Little League (Of Predators?)

Recently, the Little League in Tenafly, N.J., initiated a new rule: Any adult who wants to volunteer with the team has to get fingerprinted.

"It's time to make sure everybody's covered and we know the children are safe," the Recreation Department secretary told The Record. "It's something that a lot of towns in the area started instituting."

I'm sure they did. But there is an alternative, and it actually ensures safer kids all around. It is for parents to teach their kids "the three R's" of abuse — recognize, resist and report. That is, teach kids how to recognize what abuse is ("No one should touch where your bathing suit covers"), resist it and report it. And vis-à-vis the reporting part, parents should tell their kids that even if an adult makes them promise not to say anything, they should tell, and no one will be angry with them. Angry with the kids, that is.

This makes kids safer because now they know what to look out for and do in any situation. The alternative is to try to babyproof the world for them, starting with toilet seat locks and going all the way up to Little League fingerprinting. But that approach doesn't work for a lot of reasons.

First and foremost: The chances of an actual pedophile's having a police record are pretty slim anyway. So the fingerprinting isn't doing much.

More profoundly: The fingerprint requirement is based on the idea that everyone is guilty — in this case, of having skeevy motives to help out kids — until proven innocent.

But hey, what does it hurt to ask volunteers for their fingerprints if they have "nothing to hide"?

It changes the basic fabric of society from one of trust to distrust. It's the difference between the United States and the former Soviet Union.

That's a perverted way to think, and it is having a perverse impact on kids. In schools and organizations that require all parents to be fingerprinted before they can volunteer — even to chaperone a field trip — some parents are insulted. One dad said to me that after he tried to volunteer and was told he had to submit to a background check, "any inkling of wanting to help out was gone."

And then there's the problem of payment. Some places require parents to pay for their background checks, and not everyone can afford it. So much for parental involvement! It's being sacrificed to the idea that our children are in danger every time an adult is present.

Eventually, that fear morphs into something like this: My friend tells me that in her town, the middle schoolers on the cross-country team get out a half-hour earlier than the high-school team, so they have to wait in the park. The idea of tweens playing unsupervised in the park worried the school administration so much that one mom stepped forward to chaperone them.

You guessed it. She was not permitted to do this until she underwent a background check, even though she would be surrounded by about 10 girls in a public park.

When that's not safe enough, nothing is. The "nothing is" point is fast approaching.

Lenore Skenazy is the author of "Free-Range Kids: How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry)" and "Who's the Blonde That Married What's-His-Name? The Ultimate Tip-of-the-Tongue Test of Everything You Know You Know — But Can't Remember Right Now." To find out more about Lenore Skenazy (lskenazy@yahoo.com) and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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