Monday, January 16, 2012

When parental protection goes into overdrive

Let’s talk about balls.

Balls and sticks and rocks and holes and puddles and pills.

Also scissors, and matches and strangers and stairs and the sun and the night and cliffs and cellphones.

And don’t forget hockey pucks and horses and loud bangs and bugs and bacon and stoves and sugar and fish hooks and Facebook.

Yes, they’re all potential dangers for children. And yes, browsing the web will yield true stories, I’m sure, of catastrophes involving a child and any one of these things. Search engines are cruel; not only do they remind us of our lack of originality, they fuel our fears of the perils everywhere, anywhere: the front yard, the frying pan, the fish bowl, every crevice our foolish forebears once thought innocuous. Thank you, Google, for making parents’ protective instincts go berserk. So much for what you don’t know won’t hurt you.


Read the full story here.

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