The Jacob Wetterling Story: Are Parents Too Cautious? (Part 2 in a 5-Part Series)

Experts say it’s no accident that increased time by children in front of electronics corresponds with increased awareness about abductions.

Here’s a non-controversial statement: Kids these days spend too much time online and not enough outdoors. But parents know where their children are, a sense of security that was denied Jerry and Patty Wetterling in the years after their son, Jacob, was snatched by a pedophile on Oct. 22, 1989.

Stearns County Sheriff John Sanner once said that “Jacob Wetterling’s abduction in 1989 ended an age of innocence for central Minnesota and beyond and had a dramatic impact on how parents raised their children.”

The dilemma for parents is real, and potential consequences for kids dire.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children’s screen time should be limited to two hours per day. However, recent studies find that most kids today exceed that amount on a daily basis.

A study by the University of California, Los Angeles found that kids are spending more time than ever in front of screens and concluded it may be inhibiting their ability to recognize emotions.

About This Patch Special Report

Today, we offer our second installment in a five-part special report about the abduction and murder of Jacob Wetterling and other missing children in Minnesota and the Midwest

Previously in this report:
The Jacob Wetterling Story: What Went Wrong (Part 1 in a 5-Part Series)

The sixth-graders in the study self-reported that they spent an average of more than four hours on a typical school day texting, watching television and playing video games.

The amount of time kids spend indoors, sitting down, staring down at a screen, is an almost offensive notion to a country inspired by characters in books like the “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “Little House on the Prairie.”

A 2015 commercial from nutritional bar manufacturer Nature Valley titled “Three Generations” adequately portrays how children's sedated lifestyles feels like an affront to how Americans understand childhood. In the commercial, an interviewer asked three different generations of people the same question: “When you were a kid, what did you do for fun?”

The ad starts out with light, joyful piano music playing in the background while various people in their 70s or 80s nostalgically describe their childhood as if it had been something out of “The Andy Griffith Show.” They talk of berry picking, growing watermelons and plantains, building toboggans and encountering bears while fishing.

Answers from people in their 40s or 50s also reflect a more innocent time when kids went door-to-door and recruited their neighbors for games of baseball and hide-and-seek and built massive forts that offered endless hours of fun.

The light, melodic piano music that has played throughout the ad stops when children are asked what they do for fun. “Video games,” replies a young boy, emphatically. “I like to go on my phone,” says another. “Text,” says a young girl. “Email.” A third boy chimes in: “My favorite thing to do in the world is watch videos and play video games. Those take up so much of my time.”

The message of the ad is obvious, if not overdone. Today’s children spend an unhealthy amount of time indoors, glued to their electronic devices, isolated from the world.

And who’s to blame for these sedated, low-energy kids? The ad implies that if most parents knew how much time their children spend indoors, staring at screens for hours on end, they would put a stop to it immediately.

But is that true? Or do parents today prefer and encourage their children’s sedated lifestyles? And what role does the state have in this?

Daily headlines provide reminders about parents who’ve been hit with felony neglect charges after letting their kids play alone in the backyard. Parents who encourage their kids to play unsupervised outside as much as they did 30 or 40 years ago risk being charged with a serious crime and being labeled a “bad parent” by neighbors and colleagues.

The phenomenon is, at least in part, a parental response to the child abduction cases that gripped the nation in the 1980s and early 1990s, including the disappearance of Jacob Wetterling.

Parents can hardly be blamed for taking precautions. Thanks to increased societal awareness, better law enforcement and advances in state data collection, parents know that child abductions, drug and human trafficking are crimes that go on in their own communities.

But it’s questionable whether keeping kids indoors all day, and prosecuting parents who don’t, is actually making us safer.

According to a 2013 Washington Post article written by David Finkelhor, the director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, several deeply embedded myths in our culture wrongly inform our collective understanding about what does and does not keep kids safe.

“The notion of a stranger grabbing a child off the street occupies a prominent place in popular fear,” Finkelhor says.

“But the missing-children cases that rise to the level of news tend to distort perceptions of how often children go missing and why. It’s important to sort out the myth and reality about missing kids.”

Child Abduction Myths

• Myth: “Most missing children have been abducted by strangers.”

Stranger abductions, Finkelhor notes, are fearsome because they appear random and so often involve rape or homicide. “But children taken by strangers or slight acquaintances represent only one-hundredth of 1 percent of all missing children. A comprehensive study estimated that the number was 115 in a year.”

• Myth: “More and more children are going missing.”

In reality, Finkelhor says, that data and studies indicate that the problem of missing children has been improving.

Many state missing-children agencies show declining numbers of cases, and FBI statistics show fewer missing persons of all ages, down 31 percent between 1997 and 2011. The number of murder and sexual assault cases involving child victims is on the decline as well.

Finkelhor cites the prevalence of cell phones, more aggressive laws and prosecution of sex offenders, and prevention programs and response systems such as Amber Alert as reasons for the steep decline.

• Myth: “Prevention lies in teaching children to avoid strangers.”

If you grew up in the wake of the Jacob Wetterling case in the early 90s, a phrase you probably heard routinely, from both parents and teachers, was “never talk to strangers.”

However, Finkelhor says it’s doubtful that this advice helps at all.

“Everyone's a stranger at first; it’s all about the context of the meeting, and that’s hard to convey. But we do know that children are vastly more likely to come to harm and even be abducted by people they know than by people they don’t. We’d do much better to teach them the signs of people (strangers or not) who are behaving badly: touching them inappropriately, being overly personal, trying to get them alone, acting drunk, provoking others or recklessly wielding weapons. We need to help children practice refusal skills, disengagement skills and how to summon help.”

“We need some new prevention mantras,” Finkelhor adds.

Up Next in This Series
Before Jacob Wetterling was abducted, two other boys in the Midwest — both newspaper carriers who were abducted almost exactly two years apart — were the first children whose pictures appeared on milk cartons, the early version of the Amber Alert.

• The Jacob Wetterling Story: America's First 'Milk Carton Kids' (Part 3 of 5-Part Series)

Photo of Jacob Wetterling via MissingKids.org, used with permission