Being Overprotective of Children Will Only Hurt Them When Disasters Strike

Nature is ruthless. As COVID has shown us, a world that seems to be humming along so well can suddenly be stopped dead in its tracks, borders thrown up and people holed up, by something so small and invisible yet fast-moving and deadly. And an epidemic out of nowhere is by no means the only way that nature can hurt us, very badly. From earthquakes to tornados to landslides to sinkholes, nature will put mankind into a calamity, without any prior warning. Unlike a manmade war, no compromise can hope to halt the disaster. Nature does not negotiate.

The only thing that men can do is to always be vigilant, and never complacent. Modern lives in the modern world are filled with too many conveniences that too many people take for granted. Press a button on the remote and the humid summer air fades away; turn a faucet and water gushes out; run to the corner store and there is always something to eat...people assume that the unimpeded and unhindered peace that makes these phenomena will remain a matter of fact as long as everyone adheres to rules and the conflicts of faraway are kept, well, far away. 

Unfortunately, this mentality of complacency has inadvertently become a culture of pickiness instilled in the younger generation growing up in the lands of plenty. When the corner store has many different kinds of foods available, some refuse to eat some perfectly good foods. With plenty of housing to choose from in different neighborhoods, some criticize some living conditions for being suboptimal simply due to the location or construction. With piped water safe to drink, some even complain about water being better tasting in one place than the other.

Worse yet, the picky youths are indulged by their parents. Instead of teaching their children to be tolerant of different people, foods, and living conditions, many let them be picky and fulfill their every whim to stay that way. Never being told "No" growing up, the children then grow up to be adults who are not only picky themselves but motivated to continue the cycle of pickiness, creating a societal expectation that pickiness is not a fault but a matter-of-fact display of high standard of living and civilization's drive for further self-improvement.

The logic of such overprotection quickly collapses when calamity hits. End-of-the-world movies illustrate the danger well through the power of exaggeration. A good example is A Quiet Place, which details a family trying to survive in a world invaded by an alien race with hypersensitive hearing. A pivotal moment shows the family's four-year-old boy defying his parents to play with a loud rocketship toy, being carried away for killing by an alien only moments later. The parents' repeated expression of guilt through self-blame drives home the fatal nature of overindulgence in extraordinary times. 

While alien invasions may be far-fetched for our real world, the ecological disasters that they represent are not. The young boy's life-ending fascination with a rocketship can easily be replaced with equally fatal ones featuring more realistic scenarios. For instance, picky eaters would find themselves suffering when an earthquake damages the supply chain enough to make most of their favorite foods unavailable for purchase. Those who cannot start tolerating whatever foodstuffs that are available to eat will soon find themselves in a position of ill-health through self-induced hunger.

Preventing the overprotection, then, requires all of us, society as a whole, to constantly remind ourselves of ever-resent danger, no matter how safe the world feels at the very moment. Honestly, it is not that difficult. Looking just a bit beyond one's own neighborhood and country, there are plenty of ongoing wars, diseases, and deaths from climate change. None of these, whether natural or manmade, is necessarily constrained to one geography, nation, or culture. To share information on these happenings would inoculate the mind against taking peace and safety for granted.

This is especially important for the so-called developed countries where people are more convinced that the problems suffered in poorer countries do not matter much to them. Teaching children that they are at least partly participants in any problem that occurs anywhere in the world, with the responsibility to sympathize and assist in any way they can, would demotivate those beliefs that being picky is a given right. To overcome the tendency to overprotect would require putting the children somewhat in harm's way, at least through sharing of not-so-savory pieces of information.