Academic

?STRANGER DANGER? AND THE DECLINE OF HALLOWEEN: No child has ever been killed by poisoned candy. Ev?

By Glenn Reynolds

“STRANGER DANGER” AND THE DECLINE OF HALLOWEEN: No child has ever been killed by poisoned candy. Ever.

Halloween taught marketers that parents are willing to be warned about anything, no matter how preposterous, and then they’re willing to be sold whatever solutions the market can come up with. Face paint so no mask will obscure a child’s vision. Purell, so no child touches a germ. And the biggest boondoggle of all: an adult-supervised party, so no child encounters anything exciting, er, “dangerous.”

Think of how Halloween used to be the one day of the year when gaggles of kids took to the streets by themselves?at night even. Big fun! Low cost! But once the party moved inside, to keep kids safe from the nonexistent poisoners, in came all the nonsense. The battery-operated caskets. The hired witch. The Costco veggie trays and plastic everything else. Halloween went from hobo holiday to $6 billion extravaganza.

And it blazed the way for adult-supervised everything else. Let kids make their own fun? Not anymore! Let’s sign our toddlers up for “movement” classes! Let’s bring on the extracurricular activities, travel soccer and manicure parties for the older kids. Once Halloween got outsourced to adults, no kids-only activity was safe. Goodbye sandlot, hello batting coach! . . . We can kill off Halloween, or we can accept that it isn’t dangerous and give it back to the kids. Then maybe we can start giving them back the rest of their childhoods, too.

Read the whole thing.

Full post as published by Instapundit.com on October 28, 2010 (boomark / email).