MARY WAKEFIELD
Like so many parents, I’m a panic junkie
a packet of Mini Cheddars and set out to
drive myself mad.
And if I wasn’t in some sense looking
to be scared, why would I sweep past the
reasonable advice from reputable sources
explaining that secondary drowning is rare?
Why would I just keep going until I found
a worst-case scenario?
‘I don’t want to alarm you, but...’
Jackpot. The really good stuff is almost
always to be found on Mumsnet, usually a few
comments from the top of any thread. ‘I did
hear about someone whose child drowned
two weeks after falling in the pool. He seemed
fine afterwards but then sadly he passed
away (unhappy face).’ Terror lives in the
alimentary canal: dry mouth, tight chest,stomach sick with dread. No wonder, as the
Times reported recently, that babies in the
womb are affected by their mother’s panic.
Then after the Googling comes the sec-
ond stage of parental hypochondria: the
wild-eyed staring at your sprog in search
of symptoms. Was that a rattle in the lungs?
Did he just turn down a biscuit? Are his
hands cold? Drowning. Sepsis. Meningitis.
Scarlet fever. I’ll pack the bag for A&E.
In Greece a few weeks ago, Cedd climbed
under the restaurant table to give a cat a
chip. It swiped at him and a few small beads
of blood appeared on his head. Cat-scratch
disease! Put the phone down, said my hus-
band, please. He’s more likely to be hit by
a meteorite than die of cat-scratch disease.But I couldn’t. And in the days that followed,
until secondary drowning replaced CSD,
I was quite sure that every patch of heat
rash and every sniffle was a sign of its onset.
In London, especially N1, I see my fel-
low panic-junkie mums everywhere and it’s
a consolation to me, if not to John Mars-
den. You’ll know us by the way we flutter
around our children offering them too much
choice, often between things they can’t pos-
sibly understand: ‘The quinoa, darling, or
the escalope of chicken? Darling? Answer
me! Why aren’t you hungry? Do you have
a fever?’
We all have our particular poison. For
some (not me) it’s a hygiene thing — ‘Don’t
touch that sweetheart. No. Oh God. Come
here. I’ve got the antibacterial hand gel.’ For
others it’s vaccines or climbing in the play-
ground: ‘Careful, careful, careful.’ Me, I’m a
sucker for a rare disease. When my son was
just a few days old, I became quite convinced
that his lightly pointed ears meant he had
some terrible condition. I feel ashamed now,
and angry with myself on behalf of parents
whose children are genuinely unwell.
So can’t we be persuaded to man up?
We’re educated, rational people — can’t
we somehow tailor our level of hysteria to
fit the actual risk? At midnight on drown-
ing day, I did read one helpful thing in the
sea of enabling disinformation online. It was,
I hope, a wake-up call.
Last year three emergency doctors —
Schmidt, Sempsrott and Hawkins — wrote a
report about ‘the myth of secondary drown-
ing’ and it was so very clear and conclusive
that even I couldn’t just dismiss it. All the
stories and worries online — even those in
reputable newspapers — were nonsense,
said Schmidt and co. In fact there is almost
no such thing as secondary drowning. What
became a global parental panic stemmed
from a single highly publicised case of
a Texas boy who died one week after get-
ting a dousing in shallow water. The autopsy
later showed that the poor boy didn’t die of
drowning at all. He had a dodgy heart and
died of that. But word had got out and word
snowballed on through the internet, passed
from mother to hysterical mother.
All those wasted hours of worry. I hope
I remember next time.O
n that record-breaking, sweltering
day at the end of July, my three-
year-old son did a pirouette in the
paddling pool — ‘look at this Mama!’ —
then tripped, slid under the surface and lay
there on his back staring up at me through
two foot of water. I was in the pool too,
just an arm’s length away, and it seemed to
me that I did nothing for ages. I had time
to think: he looks so calm. Why isn’t he
moving? And, why am I not moving? Then
I had hauled him out and we were splutter-
ing on the grass.
When he could speak, Cedd was more
proud than scared: ‘I can go underwater!
Did you see?’ But I felt the first stirrings
of a familiar fear. There was clearly no
reason to worry. He was fine. Children are
forever sinking in baths and swimming
pools. But the words ‘secondary drown-
ing’ had appeared in my mind, and a half-
remembered news story — something about
a boy who died of water in the lungs a clear
week after a light dunking...
An Aussie called John Marsden has
recently written a book called The Art of
Growing Up, about the blight of over-anx-
ious middle-class parents like me, both in Oz
and across the West. We worriers are toxic,
says Marsden, not just for ourselves but for
our offspring, who pick up on it all. ‘The
scale of the problem is massive. The issue of
emotional damage is pandemic,’ he told the
Guardian last month. ‘The level of anxiety in
kids is something I’ve never seen before and
I don’t know how it can be improved.’
He might start by understanding it from
the parents’ perspective, and I don’t think
the solution is as simple as telling us all to
get a grip. My feeling is that we’re some-
how addicted to the panic. We’re fear junk-
ies, enabled by iPhone, just as wedded to our
habit as other junkies are to smack, but with
less awareness of the danger.
I knew quite clearly on that paddling
pool afternoon, for instance, that I should
nip the whole secondary drowning non-
sense in the bud. I knew that if I began to
Google the possible after-effects of sub-
mersion, I’d quite soon be near-demented
with pointless terror. But anxiety has its own
magnetic pull. I couldn’t help it. I parked
the kid in front of The Lion King with
He’s more likely to be hit by a
meteorite than die of cat-scratch
disea se, said my hu sban d‘He’s crashed out.’