On not worrying too much

This morning as I drove myself, the girls, and my Mom to the NYC Aquarium, I remembered aloud that the warning light had come on in the car on our way home from the airport the other day. My mom told me that my dad's car has had a light blinking for 5 years; when pressed on the issue, his response is apparently "well, nothing has happened yet." To which my mom and I said in unison and in the exact intonation, "because it's a warning light."

Truth be told, if I really look around my house, there are little warning lights everywhere. I often notice them and find myself thinking, just like my dad, well, nothing has happened yet. I read that column in Parents magazine called "It Happened to Me," and with two little kids, I'm all too aware that, like the people who send in their horror stories, everything is okay... until it isn't. Like the cleaning products on the floor of the bathroom that I will just assume Eleri can't reach- until one day she does? These are not lessons to learn the hard way. Now, I'm not a hovering parent. I really do think that children should be independent and learn to fend for themselves. And I fall very much on the liberal side of the debate over how much we should protect our children. For all these reasons (plus laziness and/or necessity), we never childproofed our home, Eleri eats things off the floor (as I have already confessed), and we occasionally allow Clio to play out front or back alone (we can see and hear her through the window or open door)--yes, in Brooklyn.

I love this recent piece on Salon.com by the author of Free Range Kids, titled Stop Worrying About Your Children. The author drew the ire of the news media a few years back when she allowed her then-9 year old son to ride the subway. Alone. In the essay, she very convincingly makes the argument that, essentially, we are a generation of parents that has gone insane with worry, partly because of the disproportionate and sensationalized coverage in the media of crimes involving children. (Kind of like how you would think we were a nation of serial killers based on the number of books, TV shows, and movies that feature them and the people who hunt them down.) She argues, with some statistics, some common sense, and a lot of self-effacing humor, that kids today are about as safe as we were growing up back in the 70s- perhaps safer, since there have been so many improvements based on new understanding of our environment and its risks- car seats designed on the results of crash tests, sophisticated vaccines, and (arguably), purell.

At the same time, there are dangers that are not self-evident in every home. To Eleri, the reflective, black surface of our oven door is a mirror; not only would she like to look at herself in it, she would like very much to touch that reflection, and she has no way of knowing that it might be hot. Do we condition our children away from these wolves-in-sheeps-clothing? Tell them no! until they don't go near that one "mirror," though others are okay? (How confusing). Or do we let them learn the hard way? I am reminded of a story from Marni's family: Her sister Andi was apparently a biter, and one day, when she bit their mom Max, Max just bit her right back. And Andi stopped biting.

For toddlers and preschoolers, there are many dangers that are also beyond comprehension, unless experienced. Once she got comfortable on the stairs, Clio became careless, and Dave and I waited with bated breath for the day she would fall down them; finally, she did, when she reached down for a toy that she had dropped to a lower step. Luckily, she was not hurt, just a little shaken up, and now she understand the force of gravity a little bit better, and will carry that knowledge into future experiments.

So how do we protect our children just the right amount? Obviously we don't want to create an unsafe environment, but if we over do it on safety at home, don't we set up a false sense of security, leaving them vulnerable to all the "normal" dangers out there in the spheres they will experience that we cannot control?

And what about all the chance occurrences that no one can predict, much less control? Earlier this year, my younger brother and his wife lost their first child, at birth, to Trisomy-18, a chromosomal disorder with essentially no survival rate. Before he was born, when they knew something was wrong but not how devastating it would be, I said something stupid to my brother: odds are, the baby will be fine. Because risk (and reward) is often calculated in ratios with such a big number on one end, it seems impossible that we could be the one on the other side of the equation. But that's the thing about odds: someone has to be the one. Someone is the exception that makes a rule safe for the rest of us. In Rory and Nicole's case, the number was one in 6,000, and the odds do not feel fair. We can't make sense of this, and the loss will take a long time to work through; but at the same time, we can't do anything to prevent such a tragedy. We can't live our lives as if we are the one in every, or maybe even any, case.