than defensively. If you own a gun for self-defense, you own a gun for the wrong reasons, and your family is in more danger, not less, on account of your fun ownership.
Then there are the movies. Movies aren't just unrealistic in terms of the obviously dubious action involved, but in terms of the end result of all the gun play depicted in them. In real life, when guns get drawn, their shooters are every bit as likely to hit an innocent civilian as they are their intended target. Yet in movies and drama shows alike, hundreds of rounds can be fired off without a single innocent child going down in the process. You see people diving behind cars in the process of shooting at their target while sideways and off-balance in mid air...a shot that in real life even a professional marksman would find virtually impossible. Yet this sort of acrobatic marksmanship is quite common on TV, and it gives kids a fantasy-land mentality about how easy gun use really is. Just point and shoot, and the bullet hits the bad guy. This portrayal couldn't be farther from the truth.
As is always the case, parenting plays a crucial role. We're not an organization that advocates a prudish approach of hiding your kids from any media exposure that might be disagreeable. Violent media exposure in children should be limited wherever parents can, but it's also not as though letting your kids watch that action movie they're dying to see is destined to do them any harm. But by golly, never let such scenes in a movie or television show go by unchallenged. Television offers numerous examples of brute violence and unrealistic ideals, but this also means it provides a lot of wonderful opportunities for discussion.
So the next time your family is watching Mr. Hero do a triple back flip off a high-rise building while catching a gun out of mid-air and miraculously firing off a shot that hits the bad guy square in the chest, take a little time afterwards to talk about what actually happens when guns get drawn. Television can be a wonderful teaching tool, so long as parents use it. No matter how ridiculous it’s content, it always provides opportunities for discussion.
The good news is that many kids do the right thing, so it's not as though talking to your kids about guns is a lost cause. Far from it.
For every child who brings a gun to class, there's often a friend he's showing it to who runs off and tells the teacher. Kids who do the right thing when parents are vigilant in safety. We just need a little more talk...not only about not touching guns, but also talk to combat the romanticism and high regards in which guns are elevated to in our culture.
References:
*For more info on some of the talking points within this post, look for our upcoming publication, 'Guns for Protection?' scheduled to be released in the next month or two.
1. Hahn, R.A. et al., "First reports evaluating the effectiveness of strategies for preventing violence: Early childhood home visitation." Morbidity & Mortality Weekly Report, V. 52, No. RR-14, Oct. 3, 2003
Visit www.keepyourchildsafe.org for more safety information.
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Sunday, September 26, 2010
How Many deer to car accidents occur every year?
It's hard to get an exact number, because many such accidents are never reported. An insurance industry estimate by State Farm insurance puts the number of annual deer-vehicle collisions at around 1.5 million nationwide. (That's an awful lot of deer-jerky!) Numbers are especially high in the east, an area where white-tailed deer are abundant. Such collisions are no threat to deer or raccoons, whose large numbers hedge them from extinction. Yet such collisions can take a toll on many other endangered animals, such as the Florida panther, which just might go extinct if Grandma nails any more of them.
People, too, often come out on the losing end. Around 200 people lose their lives every year as a result of wildlife to auto collisions. Efforts at curbing these accidents, such as car whistles or sensors, have shown little success. Most experts believe the only real solution is to build underpasses and overpasses for wildlife that get all sorts of animals, deer included, across the roads safely. Of course, getting them to use them is the challenge here.
Reference:
1. Thomas Hayden, "Deer Crashing," National Geographic, October 2008
Find more Safety Information at www.keepyourchildsafe.org
People, too, often come out on the losing end. Around 200 people lose their lives every year as a result of wildlife to auto collisions. Efforts at curbing these accidents, such as car whistles or sensors, have shown little success. Most experts believe the only real solution is to build underpasses and overpasses for wildlife that get all sorts of animals, deer included, across the roads safely. Of course, getting them to use them is the challenge here.
