Parents and, to a lesser extent children, speak often of their generalized fear. This fear, one of the defining characteristics of today's family life, a complicated thing, having to do with television and AIDS, pesticides and homicides, alar on the apples and pins in the candy. It also has to do with the diminishing amount of family time, and the growing distances within the web of community support. I was surprised to find the fear nearly as intense in Kansas as it was in Pennsylvania and New York.

"I have a rule," said Mike Tuel, one of several parents sitting around a dining room table one evening in Overland Park, Kansas. "I want to know where my kid is 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I want to know where that kid is. Which house. Which square foot. Which telephone number." He grinned.

"That's just my way of dealing with it. Both of my kids have heard my preachings that the world is full of crazy people. And it is. There's nuts running loose. People that need to go through years of therapy and need to be incarcerated. They're out there driving around in cars and they've got guns on their seats. They're out there! And you have to deal with that situation. I'd be hesitant to let my kids go over to the park alone. Everyone tells you to never leave your kids alone. Always be after them. But you don't want to do that -- you don't want to stand right in their face watching them. And you sure don't want to pass it on to your kids."

Then there's Halloween. I can still feel the paper bag in my hand, the smell of burnt pumpkin in the air; I can feel the dents in my shins from when I went over the hedge, bag shooting in front of you, Baby Ruths flying like bats in the darkness, the thrump, thromp, thrump of my feet and the whisking of the costume; the feel of the bag getting heavier, getting soft and crinkly up around the top, and the pace of the running: one more house, one more house, one more...What a feeling that was.

Now we're adults and the doorbell doesn't ring much anymore. Somebody stole Halloween, took it away in a plain brown paper bag and won't give it back.

As it fades for children, it's becoming a national holiday for adults.

One mother at the table described how Halloween had been transformed: "When we were young we went through the whole city, I mean we'd leave at dark and we'd come back and get grocery sacks and go for more. But we never allowed our kids to go out of our neighborhood until recently, and then they go to a neighborhood that's controlled. We live a controlled life—we always know where they are—which makes it difficult to teach independence, doesn't it?" She paused, and a look of doubt came into her eyes. "As a parent, I know a lot of instances of what crazy people have done to children. When I grew up those were only rumors. You might have heard of somebody's uncle that lived in three states away. But now, it's closer to home and we know about it more. A man in the neighborhood was going around naked in front of people. He's gone now, but it happened. It's not just there in the newspaper, it's in your neighborhood. But how did we really know that the kind of terrible things we know about now weren't going on when we were kids, even on Halloween?"

Good question.

Joel Best, professor and chairman of the sociology department at Cal State Fresno, is considered the best authority on what he calls Halloween sadism. In 1985, Best conducted a study of Halloween terrorism— candy laced with drugs or pins, razor blades or poison. He reviewed 76 specific stories and rumors reported from 1958 to 1984 in The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times and the Fresno Bee. "We couldn't find a single case of any child killed or seriously injured by candy contamination," he said. "The Halloween sadist is an urban myth."

Studies like Best's invite skepticism. Like most parents I interviewed, I'm not ready to let my sons eat Halloween candy that has not been scrutinized. Yet, it's important to realize that our concern with stranger danger may be misplaced, may, in fact, be a way for us to deal with larger doubts about the future and our own sense of vulnerability.

Best points out that, in one particularly notorious case, a 5-year-old Detroit boy died in 1970 after eating heroin supposedly hidden in his Halloween candy. Following widespread publicity, police discovered the boy had eaten some of his uncle's heroin; it had not been placed in his Halloween candy. In a similar 1974 case, an 8-year-old boy died after eating cyanide-laced candy. His father was later arrested for poisoning his son's Halloween candy. Sometimes children have contaminated their own candy, as a way of getting attention, or as a Halloween "trick." Since Best completed the study, he has seen no further evidence of anyone killed or seriously injured.

