Honey, You’re Scaring the Kids
Writing about fear and childhood between 1850 and 1950, historians Peter Stearns and Timothy Haggerty point to a transition in expectations when it comes to parental duties to prevent and allay kids’ fears. Victorian parents, they argue, were counseled to see fear as a productive obstacle, and to help children move past anxiety into adulthood. Kid fears didn’t receive much credence.
Around the turn of the century, advice to parents began to recognize specific fears as endemic to childhood: animals, the dark. “Fear and its management became far more problematic than they had been in nineteenth-century culture,” Stearns and Haggerty write. “Avoiding fear began to make much more sense to many prescribers than accepting its challenge as part of building moral character.”
The nuclear kid fears of the early 1980s were not just personal and domestic. They were public fears, writ small. In the discourse over nuclear fear, dismay over the distress of children became wrapped up with the guilt that a parent must feel at a child’s affliction, and amplified by the parent’s own apprehensions. Unlike the boogeyman, nuclear annihilation was real, and adults made it.
The Appendix, July 22, 2014