uncorrelated with those of their adopted siblings. That tells us that adult personality and intelligence are shaped by genes, and also by chance (since the correlations are far from perfect, even among identical twins), but are not shaped by parents, at least not by anything they do with all their children. Despite these refutations, the Nurture Assumption developed a stranglehold on professional opinion, and mothers have been advised to turn themselves into round-the-clock parenting machines, charged with stimulating, socializing, and developing the characters of the little blank slates in their care.
Another sacrament is the campaign to quarantine children from the slightest shred of a trace of a hint of a reminder of violence. In Chicago in 2009, after twenty-five students aged eleven to fifteen took part in the age-old sport of a cafeteria food fight, they were rounded up by the police, handcuffed, herded into a paddy wagon, photographed for mug shots, and charged with reckless conduct.200 Zero-tolerance policies for weapons on school property led to a threat of reform school for a six-year-old Cub Scout who had packed an all-in-one camping utensil in his lunch box, the expulsion of a twelve-year-old girl who had used a utility knife to cut windows out of a paper house for a class project, and the suspension of an Eagle Scout who followed the motto “Be Prepared” by keeping a sleeping bag, drinking water, emergency food, and a two-inch pocketknife in his car.201 Many schools have hired whistle-wielding “recess coaches” to steer children into constructive organized games, because left on their own they might run into one another, bicker over balls and jump ropes, or monopolize patches of playground.202
Adults have increasingly tried to keep depictions of violence out of children’s culture. In a climactic sequence of the 1982 movie E.T., Elliott sneaks past a police roadblock with E.T. in the basket of his bicycle. When the film was rereleased in a 20th-anniversary version in 2002, Steven Spielberg had digitally disarmed the officers, using computer-generated imagery to replace their rifles with walkie-talkies.203 Around Halloween, parents are now instructed to dress their children in “positive costumes” such as historical figures or items of food like carrots or pumpkins rather than zombies, vampires, or characters from slasher films.204 A memo from a Los Angeles school carried the following costume advisory:They should not depict gangs or horror characters, or be scary.
Masks are allowed only during the parade.
Costumes may not demean any race, religion, nationality, handicapped
condition, or gender.
No fake fingernails.
No weapons, even fake ones.
Elsewhere in California, a mother who thought that her children might be frightened by the Halloween tombstones and monsters in a neighbor’s yard called the police to report it as a hate crime.205
The historical increase in the valuation of children has entered its decadent phase. Now that children are safe from being smothered on the day they are born, starved in foundling homes, poisoned by wet nurses, beaten to death by fathers, cooked in pies by stepmothers, worked to death in mines and mills, felled by infectious diseases, and beaten up by bullies, experts have racked their brains for ways to eke infinitesimal increments of safety from a curve of diminishing or even reversing returns. Children are not allowed to be outside in the middle of the day (skin cancer), to play in the grass (deer ticks), to buy lemonade from a stand (bacteria on lemon peel), or to lick cake batter off spoons (salmonella from uncooked eggs). Lawyer-vetted playgrounds have had their turf padded with rubber, their slides and monkey bars lowered to waist height, and their seesaws removed altogether (so that the kid at the bottom can’t jump off and watch the kid at the top come hurtling to the ground—the most fun part of playing on a seesaw). When the producers of Sesame Street issued a set of DVDs containing classic programs from the first years of the series (1969–74), they included a warning on the box that the shows were not suitable for children!206 The programs showed kids engaging in dangerous activities like climbing on monkey bars, riding tricycles without helmets, wriggling through pipes, and accepting milk and cookies from kindly strangers. Censored altogether was Monsterpiece Theater, because at the end of each episode the ascotted, smoking-jacketed host, Alistair Cookie (played by Cookie Monster), gobbled down his pipe, which glamorizes the use of tobacco products and depicts a choking hazard.
But nothing has transformed childhood as much as the risk of kidnapping by strangers, a textbook case in the psychology of fear.207