The nation's missing-children anxiety rises and falls with a rhythm similar to the Halloween mythology. After the broadcast of the television movie Adam in 1983, commercial and government agencies began printing millions of images on milk cartons and utility bills. Fueled by this fear, a whole new industry has sprung up. The participants call it "people searching." The guidebooks of this industry, which has broadened even beyond missing children, include such magazines as Family Protection magazine, a pulpy tabloid. The cover headlines scream: DIARY OF A TEEN-AGE RUNAWAY...SHOULD YOU TEACH YOUR CHILD SELF-DEFENSE?...22 PAGES OF LOST CHILDREN. One of the articles suggests that runaways can turn out fine—after all, Neil Diamond and columnist Hedda Hopper were runaways. One article on runaways is illustrated with a staged photograph of a voluptuous, miniskirted teenager being attacked. Then there's the Missing Child of the Month: "Whatever Happened to Bobby Jo Fritz?" And another article describes, under a banner headline, "America's Most Famous Lost Children." Reading Family Protection, one gets the feeling that there are a lot of people out there who find the whole missing children phenomenon somehow titillating.

But as with the Halloween mythology, the threat of stranger danger in most neighborhoods is less than it might seem.

David Finklehor, co-director of the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire, is conducting the National Incidents Study of Missing Children, which will likely be considered the most comprehensive and accurate report on this subject. As of this writing, the final report has yet to be published.

However, an analysis of FBI statistics done by the Family Research Laboratory for the Department of Justice suggests that a relatively small number of children are killed in the course of stranger abductions. Says Finklehor, "Some organizations have claimed that 4,000 children a year have been killed by strangers in the course of abduction. The actual figure is only about 150—if that many." Also, there is no evidence of a trend that the number has increased since 1976, which is when the FBI began to more accurately categorize their statistics. Unfortunately the data for looking at this have only become available recently from the FBI. "You can look at time trends in terms of the number of children who are victims of homicides," says Finklehor, "but information about the perpetrator is not available for earlier periods, because the FBI didn't keep it." Most parents believe that small children are most likely to be snatched by strangers, says Finklehor, "but it turns out that children who are killed in the course of abduction are most likely to be adolescent females—not the 7-year-old kid you see on the milk carton." This is not to minimize the grievous nature of these crimes; but the perception of danger to children is different from reality.

Why do we so fear the bogeyman in the form of strangers?

Several trends have converged:

• General crime rates have gone up, particularly violence committed toward adolescents. Crime is also more generalized today than in previous decades; crime used to be a more strictly urban phenomenon—in the 1950s there were still many places in the country where crime was relatively uncommon. But now the borders of crime, like the borders of mass communication, have dissipated. Crime is everywhere.

• The risk of being criminally victimized has increased for parents themselves, and they often transfer this fear into an increase in anxiety for their own kids.

• Expanded and more interdependent media amplifies crime: people hear more about crimes occurring in other places, and they hear about these crimes quicker, and they hear about the same crime repetitively—through TV, through the newspaper, on the car radio on the way to work. Studies by media expert George Gerbner, at the Annenberg School of Communication in Pennsylvania, suggest that TV heightens our level of fear. According to Gerbner, all other things being equal, the residents of a neighborhood watching television eventually exhibit far more evidence of anxiety about crime than a neighborhood in which the residents are not watching television.

• The less time we spend with our children, the more we worry about them. As Finklehor points out, "Kids are in day care all day, they go to school further away than they used to—the neighborhood school is gone—the family doctor is gone, and so the kids travel further to get medical care from an impersonal medical center." As society becomes more heterogeneous, as parents have less direct control over their children, the bogeyman grows. We project our parental fears of kids taking drugs, becoming sexually active, falling away from traditional values, onto the bogeyman.

