Safety Parenting

So where is the happy medium? Safety is obviously a concern for everyone but have you ever noticed how one person's concern is not another's? Of course you have. We all have our reasons for finding one thing more worrisome than another. Past experiences and current situations both effect how we perceive safety. Then we have our own ever changing emotions. What may strike fear in your heart one day may not phase you much a few short months later.

I figure you can go with the better safe than sorry view on just about everything or take a more wait and see approach. The better safe view is an awful lot of work though. It means walking your kids to and from the bus stop every day, never allowing your children out of sight in a store, attending every field trip, making sure no house they are ever in has any weapons, and for that matter that they never learn to play with weapon either! You would also want to be sure that they only ate free range, organically grown and probably vegan foods - those pop tarts are nothing but poison you know. Doesn't diet pop have chemical 'sugar' in it, but then the regular has far too much 'real' sugar. Any type of screen will completely destroy their minds and they should only be allowed to read non-fiction, we can't be filling their heads with nonsense fantasy!

Then you have the wait and see view. That is when you, well, just wait and see. Of course if it goes wrong then there may not be much left to do about it and that could be tragic. Wait and see people probably let their kids ride their bikes miles away and not check in for hours. I imagine they take them to the shooting range on Saturday and feed them a steady diet of pop tarts, hot dogs and soda pop. Naturally they'd be fine with playing video games for hours on end and would likely join in too.

So where do I fit? I guess I'm hoping to find that imaginary "happy medium" that most of us hope to find. I walk my kids to and from the bus stop just about every day, let them eat pop tarts at Nana's house and drink pop about once a week. On those frequent long rainy weekends I've been known to ignore the clock while they spend hours mindlessly in front of one screen or another - often with Dad by their side.

Of course while they are playing video games and eating a yogurt snack I can probably be found hiding out, shoveling in the leftover holiday candy that they have forgotten about and whiling hours away on the Internet under the guise of 'work'. Maybe some of us just don't quite get it. Or maybe we're hopelessly stuck in the 80's where the only thing our parents really worried about was kidnapping and that only happened in big cities anyway. Then again rationalization works too. Those video games do teach hand-eye coordination and some even have a lot of planning and thinking skills involved. Didn't we grow up on hot dogs and Jello with red dye? Look how we turned out!

I think the bottom line is that no one has the right answer, though a lot think they do! Those who think they do have all the answers are usually the better safe than sorry types who have no problem looking down their nose at your child with his Lunchable. (Hey they have NO idea what kind of morning you had!) The rest of us seem to realize that we are all in this together. We are all doing our best and we reserve the right to change our mind (frequently) because we admit we don't really know what we are doing. So while I may send my seven year old off to get pop tarts organic bananas, one day I may not let him out of sight the next day. Let's just hope the evil people are all home on my 'off' days. Does that make me a wait-and-see parent? Great now I have to rein them all in again and make sure they're safe! At least until they are driving me crazy on a rainy weekend and it becomes necessary to remove the batteries from all clocks and pretend not to notice they have been staring at a screen for over eight hours straight.