Peter Gray

This is, of course, a very rare event.

And because it's rare, it made headlines.

It was in the news all the time.

And it led to programs trying to protect, make sure that this doesn't happen again.

And among those programs was to put pictures on milk cartons of missing children.

And the assumption was that when you were eating your breakfast cereal and looking at this milk carton, that these missing children were people, little kids who had been snatched away by some stranger on the street.

And the whole concept of stranger danger was developed.

And once a person has this image in their head

it's hard to get it out of your head.

So it leads to a belief that the world is more dangerous than it actually is.

The truth of the matter is the world is not more dangerous today than it was decades ago.

I think that is definitely a contributing factor.

When you have more kids, you're more likely to want some of them out of the house, if not all of them out of the house, right?

And houses have gotten bigger too.

When you've got a small house and a bunch of kids, you don't want them all hanging around the house.

Yes, I think we have become, over time, increasingly concerned about our children's competitiveness.

We

We in the United States are a competitive culture to begin with.

And the other thing that's happened, I think, really ever since about 1980, there's been continuous growth in the gap between the rich and the poor in this country.

And there's actually research indicating that when the gap between rich and poor is great, parents become increasingly anxious about their children's futures.