Reference:
1. Thomas Hayden, "Deer Crashing," National Geographic, October 2008
Find more Safety Information at www.keepyourchildsafe.org
Friday, September 3, 2010
Why Parents Murder Their Children ... And How We Can Prevent It
If you follow the news at all, by now you've probably heard about the recent case of a South Carolina mom who allegedly confessed to murdering her two children. Police say 29-year-old Shaquan Daly left for a motel after an argument with her mother, which apparently started over how she was caring for the kids. (Tragically ironic) She booked into a room at around 1:30 a.m., and it was there that police say she killed her two boys in the early morning hours by placing a hand over their mouth. The older tot had defensive wounds, suggesting he had struggled.
She then allegedly strapped them into their car seats, and drove off, ditching the car in the Edisto River. She then made up a story about getting into an accident and having to walk some ways to flag someone down because she didn't have a cell phone. Police received a call about a car in the water later that morning, less than 5 hours after Daly booked into the motel.
Police say the young mother was unemployed and "had no means of taking care of her children," according to Orangeburg County sheriff Larry Williams. "She was fed up with her mother," says Williams. "She just wanted to be free. ...she truly felt, if I don't have these toddlers, I can be free." She is currently being held without bail on two counts of murder. And so it is the sad conclusion to another senseless tragedy.
Catastrophic events happen all around us, but I'm always struck by the feelings of "what a waste" amidst such stories; I mean, surely, someone out there could have wanted these children and would have taken care of them, sparing the lads such a horrible fate. For those of us who value and treasure children, the act seems so needless and tragic. It's sort of like watching someone toss valuable jewels and works of fine art into a hot lava pit while arriving just a little too late on the scene to salvage them. You just want to scream out, "Wait! Don't do that! I'll take them if you don't want them." If she had only sampled random people she met on the street, or heck, put an ad on eBay, someone out there would have been happy to take possession of this treasure. The motel owner was reportedly in tears when he heard about the news. I wonder what would have happened if Shaquan had simply brought the kids to his office and said, "I'm at my whit’s end, I can't take care of these kids anymore, will you please do it or help find someone who can?" In an ideal world, no parent would be driven to the point of premeditated murder as a way out.
Of course, we don't live in an ideal world, and our modern society often puts roadblocks in the way of such solutions, preventing more rational and accommodating escape routes for frustrated parents. Had she done such a thing, the police would have been called, and she'd be arrested on neglect charges. She'd be shamed and humiliated by an army of policeman and social workers. Little sympathy would be shown for her predicament. She would be judged, ostracized, and thrust into all new battles. It likely wouldn't solve her problems or absolve her of her parental duties, but only exasperate them. She would be met with resistance and hostility rather than support. This is why she instead hatched an elaborate plan to try and dispose of the kids and make it look like an accident. People have a tendency to take what they presume to be the path of least resistance to solve their problems.
What's also striking about this case is that Shaquan's other child, a 5-year-old girl, was left at the Grandmother's house, and thus, spared the murderous plot. (Grandma now has temporary custody of the child.) Neighbors say Daley lived with her mother in Orangeburg, a town of 13,000 about 40 miles south of Columbia. Considering the police say the fight was about the children's care, and the older girl was left with Grandma while the younger two were toted off with mom, this makes one wonder about the caregiver dynamics that were at play here. Perhaps Grandma was willing to help with the girl but not the boys, or maybe she simply found the younger children too much work to take care of. (As most readers are probably aware, there is a world of developmental difference between a two-year-old and a five-year-old. Infants and toddlers demand constant and intense attention, making it hard to do anything else, whereas a 5-year-old is much more autonomous and can largely care for themselves with limited supervision.) Maybe mom wanted and loved her daughter but found her sons to be too much work and a source of continued frustration. (Police were unable to locate the father of the dead children.) We can only speculate as to the specific family dynamics that played out, but one way or another, we ended up with a situation in which two kids were left out of the mix, with no one vying to care for them.
Time and time again, we watch as situations like this unfold. This wasn't the first such incident, and it won't be the last. In our quick-to-judge society, it's easiest to demonize this mother and her actions, but that doesn't get us anywhere or do anything to help kids in the future. The reality is that people are imperfect, some parents are better than others, and some parents find themselves in situations where they can't take it anymore, and need some type of escape. This doesn't make them monsters, even as barbaric as this mother's actions were; it makes them imperfect, frustrated parents at their breaking point, parents who need some kind of help and act in their own self-interest~ And there are a lot of such parents out there.
