Opinion: Fear of Momo? Read this.
By Elizabeth Bruenig Elizabeth Bruenig Opinion columnist focusing on politics, religion and morality in public life. Email Bio Follow Opinion columnist March 6 at 3:04 PM News of a fresh threat to children exploded on social media last week.
But despite all signs of the phenomenon being a hoax, fear of Momo persists. In the New York Times, John Herrman observed that “screens and screen time are a source of endless guilt and frustration among parents today, and it makes sense to need to displace these feelings on a face, a character, and something, or someone, with fantastically evil motives.
What all of these episodes of child abuse share is parents’ excruciating realization that they somehow delivered their children into danger — or failed to protect them. Onlookers tend to charge parents in these situations with stupidity, or negligence or even malice after the fact. But that all seems arrayed toward the cause of imagining that abuse could never happen to smart, vigilant, loving parents. And that simply isn’t true.
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