When Was the Last Time American Children Were So Afraid?
Students used to duck and cover. Now they have lockdown drills.
This week, America got another reminder of the fear that its schoolchildren must make sense of every day. On Tuesday afternoon, nine students were shot—one of them fatally—at STEM School Highlands Ranch, near Denver.
Though the two suspects are teenagers, STEM School Highlands Ranch is K-12, meaning that some young children were exposed to the violence. Among them was a second grader who told a New York Times reporter that he’d gone through lockdowns and active-shooter drills since kindergarten. That’s close to half of his eight years of life.
His familiarity with potential crisis scenarios makes him part of an enormous group: In the 2017-2018 school year, over 4.1 million students participated in a lockdown or lockdown drill, according to an analysis by The Washington Post.
These lockdowns can be scarring, causing some kids to cry and wet themselves. Others have written letters bidding their family goodbye or drafted wills that specify what to do with their belongings. And 57 percent of teens worry that a shooting will happen at their school, according to a Pew Research Center survey from last year. Though many children are no strangers to violence in their homes and communities, the pervasiveness of lockdowns and school-shooting drills in the U.S. has created a culture of fear that touches nearly every child across the country. In postwar America, have kids ever been so afraid and so regularly prompted to imagine their own suffering?When I asked that question to Paula Fass, a historian at UC Berkeley and the author of The End of American Childhood: A History of Parenting from Life on the Frontier to the Managed Child, she brought up two eras as analogues. The first was the early stages of the Cold War—the ‘50s in particular—when fears of nuclear bombs had schoolchildren across the country doing duck-and-cover drills underneath their desks.
Surveys of children who grew up in this era indicate that 60 percent of themreported having had nightmares about atomic bombs. Fass herself lived CONTINUE READING: The Lockdown-Drill Generation - The Atlantic