We got a glimpse of the scope of the problem when Nebraska’s recent safe-haven law, which was meant to allow for the safe abandonment of newborns at area hospitals, unintentionally made it legal to abandon any child at a hospital, because the law failed to specify age. Thirty-six children were abandoned in a period of three months before the loophole was fixed. None were infants. Sadly, when legislators saw what was happening, rather than address the underlying problem, they merely rushed to put the genie back in the bottle, plugging the loophole and burying the problems from public view again. Nebraska is a fairly small state, at least population-wise, and they were on pace to have an annual abandonment rate of around 150 kids. Which means nationwide, there are tens of thousands of kids in similar predicaments, with their parents at their breaking point and desperately needing assistance. From this sea of unacknowledged frustration come tragedies such as the recent one.
These are parents and children living right underneath our noses, and society isn't doing much to acknowledge or address the issue. Nor is traditional state intervention by CPS the answer. Our child protection system is an oxymoron if there ever was one; bogged down in the normal government bureaucracy, exhibiting the normal incompetence, and built around an antagonistic philosophy that causes children far more harm than they prevent. It is our utter lack of informal resolutions that poses the biggest problem. What we need is not more bureaucracy that works against parents - precisely the opposite. We're so caught up in laws and formality and punishment and finger-pointing and a community that operates at a distant arms-length that, for a few select individuals, disposing of the kids through one means or another seems an easier solution than obtaining the relief they so desperately need.
We need to make it easier for someone, anyone, to be there for such parents and provide care for their kids during times of need in an informal capacity ... without the government feeling a need to complicate the procedure with persecutory laws, criminal charges, and licenses/ paperwork/procedural guidelines from here to the moon. Moreover, such a support network needs to work with parents (not against them) to provide relief on the fly when they desperately need it, and it needs to be as easy and painless as ordering a cheeseburger, so that no parent ever considers murder the easiest way out. The Nebraska safe-haven law was not necessarily wrong, in principle. In fact, it uncovered a hidden problem with enormous need. Something similar with a few fundamental tweaks and alterations could provide a support network that keeps children alive, and offers frustrated parents the support they need.
This may sound like a romantic vision, but it's hardly unworkable. I remember as a child a campaign of helping hand stickers on houses, which were meant to be safe places for children to turn to if they needed help. We need a similar type of informal support network, in every community, that parents can utilize to seek help...whether it be to drop off their kids for a couple days, seek support on an ongoing basis, or otherwise alleviate the stress and keep such children safe. It needs to be readily available and widely known about. Similar programs, known as 'crisis nurseries,' are already available in certain communities to individuals who have already been cited for child abuse or neglect. There are precious few of these available, but those that do exist have been the most successful and child-friendly abuse-intervention programs to date. Yet we can't wait for someone to be arrested for child abuse to offer such help, and we can't link help with criminal prosecution, judgment, or disruption of parental rights if we truly want to assist families in crisis.
We need to stop pretending that those who injure children are monstrous individuals who enjoy being evil, as opposed to people who for one reason or another have reached their breaking point. This mother's actions were horrific and inexcusable. But we're not exactly doing all we can to prevent such tragedies, either. We need to worry less about laws and rules and procedures and persecution, and start worrying more about building a supportive community. People will always act as imperfect people do, and for those parents at their breaking point, we can expect they might do injurious things out of self-preservation. This is basic human nature. Expecting every parent to be wonderful and selfless and skilled in handling their children at all times and out of every situation is simply foolish and naive. Not all people were equally cut out for the parenting role, especially when under severe stress. We need a system that offers better support for all levels of parents, especially those who are less skilled, caring or devoted to their children. This will not occur by snatching children away from their communities only to thrust them into an abusive bureaucracy, but by making support available, and readily available, at the times and in the places and in the ways they need it.
I don't know about you, but I'd gladly join some type of register and submit to background checks, and would be happy to help provide care to those invisible children in our community whose parents are surviving on the margin of sanity, in order to prevent those kids from being beaten or murdered. And I’m sure there are enough other parents or retired grandparents who would be willing to do the same, so that we could have a crisis drop-off house on every block. One way or another, we need to build a support network into our communities, so that no parent ever feels that murdering their children is the only (or easiest) way to obtain the relief they need.
