If you were sentient in the early 1980s, you probably remember watching public service announcements that made it seem as if every neighborhood in America was teeming with creeps. A typical “stranger danger” P.S.A. went something like this one, from the American Medical Association. A maternal voice-over intones: “You’ve taught your children to be polite and friendly. But have you taught them when not to be?” Then, a central-casting child predator rolls up in a sleazy sedan and tries to kidnap a little girl on her way to school.
The announcement claims that in the previous year, 50,000 children disappeared, but that figure is wildly misleading: Nearly all of those missing children were runaways, not kidnapped by strangers. A few cases of child abduction and murder — Etan Patz in 1979 and Adam Walsh in 1981 — put the country on edge, and these ads were meant to help raise awareness so no other children would meet the same hideous fate.
While the urge was well intentioned, ads like these were making parents so hysterical that The Los Angeles Times published an article in 1985 debunking that 50,000 number and explaining that according to the F.B.I., in 1984, 67 children were kidnapped by strangers.
Therapists warned about the consequences of inflating and amplifying kidnapping statistics. “It’s making children paranoid, too. There’s a difference between healthy respect and caution and what’s going on now. It’s not healthy anymore,” a psychologist told The Times.
I was thinking of these ads, and this decades-old admonition, when I saw a new set of data from the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute that the authors titled “Strangers Next Door.” The percentage of Americans who talk to their neighbors at least a few times a week has declined for all age groups since 2012, but it’s declined more aggressively among Americans ages 18 to 29. Many of the young adults in that group are the children of people who were children and teenagers in the early ’80s. Additionally, only 49 percent of respondents of all ages “are comfortable with having a neighbor watch their child for a few hours in an emergency.”
It makes sense that if you’re not really talking to your neighbors, you wouldn’t feel comfortable leaving your kids with them. And while a set of Reagan-era public service announcements isn’t the only reason behind Americans’ distrust of one another, these ads played a role in a culture of fear and parental judgment that has only grown over time, with social media amplifying many horrible things that have happened to children (and also false claims about horrible things that never actually happened to children). In 2023, the journalist Melinda Wenner Moyer pointed out that TV networks continued to spread misleading statistics about missing children and stranger danger, just as in 1985.
The sad reality which bears repeating is that the majority of sexual and physical violence against children and teenagers is perpetrated by members of their own household or intimate partners, not strangers. Even though tragedies like school shootings loom large for parents, myself included, and gun violence is worse here than in our peer nations, the United States is generally safer than it has been in a long time. A place where the victimization of children has markedly increased is online.
And yet, the physical freedom we give our children has been seriously curtailed or delayed for too long. This trend isn’t new; I was writing in 2014 about “the shortening leash,” the idea that children have far less independence at young ages than their parents did. But another new survey, from the Institute for Family Studies, a conservative research organization, shows that children have very little autonomy, while they are largely given unrestricted access to the internet.
A few results from that survey shocked me: Around 60 percent of 17-year-olds are not allowed to leave their neighborhoods unsupervised, and over 60 percent of parents “said that 8- to 12-year-old children should receive more supervision than they currently do.” I’m not sure how this group of kids could be even more supervised than they already are. Per the same survey, only 25 percent of 12-year-olds are allowed to leave their streets by themselves.
I’m not trying to minimize parents’ fear, which is real and sometimes warranted. There’s a class element here, and per the Institute for Family Studies survey, more educated parents seem to feel better about letting their children wander, possibly because their neighborhoods are safer. There’s also a class element in trusting your neighbors, as wealthier people have more positive feelings toward the people who live around them. But I also think that some of the caution reported in these surveys comes from a place of concern on the part of parents who feel they will be judged by other adults and by society in general if they let their kids have autonomy.
If you’re inculcated, even subconsciously, with the idea that evildoers are lurking behind every car door, then of course a “good parent” wouldn’t let a child out in the streets. As a parent told me way back in 2014: “Sadly, I find myself parenting from a newspaper headline point of view. If something bad happened after a parenting choice I made, how would it sound when reported in the papers? It makes me more conservative than I’d like to be.” That impulse is more intense now, because any perceived parenting transgression can be replayed on social media.
At the same time, there’s a reason teenagers and 20-somethings are struggling socially — because we’ve taught them to assume the worst about strangers. Jamil Zaki, a Stanford professor who is the principal investigator at the Stanford Social Neuroscience Laboratory, described a “soft form of cynicism” that leads to this dynamic. “People underestimate how warm, open-minded, friendly and trustworthy others are. We make these bleak assumptions about each other in the abstract when asked what ‘people’ are like, and less so when interacting with real, flesh and blood humans,” Zaki told a Stanford publication about Gen Z struggling to connect with each other.
If we want our children to be better at social interactions, we need to pull back on emphasizing all the bad things that could happen to them when they talk to people they don’t know. So many bad things appear to be happening inside our children’s minds instead, and the antidote may be letting them experience more of the world on their own terms.
