Cotton Wool Brains

On More4 just now was a show called Cotton Wool Kids. It's about parents, and children of parents, who think that the world is so dangerous that they simply can't let the kids out of their sight for even a second.

There's a guy who will stalk his son in his car whenever he lets him go anywhere (although he's rubbish at it), a woman who has conversations with her daughter that start "see that man? He's a stranger, isn't he?", and a woman who is having her children "chipped", like... God, I don't even know -- we don't even treat animals that way. Anyway, she's having GPS things put in them so she'll always know where they are and how deep the nasty man has buried them.

Partly it's just gullible, tabloid-trusting paranoia, which on its own is stupidity in such massive amounts that it's frankly verging on becoming a punishable crime, but as well as that it's the most god-awful selfish hypocrisy -- they were perfectly happy to run around free when they were kids, and let's not pretend their parents weren't at all worried, but now it's them doing the worrying and their kids' freedom at stake, suddenly now they flip into overprotective mode and keep the kids locked up where they can be monitored at all times by their parents and thirty-two satellites. All this, and the kidnappings they fear (largely on the back of one case that was almost certainly just the parents drugging the girl to sleep, overdoing it, and hiding the evidence) haven't actually got any more common in 20 years. Apparently. They want it both ways, and it's just selfish and stupid and pathetic.

I'm convinced they're busily wrecking any chance their kids might have of growing into useful members of society. They have good intentions, certainly, but so do the anti-MMR-jab whack-jobs and and suicide bombers, and they're all going to ruin and shorten people's lives. These people need to be fucking told.