Safe, Not Sound

By ROBERT WRIGHT

My wife and I must be caring parents, because we've been sent "the catalog for parents who care." It is called Perfectly Safe and is devoted to creating "the perfectly safe home." It offers, for example, a venetian-blind-cord shortener (so your child won't inadvertently hang himself) and a plastic "safety film" to put over windows and glass doors ("For use during hurricanes too!"). The catalog also gives you the opportunity to "Lock out 'toilet tragedies' with Lid Loc."

It is amazing how many things you don't realize you need until you get a catalog featuring them. My wife and I had never even discussed toilet tragedies, much less formulated a viable strategy for combatting them. And consider the Tub Rug, a temperature-sensitive bath mat on which the words TOO HOT! appear under appropriate circumstances. It is almost embarrassing to admit, but we had been using a system, devised during the 19th century, in which a parent feels the water and, if it's too hot, says, "Too hot!"

Don't get me wrong. Parents are free to spend as much as they want to cut the chances of tragedy from very near zero to very, very near zero. Still, I do believe this child-safety business is getting out of hand.

The Perfectly Safe catalog is the least of it. Lid Loc won't scare a kid half to death, which is more than you can say for some other attempts to remove the last scintilla of risk from human experience.

Exhibit A: A coloring book from the police in Montgomery County, Md., warns children, "You cannot tell if a stranger is dangerous by the way he or she looks. A dangerous stranger could look and act like a very nice person." The accompanying drawing is of four adults who look like the neighbors in an old Dick-and-Jane reader, among them a well-dressed elderly woman.

Now, a young child's chances of being abducted by a well-dressed elderly woman are about the same as those of being snatched by a low-flying eagle. And, for that matter, a young child's chances of being abducted period are not much higher (especially if you eliminate cases involving custody disputes and other family feuds). Yet to stave off this peril, we're giving kids coloring books that have the psychological impact of the 1950s movie Invaders from Mars, in which the child protagonist learns that anyone--next-door neighbors, even the police--may be a robotic Martian convert.

Naturally, the several school shootings in recent years have propelled safety extremists to new levels of productivity. The Associated Press has reported that "many" schools are supplementing their fire drills with "bullet drills," in which children duck and cover on command. Will this save a single life? Probably not. Will it teach some six-year-olds that the world is a dark and terrible place where gnawing dread is a logical frame of mind? Probably.

Much of the problem here is our cognitive machinery for gauging risk. Human beings evolved in societies of 40, 50, maybe 100 people. In those groups, if you saw a mother sobbing that her child had been carried off by a wild animal, it meant your child faced a real risk. So, apparently, the human brain evolved to take such reports seriously. But today Americans live in a society of 250 million people. If you turn on the TV and see a mother sobbing that her child has been abducted, it means nothing of statistical significance. Still, you instinctively pay attention, and you probably feel alarmed.

How to relax? Start by recalling the core definition of news: that which is new. The less common a tragedy, the more likely it is to lead the nightly broadcast. Last winter, when you turned on the TV and saw footage from the school shooting in West Paducah, Ky., you could find some consolation: if this sort of thing had much chance of happening at your child's school, it wouldn't be the lead story.

True, the fact that it was the lead story helped make such shootings more likely in the future. And two other school rampages--in Jonesboro, Ark., and Springfield, Ore.--did occur. Even so, the chances of such a tragedy visiting your neighborhood remain minuscule. You'll know it's time to worry when your newspaper stops covering school massacres that happen outside your region.

In America life expectancy is at an all-time high. Yet 63% of children ages 7 to 10 are worried about dying young, according to one study. This is not as paradoxical as it sounds. We have lengthened the human lifetime by declaring war against risk on fronts ranging from medicine to car design. And wars make people painfully conscious of the enemy.

Consider the current movement to have school-age children fingerprinted just in case the police-department coloring books fail to thwart abduction. Ever try to fingerprint a seven-year-old without having her ask why? (She might even ask a more troubling question: How likely is it that a fingerprint would help you locate an abducted child?)

The war on risk has scored many successes, and I don't want to be ungrateful. But as more time, effort and money go into the crusade, bringing increasingly marginal gains, you have to start wondering: Is all this safety worth the fear it brings?