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America’s children face far graver dangers than parents realize. Journalists, politicians, and advocacy organizations reiterate that conclusion incessantly. One way they reiterate it, as we have seen, is through stories about sexual predators in churches, schools, and cyberspace. Another is by asserting that children face huge hazards that the public and policy makers have failed to appreciate.

A front-page article in the sports section of the New York Times told the story of young Scott Croteau of Lewiston, Maine, cocaptain of the football team and reportedly the most popular student at his high school. Possessed of good looks and straight-As, Scott was being recruited by Harvard and Princeton at the time he hanged himself from a tree and then shot himself in the head with a revolver. “Suicide,” the Times reported, “has become one of the major causes of death among American teen-agers, following automobile accidents and homicides.” What is particularly disturbing, said a public health expert quoted in the piece, suicide by young people “is a virtually unrecognized national public health problem.”1

Or consider a page-one headline in the the Washington Post: “Prescription Error Claims Dad’s ‘Angel’–Mistakes on Rise, Pharmacists Say.” The story told of little Megan McClave of Hampton, Virginia, who was given medication by her father upon her return home from having her tonsils removed, went to bed for the night, and never woke up. “Pharmacists say their jobs are becoming tougher, and mistakes more common,” reports the Post, “because of the rapidly increasing number of medications hitting the market every year and the new generic equivalents for older drugs.” At some large-chain stores and bulk prescription services pharmacists who fill hundreds of prescriptions a day may be overworked, and as in Megan’s case, dispense the wrong pills.2

Reading this stuff, most parents undoubtedly think my child could be next. But need they? On closer reading, the evidence journalists amass in support of the supposed trends seldom turns out to be overwhelming. “Medical experts say that although a mistake as serious as the one that killed Megan is extremely rare, prescription errors are not as infrequent as commonly believed,” was the best the Post could muster. The Times at least gave some scary-sounding statistics in its story about suicide : the incidence of teen and young adult suicides nearly tripled between 1952 and 1992, to 1,847 in 1992.3

Those numbers can be read, however, in a considerably less alarmist way. At the conclusion of a forty-year period during which increases in the divorce and poverty rates, decreases in investment in education and counseling services, and the advent of AIDS put more stress than ever on American adolescents, about 1 in 10,000 saw fit to end his or her life. I do not want to minimize their tragic loss, but the numbers pale beside statistics for other threats faced by teens. One in nine goes hungry for some part of each month, for instance, and the number of hungry young Americans increased by half between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s.4

That suicide is the third leading cause of death for teens—a startling fact that the media repeat early and often in stories about kids who take their own lives—also warrants a moment’s reflection. Adolescents are unlikely to die of cancer, heart disease, or HIV Those leading killers of adults generally take years to progress. Fortunately, we live in a period and place where, unlike most cultures throughout history, the vast majority of people survive to adulthood. It is far from surprising that those young people who do lose their lives fall victim to immediate causes, which is to say, accidents, homicide, and suicide.5

The trend in youth suicide actually has been moderately encouraging in recent years. Nationwide, an all-time high was recorded in 1988, and since then the rate has stabilized, even decreasing slightly in some years. In the 1990s some locales experienced substantial increases that were widely reported in their local media,