My Sophia is upset. You see, today at school the local police will be taking the fingerprints of all kindergarteners whose parents signed a permission slip for them to do so. Her father and I have not and will not grant permission for our 5 year old’s fingerprints to be taken. Which means that Sophia will be left sitting somewhere by herself while the rest of the kids get inked up. And she doesn’t want to be made to left out like that. I guess that this will just have to be an early lesson in the importance of standing up for something you believe in – even if it means being the only one left out. (Frankly, I had assumed that other parents would refuse to allow their children’s fingerprints to be taken. However, Michaela told me that last year she was the only kid in her class who didn’t get their fingerprints taken. She says she cried and put her head down for a minute and then decided that it was ok. She’s awesome like that.)

As I explained to Sophia and Michaela last night, there are several reasons that I won’t consider allowing the police to take my children’s fingerprints. First of all, there is just no reason to. The police and school see this as a safety precaution, but taking a kid’s fingerprints doesn’t protect them from any harm. There’s not one terrible event which could be prevented by having my kid’s handprint on file. Even if something really awful were to happen to her, fingerprints could only help police to make an identification. But even then, this would only help if she were still alive or her body had been found within a relatively short time of death before decay set in. And even if that were the case, other means of identification are available: pictures, DNA. So, the usefulness of having her fingerprints on file is pretty much nil.

Even more than that, I think that the whole notion that it is reasonable or responsible to plan for the sort of events where having quick access to her fingerprints is corrosive in and of itself. You would never know it from watching the news or observing many parents, but our kids are safer today than they have been in decades. Crime – including crimes against children - have dropped precipitously from their high points in the early 90s. Yet rather than celebrating the fact that we live in a time where our children are so safe, we live in fear. And we pass that fear on to our kids.

Kids don’t have access to crime statistics, but they are sharp enough to understand that if we are taking their fingerprints “just in case”, it’s because there is a real chance that they will be needed. And yes, terrible things do happen. But close to 95% of violence against children occurs at the hands of people they know – often in their own homes. The chances of any particular child being the victim of crime in any other context are vanishingly remote. To put this into perspective, more than three times as many people are struck by lightning each year in the USA than there are children kidnapped by strangers each year. To make plans for this sort of “just in case” event would be much like buying clothing designed to conduct electricity in the event of a lightning strike. It happens, but not so often that we prepare for it!

And this fear that we have about our kid’s safety isn’t harmless. We have a very real childhood obesity epidemic, but every parent worries that if they allow their child outside without a keeper neighbors will talk and CPS might even be called. My brothers and sisters and I used to wander all over town and the neighbors never thought it was a problem! Well, there was that one time my mom got a call telling her that I was sitting on my bike on the corner eating candy – a sure sign I wasn’t supposed to have candy and had probably stolen coins to buy it with. But even though I was statistically more likely to have been the victim of crime as a child back in the 80s than my kids are today, no one thought my mother was negligent or putting us in danger to let us walk to the park by ourselves. These days people sometimes call 911 to report a child sighted out and about without an adult keeping watch. This is not healthy for us as a society or for our kids.

I want my kids to grow up to be strong, confident people who can move through their world freely, not afraid of shadows and boogey-men because my fear kept them from being given the chance to learn basic competance. So, I am philosophically and morally opposed to behaving as if my children are in ever-present danger. And getting fingerprinted is just one little thing on top of a bunch of other things which all create a culture of fear and helplessness for our kids. I’ve also refused to allow their pictures to be kept on file at the police station for quick distribution in case they go missing. They’ll just have to make do with the ones from our phones that we take all the time. My kids are the only children I’ve ever seen exploring the cool dead tree out in the field by our house – a kid’s playground if ever there was one. And my advice to parents who worried about their kids and the pile of sticks the previous resident left in our backyard was always, “just don’t watch.” (No one ever got hurt although I did have to institute a rule that sticks for play couldn’t be taller than the person using it, thicker than their wrist or thinner than their pinky. But this was mostly for the sake of my poorly parented neighbor kids who thought it was funny to deliberately hurt people.) As far as I can tell, I’m about the only parent on my kid’s bus route that doesn’t walk them to the bus stop and back. (I was shocked one morning when the bus was late and I drove my girls in – at the end of every driveway that the bus stops at along the way parents were sitting in their cars with their kids! And this is a bus that takes everyone from K-12 to school – not just the elementary kids. And it was 30 degrees out – hardly dangerous weather her in Wisconsin!) I teach my kids that it’s OK to talk with people they don’t know, but that they can never go anywhere with anyone without talking with me first – even someone they know. Which is not only safe, but common courtesy. I even – gasp – allow my kids to sled without helmets.

