There is a conversation I have had with my mother many times since the birth of my first child four years ago. The basic outline goes like this.
Mom: "Wow. What's that for?"
Me: "It makes [insert an activity] safer."
Mom: "Really? But I didn't have anything like that and you survived."
In the beginning, I rolled my eyes. I would say, "Mother, this is progress. This is better. These are the products we have now because people have done research and learned more about keeping children safe in the tub, on a bed, in the car, on a bike." (With a fox and in a box? Probably.)
Me: "Aren't you glad we have this now?"
Mom: "I'm not sure."
At the beginning of my fifth year of parenthood, I'm not sure either. Now I wonder if these are the products we have because our consumer culture, driven by the goal of absolute safety, has lost an understanding of acceptable risk.
Like reasonable doubt, acceptable risk seems a bitter pill to swallow. Who would not prefer certainty to doubt, safety to harm? I can hear the chorus now: Why should we take any risks with our children? My answer: By trying to protect them from everything, we're handicapping them.
Somewhere between the development of successful immunizations for childhood diseases and the invention of the plastic baby bathtub, we as parents became too certain that if we do everything right, we are guaranteed a safe and healthy child. We have become too confident of our control. We've forgotten that we take risks every day. For example, I understand I'm not supposed to put my baby to sleep on his stomach, but is this more or less dangerous than putting him in his car seat? Certainly driving in a car is risky. Maybe each action has exactly the same level of risk, in which case, if I choose to put him on his stomach, which he vastly prefers, then perhaps I'm taking no greater risk than if I strapped him into the car and drove to the grocery store. I've asked several pediatricians this question; all have avoided answering.
Now that I've brought up stomach-sleeping (the chorus is no doubt shaking its head), I'll also confess to being the only mother in the city square who didn't buckle a helmet on her toddler as she learned to ride her tricycle, let alone the knee and elbow pads I'd seen on other kids. To ride a tricycle! At the time, my daughter was barely thirty-four inches tall. I didn't want to hamper her with so much safety equipment that she couldn't feel the joy of pedaling. And that's the essence of my concern: I worry that this generation's children are losing a sense of adventure, resourcefulness, even, yes, a healthy sense of danger because of our obsessive fretting about their safety.
When my father was a boy, he regularly followed the river behind his house out to the Long Island Sound in a small boat with only an outboard motor and no navigational equipment. Now he marvels at the recklessness of it, but he always tells the stories with a sparkle in his eye that reveals he wouldn't have wanted to grow up any other way. When I was a girl, I was allowed to ride my bike--alone and helmetless--around our neighborhood streets. I was given boundaries to stay within and told to be back by dinnertime. Safer than my father's adventures, but still well outside the bounds of what many parents are comfortable letting their children do today.
But I loved those rides! I used to try to get lost, just as I did every summer in Connecticut when I was allowed to wander in the woods around my grandmother's house. She'd given me a book, Jennifer's Walk, about a little girl who goes on a walk in the country by herself one morning, sees lots of beautiful and interesting things, then retraces her steps home, where her mother is waiting for her with lemonade and cookies. I still have the book and read it now to my daughter. The other day I told her that over the lemonade and cookies on the last page Jennifer is going to tell her mother about all the things she saw on her walk.
And then it occurred to me: Do we control our children's stories too much with our omnipresence and our safety precautions? In the parenting world I know, Jennifer's mother would have taken that walk with her. She would have slathered Jennifer with bug repellant, warned her away from the sharp thistles, and probably helped her over the stone wall. There wouldn't have been cookies at the end of the walk because her mother would have packed a juice box and snack to eat along the way.
If each generation is reining its children in more and more, what are the stories our children will tell their starry-eyed offspring? It took me longer to strap on all the protective gear to ride my scooter than I spent actually riding the scooter!
It's possible some of the better stories will be told by families new to this country. There is a Russian family at the end of my block, the children of which are allowed to play in way that looks a lot more like childhood circa 1970 than what most of the mothers I know could tolerate. The kids ride their bikes and play in the street relatively unsupervised. A couple of my friends have told me about the same phenomenon in their neighborhoods--one knows a couple of Somali families placed here by the International Rescue Committee, another has a next-door neighbor recently arrived from Beirut. The common denominator is a more relaxed approach to child safety. The kids walk to the corner bus stop alone. And why not when you've come from a part of the world where danger is much more tangible?
Our town must seem like Eden by comparison.
So why doesn't it seem that way to those of us who've been here all along? Why did a mother I know receive a nine-paragraph e-mail from a neighbor in her homeowners' association berating her for letting her boys play outside alone--in their yard? Much of our society lives in conditions of historically unprecedented safety and privilege, yet far from feeling more comfortable, parents today seem driven further toward the hysterical belief that everything can be made safe. Our stores are filled with products--gates, baths, locks, seats, wedges, cuffs--the production and marketing of which fuels the sense that the goal is within reach. But here's an irony. We might think we're being good parents if we buy lots of safety equipment, but much of the equipment is designed to do a parent's job: hold a baby in the tub, keep a baby from falling down stairs. Thus the actual work of safety is done by the product, not the parent.
Which brings me back to my mother. The rest of the conversation?
Mom: "Well, you know what I did. I just [held you, watched you, warned you, gave you all the information I could]. I trusted you."
Me: "I know."
I think I too often say to my daughter, Be careful. Not too fast. Don't fall. I know how much a scraped knee hurts. But how much will it hurt her in the long run if I check too much her impulse to fly? At least sometimes, I try to bite my tongue.
