Sense and sensationalism | Bangkok Post: lifestyle

MUMMYSAYS

My heart breaks every time I hear about children being hurt or killed, either accidentally or intentionally, but it breaks even more when I see how some people grab the chance to stir the public's emotions.

Motherhood comes, perhaps inevitably, in the same package as mild paranoia. Every woman is afraid that bad things will happen to her child and when one hears horrific news about the fate of some stranger's child, the possibility of danger to one's own seems that much greater. Last month, a toddler drowned in the toilet at a daycare centre. A woman in the US, most likely mentally disturbed, microwaved her six-week-old baby. A newborn was kidnapped from a hospital. A one-year-old burnt to death during a house fire. All these incidents occurred within the space of a single month. What a wonderful world we live in!

Reading accounts like these in the various newspapers delivered to the offices of the Bangkok Post, my heart practically leaps out of my throat and I feel a compulsion to run all the way home and build a disaster-proof shell around my baby. The headlines are often graphic, describing how these poor kids died, what their dead bodies looked like and how traumatised the parents were. It is oddly compelling, this kind of news, and I find it hard to stop reading. The more I read, the more disheartened I become and then I read some more for some unexplainable reason.