I know, I’m a terrible mother. But I’d rather be a terrible mother with competent kids than a “good” mother whose kids never get to practice being independent or taking small risks. I do not want my kids living in fear or thinking that it is normal to arrange life out of fear of things that could, but almost certainly won’t happen. One of the best illustrations of how insane and counter-productive our collective fear for our children is comes from a letter published by Lenore Skenazy on her indispensable blog Free Range Kids:

I asked [a fireman] about the red reflective circles that we all used to have on our bedroom windows in the ’70s and ’80s — remember those? — to alert firefighters there might be children in those rooms. “Why don’t we have those anymore?” I asked.

He hemmed and hawed for a minute before he responded something to the effect that “society” anymore doesn’t really approve of those. “Society?” I was thinking. “What part of society could object to notifying firefighters where children sleep…?”

Aha. It sunk into my thick (Free-Range reinforced) skull: By having red stickers in kids’ bedroom windows, we would be advertising to all predators that a child lives in this house! Of course, there is no other way for a predator to know where a child lives. The chalk designs on the sidewalk, the bikes in the garage, never mind all the comings and goings of the family. None of those communicate that there are children as much as that red dot in the window. Why, predators would be lining up — or climbing in!

Now, given that more than 90% of child sexual abuse cases and more than 95% of child abduction cases involve someone the child knows — many of whom are family members — most predators not only know where the child lives, but also where she sleeps. The firefighter told me that those red dots were helpful back in the day, showing firefighters where to put their ladders to track down children as quickly as possible. But “society” has chosen to protect us from potential boogey men instead of fires.

This is the world we are creating by indulging in fear. When (fake) Dear Abby advises taking a picture of your child each morning just in case he or she goes missing that day. When we safety-proof playgrounds to the point that they are no longer fun to play on and our kids don’t know how to engage in gross motor activities safely. Or when we take fingerprints of our 5 year old children just in case . . .

The reality is that terrible things happen. Terrible things will always happen. It’s part of life. I’m not super-human. I’m not God. I can take reasonable precautions against predictable tragedies, but I will never be able to make my kids or myself completely safe. It’s not my job and trying to do so is itself quite predictably harmful.

Besides, I prefer to direct my paranoia towards more realistic targets. For example, the real reason the police want everyone’s fingerprints on file has nothing to do with child safety – that’s just an easy, guilt-laden cover. They know perfectly well that there’s pretty much no practical safety-related reason to fingerprint 5 year olds. The fact of the matter is that the most likely use of my kid’s fingerprints would be to catch her if she were to commit a crime in ten years. Or if she were present in a place where a crime was committed – perhaps not even when it was committed! Innocent people have been convicted on less. Or they may be used by an identity thief looking for a way to get through biometric security. Or even for an out-of-control government keeping an increasingly unruly populace under its thumb so that the rich can live in peace. Maybe it’s not a real threat today. But how about ten years from now? Twenty? God willing, she has the genes to still be kicking around in 80 or 90 years and there’s no way that I can guess what will be going on then. I mean, good heavens – there could be a Marxist Kenyan bent on destroying all that is good and holy in office by then – bwahahaha! But whatever happens, it won’t involve a set of fingerprints kept on file from when she was 5.