Our society has changed significantly over the course of my lifetime. When you say album to a teenager, they think of something you put those outdated analog pictures in. Use the term LP and you get a blank stare.
The list of similar examples is endless in all aspects of life, and it's actually a little bit fun to try to think of a few, but today I'm talking about children and the fact that sometimes we may be going a little bit overboard.
Medical Standards
The push for natural childbirths has always been there from some segment of society, but a C-Section wasn't always a last resort and in fact for my mother it was the recommended route from prominent doctors.Today, the fear of fetal alcohol syndrome or other unknown affects of minor alcohol usage has changed things to the point where a pregnant woman having a sip of wine in public will draw hard stares, area-wide gossip, and it wouldn't be far fetched for a complete stranger to interrupt her to provide a lecture.
For my parents' generation, a glass of wine or perhaps a cigarette every evening was a common recommendation as a method of relaxation. And yet, here I am, healthy and perfectly normal.
If you go back a few generations, the standard of medical care and advice that pregnant women received ranges simply incorrect to the downright scary. And yet, my grandparents made it through their childhoods. My parents made it through theirs'.
Our children will laugh when we tell them about our prenatal care and advice. The latest and greatest innovations that we experience if we are lucky will become commonplace for their generation. We (most of us) have faith in medical professionals and accept that their daily practice is the result of experiences and studies laid out over the course of the last 100+ years.
What we forget is that the technological innovation that we take for granted on a daily basis and the standards for studies and experimentation that are currently implemented are all relatively new.
It wasn't that long ago (post 1950's) that the U.S. government was running a public sterilization program based on medical studies that would be laughed at on any college campus today.
Sure, the doctors know more than we do, but talk to any mid-wife or doula for any length of time and you will find a measure of skepticism regarding the recommended medical standards in practice today.
Home Safety
I don't remember much in the way of home safety precautions being taken when I was a child, though I'm sure Mom might have some input.
In my home, we have safety latches on drawers, magnetic keys on cabinets, safety gates, a fence around the pool, and the list goes on. We had a professional child safety guy come out and install all kinds of things because we didn't want to make potentially egregious mistakes ourselves.
It was much more basic for my childhood - keep the pill bottles and cleaning supplies on a top shelf, block access to the stairs. Of course, eventually the parental units always turned to the children to open the overly complex pill bottles.
And yet, here I am. I do have a few scars from my childhood, but they are from injuries I sustained well past toddler-hood that would have happened if I grew up in a rubber padded room.
In the Car
Car safety standards today take a lot of joy out of being a kid. I didn't have a DVD player in my car - they weren't invented yet. A TV of any sort would have been an extreme luxury.
I did have the opportunity to sit in grandpa's lap and steer the car, slide and bounce all around the back of a, pickup truck on bumpy roads, and to hang out on my almost permanent childhood perch between the driver and passenger seats leaning into the front seat so that I could participate in anything interesting going on in the front of the car.
I got to dangle my feet out the window, and occasionally my head pretending I was a puppy dog enjoying the wind.
And yet, here I am.
My kids won't even get the opportunity to ride in a regular non-booster seat until they reach a ripe old age and are nearly able to obtain their own driver's permits. For road trips, they won't be playing license plate bingo. Instead they'll be strapped into a five point harness watching the same DVD over and over and over.
FUD and the 80/20 Rule
Life for children has improved safety-wise, but it isn't any more fun. Some things have changed with good reason. Some things have changed because of good target marketing.
There is a now common marketing principal known as FUD - Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt - that plays out considerably well when you are target marketing parents who have the best interests of their children in mind.
If a parent can improve the odds against a given injury from 99% to 99.5%, they'll do it. Especially if they can do it at a cost of under a hundred dollars with minimal disruption to their daily routines.
In the computer programming world, we do things a bit differently. We have the 80/20 rule - if a problem occurs less than 20 percent of the time, it probably isn't worth the time it takes to write software to resolve the problem.
We can take that kind of cynical or lackadaisical approach to a lot of things in life, but our children simply do not fall under the umbrella of things that we want to or are willing to take a risk on.
Are you taking things too far?
You are taking things too far. You worry about too many things that probably will never happen. You worry about things that will definitely never happen, and you take action so that you can be certain with at least two adjectives (absolutely positively certain).
You are no different than your mother or your grandmother, or your great grandmother. It's motherly to worry, to have unreasonable concerns, and to take overly protective actions. Given the tools, the knowledge, and the financial ability, your parents would have owned all of the safety items you currently do and they would have followed all of the same advice that you have followed.
But you really should relax a little bit. That big mistake that you made - the one you were sure was going to earn you the "bad parent of the year" award and get Child Protective Services knocking at your door - that mistake was made by our parents' generation regularly, and it is made by parents every day all across the country.
Our kids will survive not because we are so concerned about their safety, but despite our misguided efforts.
I am not advising that anybody disavow safety rules, stop following medical advice, or fly against common community standards. I'm just saying that we all should worry a little bit less and enjoy our children a little bit more. Our role is not to merely prevent serious injury to our children, it is to shape the future of the world, to give them the best possible chance to succeed, and to guide them through the best years of their lives. Don't focus on fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Focus on love, enjoyment, and on every tiny little moment that you spend with your children. This time will be gone before you know it.
Discuss And Yet, Here I Am