To learn more about child safety issues visit www.keepyourchildsafe.org
She then allegedly strapped them into their car seats, and drove off, ditching the car in the Edisto River. She then made up a story about getting into an accident and having to walk some ways to flag someone down because she didn't have a cell phone. Police received a call about a car in the water later that morning, less than 5 hours after Daly booked into the motel.
Police say the young mother was unemployed and "had no means of taking care of her children," according to Orangeburg County sheriff Larry Williams. "She was fed up with her mother," says Williams. "She just wanted to be free. ...she truly felt, if I don't have these toddlers, I can be free." She is currently being held without bail on two counts of murder. And so it is the sad conclusion to another senseless tragedy.
Catastrophic events happen all around us, but I'm always struck by the feelings of "what a waste" amidst such stories; I mean, surely, someone out there could have wanted these children and would have taken care of them, sparing the lads such a horrible fate. For those of us who value and treasure children, the act seems so needless and tragic. It's sort of like watching someone toss valuable jewels and works of fine art into a hot lava pit while arriving just a little too late on the scene to salvage them. You just want to scream out, "Wait! Don't do that! I'll take them if you don't want them." If she had only sampled random people she met on the street, or heck, put an ad on eBay, someone out there would have been happy to take possession of this treasure. The motel owner was reportedly in tears when he heard about the news. I wonder what would have happened if Shaquan had simply brought the kids to his office and said, "I'm at my whit’s end, I can't take care of these kids anymore, will you please do it or help find someone who can?" In an ideal world, no parent would be driven to the point of premeditated murder as a way out.
Of course, we don't live in an ideal world, and our modern society often puts roadblocks in the way of such solutions, preventing more rational and accommodating escape routes for frustrated parents. Had she done such a thing, the police would have been called, and she'd be arrested on neglect charges. She'd be shamed and humiliated by an army of policeman and social workers. Little sympathy would be shown for her predicament. She would be judged, ostracized, and thrust into all new battles. It likely wouldn't solve her problems or absolve her of her parental duties, but only exasperate them. She would be met with resistance and hostility rather than support. This is why she instead hatched an elaborate plan to try and dispose of the kids and make it look like an accident. People have a tendency to take what they presume to be the path of least resistance to solve their problems.
What's also striking about this case is that Shaquan's other child, a 5-year-old girl, was left at the Grandmother's house, and thus, spared the murderous plot. (Grandma now has temporary custody of the child.) Neighbors say Daley lived with her mother in Orangeburg, a town of 13,000 about 40 miles south of Columbia. Considering the police say the fight was about the children's care, and the older girl was left with Grandma while the younger two were toted off with mom, this makes one wonder about the caregiver dynamics that were at play here. Perhaps Grandma was willing to help with the girl but not the boys, or maybe she simply found the younger children too much work to take care of. (As most readers are probably aware, there is a world of developmental difference between a two-year-old and a five-year-old. Infants and toddlers demand constant and intense attention, making it hard to do anything else, whereas a 5-year-old is much more autonomous and can largely care for themselves with limited supervision.) Maybe mom wanted and loved her daughter but found her sons to be too much work and a source of continued frustration. (Police were unable to locate the father of the dead children.) We can only speculate as to the specific family dynamics that played out, but one way or another, we ended up with a situation in which two kids were left out of the mix, with no one vying to care for them.
Time and time again, we watch as situations like this unfold. This wasn't the first such incident, and it won't be the last. In our quick-to-judge society, it's easiest to demonize this mother and her actions, but that doesn't get us anywhere or do anything to help kids in the future. The reality is that people are imperfect, some parents are better than others, and some parents find themselves in situations where they can't take it anymore, and need some type of escape. This doesn't make them monsters, even as barbaric as this mother's actions were; it makes them imperfect, frustrated parents at their breaking point, parents who need some kind of help and act in their own self-interest~ And there are a lot of such parents out there.