All of these trends add to the sense of losing control. Symbolically, children represent two things to us. They are, as Best puts it, "the walking, talking future," and they represent vulnerability and innocence. He points out that the frequency of the various bogeyman reports seems to rise during years of particularly intense economic and social tensions. "People are not as confident about the future as they were 20 years ago, and worrying about children is a way of expressing those fears—fears which are terribly frightening to express." And these fears are projected onto the stranger who's going to snatch your kids, and who cannot be killed, an old theme, with a new twist: Dr. Frankenstein's monster, frozen, burned, drowned, survived from movie to movie, expressing our unconscious understanding that we cannot squash evil permanently. But in new movie monster movies, particularly the ones in the outrageously successful Halloween, Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street series, the bogeyman is destroyed and revived again and again, even within the space of a single film. Also, the new movie monsters seem to represent a generational threat. For example, Nightmare on Elm Street's Freddy takes the form of an old man, the product of all the accumulated evil of an earlier generation. Perhaps it's easier for people, consumed by generalized fear, living on the brink of a nuclear disaster, to eliminate the shades of gray and consolidate all their fears into something like Freddy.

The effect of the bogeyman syndrome is four-fold.

• The bogeyman distracts us from larger societal dangers about which we should be concerned. An over-emphasis on stranger danger makes it easier to turn away from a myriad of other very real threats to children, including the often unseen violence of emotional and societal neglect. Of course, to say that much of our anxiety is misdirected is not to imply that children are not endangered or subject to violence. Quite the contrary. Teenagers are twice as likely as adults to be victims of violent crimes. However, for children, the greatest danger of violence is not from strangers but from family members. While 150 children abducted and murdered each year is still far too many, that figure needs to be put in perspective: by contrast, 1,100 children are killed each year by their own parents; 75 to 80 percent of sexual child molesting is by people that the kids know. We just don't see most family violence as a crime because our image of crime is something out there. "Curiously, the Halloween sadist only comes out once a year," says Joel Best. "This makes the fear manageable. Parents can pour a year's fear into that night and then the next morning count the toes and heads and say, 'Whew, we made it through another year.' And then we ignore more important childhood safety issues, like the fact that nobody wants to pay to put seat belts in school buses or that nearly 10,000 children are killed in automobile accidents each year while auto manufacturers neglect safety."

• The bogeyman changes the texture of family life—particularly American conceptions of freedom. This is a tricky issue. Many parents mourn what they perceive as their children's loss of physical freedom; but other parents point to new childhood freedoms that did not exist thirty years ago.

"When I was a kid, I would leave the house at seven in the morning—I'd be out in the woods playing," said a father in the Overland Park group, Jack Hughes, who grew up on a farm in Kansas. "My stomach would get to where I had to come home and get lunch and then I'd be gone again until my dad whistled for me when he got home from work and it was time for supper. If my daughters were gone like that I would be—I wouldn't know what was going on."

"The cops would be here," said Mike.

"The thing I wonder about is, what's going to happen to these kids' sense of adventure? Will they have less, or will they rebel?" said one mother, Lora Beth. The group fell silent. She turned to Steve, her husband. "Tell them about the trips you took as a kid. I love the stories he tells me about those wonderful times. I can't believe it! His folks would give these wild, crazy kids a car...

Steve grinned at the memory, and said, "As soon as we had our driver's licenses we were allowed to take trips, camping trips mainly, by ourselves. Sixteen-year-old kids. And there would be four, five, six of us at a time."

"Tell them how far you'd go," said Lora Beth.

"Well we started out just going on short trips, but we ended up going to the Black Hills in South Dakota. And we ended up going to Yellowstone National Park. But we weren't that crazy. We developed our parents' trust and we never abused it."

"Do you think we'll ever let our kids do that?" Lora Beth asked Steve.

"I don't know yet," said Steve.

Another father said, "When I was in high school and college, kids were always thinking about putting on a knapsack and hitchhiking someplace. But my daughter has a little bit of skepticism about leaving home. She's a relatively brave kid, but she doesn't have unbridled enthusiasm about venturing out there. And I'm not sure I'd let her."

Curiously, children are not nearly as worried as their parents about their loss of physical freedom. In fact, I was often struck by parents' sense of grief—which I share—their loss, as adults, of their own innocence and freedom; their loss of adventure; their own loss of passion. So much of what we perceive, in the next generation, may be a projection of our own disappointment and frustration. We must take some care with our grief and our perceptions. They are more powerful than we know.

