Captain Kangaroo's New Gig?

Mar 1, 2003 12:00 PM, Larry Anderson, EDITOR

Have you seen those shopping carts at the grocery store that are shaped like trucks or racing cars to make children want to ride in them? Why is it that every experience in life has to be cartoon-ized for children? Whatever happened to children adapting to the world at large instead of vice versa?

Now we hear word that the Denver airport is experimenting with so-called kid-friendly passenger screening. They have designated a special lane in which “screeners talk to the kids, give them a sticker with a smiling face, and use hand puppets to entertain them as they go through the metal detector,” explains James M. Loy, U.S. Under Secretary of Transportation for Security. If secondary screening is necessary, screeners ask children to stand on special mats that “feature cats and dinosaurs and use a fuzzy ‘caterpillar’ that wraps around the hand wand, thus making it more friendly.”

In the process, are we demonstrating to our children that a security checkpoint is play-time?

Airport screening should not be ominous or scary to children, but it should be portrayed as something important and serious … not trivialized.

And here's how your tax dollars are being spent: If successful, the program at Denver International could eventually be in place at all of the nation's 429 commercial airports!

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