We got a glimpse of the scope of the problem when Nebraska’s recent safe-haven law, which was meant to allow for the safe abandonment of newborns at area hospitals, unintentionally made it legal to abandon any child at a hospital, because the law failed to specify age. Thirty-six children were abandoned in a period of three months before the loophole was fixed. None were infants. Sadly, when legislators saw what was happening, rather than address the underlying problem, they merely rushed to put the genie back in the bottle, plugging the loophole and burying the problems from public view again. Nebraska is a fairly small state, at least population-wise, and they were on pace to have an annual abandonment rate of around 150 kids. Which means nationwide, there are tens of thousands of kids in similar predicaments, with their parents at their breaking point and desperately needing assistance. From this sea of unacknowledged frustration come tragedies such as the recent one.
These are parents and children living right underneath our noses, and society isn't doing much to acknowledge or address the issue. Nor is traditional state intervention by CPS the answer. Our child protection system is an oxymoron if there ever was one; bogged down in the normal government bureaucracy, exhibiting the normal incompetence, and built around an antagonistic philosophy that causes children far more harm than they prevent. It is our utter lack of informal resolutions that poses the biggest problem. What we need is not more bureaucracy that works against parents - precisely the opposite. We're so caught up in laws and formality and punishment and finger-pointing and a community that operates at a distant arms-length that, for a few select individuals, disposing of the kids through one means or another seems an easier solution than obtaining the relief they so desperately need.
We need to make it easier for someone, anyone, to be there for such parents and provide care for their kids during times of need in an informal capacity ... without the government feeling a need to complicate the procedure with persecutory laws, criminal charges, and licenses/ paperwork/procedural guidelines from here to the moon. Moreover, such a support network needs to work with parents (not against them) to provide relief on the fly when they desperately need it, and it needs to be as easy and painless as ordering a cheeseburger, so that no parent ever considers murder the easiest way out. The Nebraska safe-haven law was not necessarily wrong, in principle. In fact, it uncovered a hidden problem with enormous need. Something similar with a few fundamental tweaks and alterations could provide a support network that keeps children alive, and offers frustrated parents the support they need.
This may sound like a romantic vision, but it's hardly unworkable. I remember as a child a campaign of helping hand stickers on houses, which were meant to be safe places for children to turn to if they needed help. We need a similar type of informal support network, in every community, that parents can utilize to seek help...whether it be to drop off their kids for a couple days, seek support on an ongoing basis, or otherwise alleviate the stress and keep such children safe. It needs to be readily available and widely known about. Similar programs, known as 'crisis nurseries,' are already available in certain communities to individuals who have already been cited for child abuse or neglect. There are precious few of these available, but those that do exist have been the most successful and child-friendly abuse-intervention programs to date. Yet we can't wait for someone to be arrested for child abuse to offer such help, and we can't link help with criminal prosecution, judgment, or disruption of parental rights if we truly want to assist families in crisis.
We need to stop pretending that those who injure children are monstrous individuals who enjoy being evil, as opposed to people who for one reason or another have reached their breaking point. This mother's actions were horrific and inexcusable. But we're not exactly doing all we can to prevent such tragedies, either. We need to worry less about laws and rules and procedures and persecution, and start worrying more about building a supportive community. People will always act as imperfect people do, and for those parents at their breaking point, we can expect they might do injurious things out of self-preservation. This is basic human nature. Expecting every parent to be wonderful and selfless and skilled in handling their children at all times and out of every situation is simply foolish and naive. Not all people were equally cut out for the parenting role, especially when under severe stress. We need a system that offers better support for all levels of parents, especially those who are less skilled, caring or devoted to their children. This will not occur by snatching children away from their communities only to thrust them into an abusive bureaucracy, but by making support available, and readily available, at the times and in the places and in the ways they need it.
I don't know about you, but I'd gladly join some type of register and submit to background checks, and would be happy to help provide care to those invisible children in our community whose parents are surviving on the margin of sanity, in order to prevent those kids from being beaten or murdered. And I’m sure there are enough other parents or retired grandparents who would be willing to do the same, so that we could have a crisis drop-off house on every block. One way or another, we need to build a support network into our communities, so that no parent ever feels that murdering their children is the only (or easiest) way to obtain the relief they need.
To learn more about child safety issues visit www.keepyourchildsafe.org
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