"I can't relate to any of this talk about freedom," said one woman in the Overland Park group. She had remained silent through most of the discussion about freedom and now she spoke suddenly, vehemently. "I think of my kids having much more freedom than I did. I don't know if it's being raised in the South or if it was my particular parents, but it was like pulling teeth to get my parents to let me go to someone's house or to have someone come over. When I think of my kids' freedom to call somebody, to be invited someplace, and me saying, 'Sure you can go.' That's the kind of freedom I think is being allowed. And I wasn't allowed that freedom."

Mike, the contrarian of the group, took her side. "I don't feel saddened, I don't feel bad at all that my kids are missing out on the kind of freedom I had. When I was a youngster I never had the rush, the adrenal pleasure of doing some of the things that my kids have participated in their young lives. Performing, dancing, doing something in front of 500, 1,000 people. Throwing, pitching, hitting, playing soccer. Doing these— being a hero. Gaining that self-esteem that we didn't have. I mean we may have had different freedoms, but so many more kids have so many more opportunities to experience that feeling of, 'Wow, I did something and it was good!'

When I mentioned, to several teachers, the perception of many parents that their children have less freedom today, the teachers were surprised. Yes, they said, they could see where children have fewer of some freedoms: many of the children in their classes are over-structured by their parents; but so many other children have a freedom closer to abandonment—the freedom to spend hours alone in an empty house, the freedom from role models. For many children, physical freedom is decreasing as their mental, psychological and moral freedoms are increasing. As described later chapters, children's physical boundaries may have shrunk, but their electronic and ethical boundaries are often more distant than their parents can imagine.

• The bogeyman syndrome decreases the strength of the best safeguard against crime: community. Children who do not feel physically free within a city surely have less opportunity to know it, feel a part of it, feel wanted by it, or eventually, to protect it.

Richard Nagely, government teacher at Franklin High School in Seattle, said, "This generation of kids has more psychological freedom, more options in life, than we did. But at the same time, they don't have the bonds, the bonding to the community, to society, or to family. And so freedom for them is double-edged."

"For blacks of my generation, there was less freedom, a lot less," said a physical education teacher at Franklin, an African American in his 50s. "There's more freedom now, but there were more attachments then, to the community. I admit I'm a '50s person, so a lot of my philosophy is dated. But I believe that all of the drugs, all of the stuff that we're going through now is because we allowed a lot of kids to have the freedom to make decisions that they're not capable of making, but they don't have the experience of living in a real community. I think where it's going to hit us the most is when these kids are in their late 30s and early 40s when a lot of pressure falls on them. I think they're going to have a real problem handling it alone."

Fear is reshaping the physical environment in which we live. Most developers no longer sell community, but instead, a packaged security, socially controlled environments—condominiums and planned developments surrounded with walls and electronic surveillance systems (where parents have no choice about the color of their curtain liners or whether or not they can hang an American flag on their balcony). One wonders how the children growing up in this environment of fear and control will define freedom as adults—and whether the forces creating this environment can be countered and eventually reversed.

"It's relatively safe to be in the world," says Richard Farson, head of Western Behavioral Sciences Institute in La Jolla, California. "But people are so afraid that they've let their communities erode. Fear is circular. In La Jolla, we no longer have a downtown community because we avoid the very thing that creates community—regular contact with friends and strangers. All of a sudden we have boutiques and iron bars. We don't need another dainty boutique, we need a family hardware store. That's what we need to run a community. Every time we lose community, other costs rise—for prisons, for psychological help. We should be going in the opposite direction: instead of putting kids on the milk cartons, and giving them fear, we should be building community."

• The bogeyman syndrome perpetuates itself. Though most Americans believe that the crime problem exists in somebody else's neighborhood, many parents are modifying their behavior based on the perception that crime is getting worse. Forty-one percent of parents avoid talking to strangers, and 41 percent avoid becoming friendly with people they meet if they don't know anything about them.

As trust diminishes, we find it more and more difficult to ascertain what is a valid fear and what is not, and what is effective protection, and what is not.

