As a parent, I can tell you with great assurance that there is nothing in the world that frightens me more than the possibility of something terrible happening to my children. That of course goes double for my granddaughter, because anything that happened to her would hurt doubly by also hurting my daughter.

We used to treasure our children in this country. We used to understand that they were tender and vulnerable, and we used to do what we could to protect them from the nastiness of the world for as long as we could. Even as a society, we used to understand that just because a child had bad parents, it didn't mean they should lose out on whatever chance for a happy life we could give them.

Of course, times change.

Our society has become a colder, less generous place for children to grow up in. Some of what we do is out of selfishness or meanness, complaining about high taxes and cutting programs that benefit children, but some of it is out of a misguided sense of what freedom and modernity mean. Believe me, some of the stuff kids are exposed to on television now is stuff adults couldn't have seen in movie theaters sixty years ago.

We coarsen the culture and we sexualize our children. America was shocked at Christmas 1996 by the murder of 6-year-old Jonbenet Ramsey in Boulder, Colorado, but almost equally shocking to some people were the pictures of this preschooler competing in beauty pageants made up and dressed up to look like a miniature bombshell.

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Every decision we make comes with a price. Remember Spencer Tracy as the Clarence Darrow character in "Inherit the Wind:"

<em>"Madam, you may vote but at a price. You lose the right to retreat behind the powder puff or your petticoat. <strong> </strong>Mister, you may conquer the air but the birds will lose their wonder and the clouds will smell of gasoline."</em>

Folks, you can sexualize your society and enjoy all sorts of freedom, but don't be surprised when your children grow up too fast and the coarseness of life sickens you.

In that same play, based on the 1924 Scopes Monkey Trial, the H.L. Mencken character is told that you can't say "God" or "hell" on the radio. I'm pretty sure that ban on "hell" and "damn" lasted through a good part of my childhood. These days you can say almost anything, especially if you fiddle with it a little. You can call someone an "a-hole" or you can say something is an "effing" mess without getting into trouble, but everyone knows what you mean and life gets just a little bit more coarse.

I remember contributing to that coarseness in a small way myself without even meaning to. When I was visiting friends in 1990, I was watching television with their 7-year-old son. I heard a noise, and I asked him, "Did you fart?"

He denied it, and I told him I had heard him.

"Oh," he said. "I passed gas."

I smiled. "That's also known as farting," I said, and he stored the knowledge away for future reference.

Two years later, his dad accidentally dropped a couple of "f-bombs" around my children. We all make mistakes, and in the end, all we can do is love our children and try to keep them innocent for as long as we can.

What brought this on?

Actually, I thought about this because I'm frightened for a friend of mine. Jeff Malet, a friend and former colleague in California, posted on Facebook that his 15-year-old niece has been missing since Friday. No one know for sure the reason yet, but these days, there are so many things that can happen to a child -- or even a teenager -- away from the protection of friends and family.

I told Jeff I would pray for his niece, and I will.

I wish I could do more.

It's a helpless feeling, because so much of what has gone wrong with our society is so far beyond the ability of any of us to correct.

And that's the most frightening thing of all.