April 24, 2005
BILLIONS AND BILLIONS SERVED (via Tom Corcoran):
The Fever Swamp: “Don’t You Want to Be Prepared?” (Meghan Cox Gurdon, April 22, 2005, National Review)
I don’t want to sound unpatriotic, and I realize that this is not a wildly original point, but there is something creepy about how risk aversion has become a kind of unofficial American creed.It’s creepy in the way that it has crept stealthily into our national life, and creepier still in its sinister, innumerate, fear-fanning, joy-squashing effects. There have been days lately when I have caught myself wondering aloud, “Can we really be the people who settled the Great Plains?”
Spend a few hours at the park and you’ll hear the endless gull-like cries of fretful parents and nannies: “Don’t climb so high! Watch out with that stick! No running! No pushing! Don’t get on the slide until everyone’s off it!” Of course children can get hurt, but really, they usually bounce. Go to a swimming pool and it’s all, “No running! No diving! No jumping! Stop splashing!”
When Paris went recently to his pal Emma’s 8th birthday party — “Laser tag, wow!” — he came out cheerful and sweaty but slightly crestfallen. “It was fun,” he told me, “but not as exciting as I expected. We weren’t allowed to run or jump, so everyone just walked around slowly, shooting each other with beams of light.”
The next day Molly returned from a field trip to a D.C government office and informed us that a new municipal regulation requires children to wear protective headgear when…sledding! To grasp the full craziness of this rule, you must understand that we get sled-worthy snow maybe three times a winter — at which point school is invariably cancelled due to the peril of slippage — and that Washington, D.C. is not exactly Alpine. Them thar hillocks is hazardous, m’am! Them moguls is downright deadly!
It seems a no-fun approach to life to me, but then I come from a generation that knew not the steel-reinforced child car seat, the bicycle helmet, or that antibiotic gel that conscientious mothers rub on their toddlers’ hands when they’ve been playing in a sandbox.
The Wife and I have a fairly basic theory when it comes to fretting over stuff that could happen to the kids and whether we're fulfilling our parental duties: there have been 10 to 12 billion humans born and raised so far--many, if not most, to idiots--it just can't be that hard. Posted by Orrin Judd at April 24, 2005 5:10 PM
It's the kinda thing that's easily overthunk.
Posted by: ghostcat at April 24, 2005 6:29 PMHere in rural Utah you see considerably less of this. Every other house has a trampoline in the backyard, and kids go zooming down the street on ATVs sans helmet all the time.
My theory as to why parents are less uptight here: they have lots of kids. If they lose one, well, there are five or six more at home.
The above is not really fair, what I really think it is is the confidence (or resignation) that comes with experience. When you have a dozen kids (our babysitter is the seventh of 14)you have already seen your kids survive all sorts of things.
Posted by: Jason Johnson at April 24, 2005 8:57 PMOne nice thing about all the safety rules, our kids have far fewer trips to the ER with their kids than we did. In today's world, we'd probably be arrested as child abusers with all the scrapes, cuts, bruises, etc. our kids managed to get into.
Posted by: erp at April 24, 2005 9:33 PMNot allowing children to run when playing laser tag is excessive and silly, but wearing protective headgear isn't. I have a trampoline, but it has a net around it, and the children have to wear soft karate sparring helmets when more than one is on the trampoline at once. That way, they have fun and get exercise, but they're less likely to be permanently disabled or dead as a result of knocking heads as they jump.
Do some reading on traumatic brain injury, and perhaps take a refresher course in probability and statistics, and maybe it won't seem so silly that some of us place a high value on each and every child's life. Imagine your child's head being slammed by a sled carrying a larger child down a hill - is that a pleasant image?
Restricting children to the point that they can't do anything is excessive, but wearing protective headgear isn't, once you've looked at the cost of trying to recover from brain damage. The years of therapy, the constant fights with insurance companies, the fear that other children will make fun of your child because she's different, the knowledge that your child will always have to struggle and never be what he could have been.... and that's only if you're lucky enough that your child survives.
On a strict cost/benefit basis, given the probabilies and expected costs involved, you have to place a pretty low value on your child's life to decide that protecting her brain isn't worth a $30 helmet.
Posted by: Mom at April 25, 2005 11:16 AMIt was pleasant when it was my sled and my brother's head.
Posted by: oj at April 25, 2005 11:28 AM