Indeed, the bogeyman is creating a Guns-R-Us society, a children's arms race. Barron's reports that the biggest new marketing effort is directed at women and young Americans; the shooting programs of the 4-H Club attracted at least 100,000 youths in the late 1980s, a tenfold increase in five years. Students are carrying more guns to school. Interestingly, while a 12 percent increase in armed children occurred in California during the 1980s, drug abuse declined 17 percent, sex offenses dropped 6 percent, and assaults with deadly weapons dropped 17 percent. These statistics suggest three possible explanations: One (highly unlikely) is that an armed school population somehow decreases crime; or two, that fear, aggressiveness, anxiety and the sense of helplessness among children (reinforced by parents and TV) causes them to react by arming themselves even though crime has decreased slightly; or three, that guns are trendy, like Reeboks. In all three cases, the bogeyman wins.

In Kansas, one teacher, a pleasant middle-aged woman told me, "I was standing in line the other day at the airport and a little kid was going around to look behind the counter and his mother said to him, 'Do you want somebody to snatch you? Don't walk away from me like that.' And here I'm standing behind them in line and I'm saying to myself, well, I really didn't look like a child snatcher." There was laughter and disbelief in her voice. "But we teach our kids so young to be aware of everything. They lose their time to be innocent. My seventh-graders have had to deal with situations that we didn't know about until we were adults. Teaching kids intelligent caution around strangers is certainly important, how to say 'no' to potential child abusers is essential. But we need to create a balanced view of danger. The damage that has been caused when you have families teaching their kids never to talk to another adult in a society where you desperately need more communication—what does that do to the kid?"

Ultimately, the bogeyman drives family life deeper into itself, reduces public trust, replaces real community with walls and gates, and isolates children. Ironically and tragically, the reduction of community and personal and public trust creates the kind of conditions which produce real-life Freddys. A black seventh-grader in Philadelphia, who made a show of being streetwise (though his desk was stacked with library books) offered this wonderful analysis of the power of the bogeyman: "I say if you worry about it too much that maybe you will lean towards it, like let's say, if you owe the mob money, and you walking down the street and you constantly looking over your shoulder to make sure nobody's behind you with a gun, and you never turn around, you constantly looking over your shoulder, they going to be in front of you while your head is turned that way. And then you going to run into 'em. So it's just like that."

It's time to face the bogeyman.

How do we appropriately confront our fears about childhood's future? Some truths emerged quite clearly from the interviews. One is that family time and family fear are directly related.

Another truth is that the best antidote to fear is action.

First, we can confront the fear psychologically within our own families. Second, we can do something within our homes, neighborhoods and communities to lessen the danger. The place to start is to recognize that we should be concerned for our children's safety, but that the bogeyman—at least in the form of stranger danger—should not, in the hierarchy of fears, be at the top of the list. There are other dangers and forces which should consume our attention. Instead of projecting so many of these fears onto a bogeyman who is out of their control, some parents take action on those safety issues closest to home, and this decreases their general anxiety.

When I asked stranger-danger expert David Finklehor what he considered the most important thing parents could do to protect their children, he touched the core of the Bogeyman syndrome.

"There are an awful lot of programs out there today trying to teach personal safety to children," he said. "But I honestly think the most important thing a parent can do is to have a good relationship with the child, a good, supportive relationship, because a child who has good self-esteem, good self-confidence, a closer relationship with the parents, is much less likely to be victimized. Our studies show that. Predatory people are not as likely to mess with them, because the predator senses that these are kids who will tell, who can't be fooled or conned. The studies show that most kids who are victimized are emotionally neglected, have unhappy families, or other deprivations."

There it was: the key. By focusing on building self-esteem and self-confidence in our kids—by spending the time with them that this goal demands—we give them an armor they can take with them wherever they go, through their childhood and adolescence and into their adulthood. An internalized armor.

The most important protection we can give them is our time.

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From Childhood's Future (Anchor Books) by Richard Louv. Richard Louv is Senior Editor of Connect for Kids and columnist for The San Diego Union-Tribune. He is also author of "101 Things You Can Do for Our Children's Future" (Anchor) and "The Web of Life" (Conari).

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