I don't know if it is as much about perfection as it is about control. I accept that life has it's risks, even where my children are concerned, and not only would it be impractical for me to have tried to eliminate life's risks in my children's lives, but I feel it would also have deprived them of much functional knowledge they would need later in life to get by.

However, as a parent, I am responsible for the welfare of my children, and so it is up to me to discern what constitutes an acceptable risk, and what is going to be unacceptable. Based on desired outcomes, there are risks I am willing to subject them to, such as taking them into the mountains hunting with me, where I feel the opportunity for growth is significant enough to allow for the amount of risk I am going to expose them to. Then there are times when my expectation of risk is necessarily quite low, usually by restricting their activity in order to accomplish some other objective, such as the necessary social time I need to spend with my spouse once in a while, away from the kids. Under those conditions, I make arrangements to mitigate risks, and so my expectation will be that nothing averse would likely happen, and if it does, and it is because of a negligent act by someone in whom I placed trust and entered an agreement to compensate them for their supervision, then we will have words, even if the outcome is benign.

Have their been lapses in my own judgement/duty to control the risk exposure to my family? Yes, unfortunately I've discovered that I too am not perfect. It was a sad day for me. I was lucky that bad things didn't happen, but the fact remains that the unintended exposure occurred, and so I learned from it, and will not repeat the same mistakes. In the particular case where such a lapse might've ended with an outside party getting involed, I would like to think that, depending on the behavior I observe at the point of recovery, I would tend not to go off on a stranger right away, unless I was positive there was an imminent or progressive threat. That could be splitting hairs in some rare cases. A tough call.

I agree. I remember being out walking the dogs and finding a neighborhood child of about three years age standing in the middle of the road at about 10 pm on a cold night in my dark, semi-rural neighborhood, about a block from my house. I knew which house was hers, but I'd never met the parents.

I am usually quite decisive, but I recall a feeling of confusion and slight panic, not wanting to come within 10 feet of the little girl, lest the parents choose that moment to come bursting forth, and mistake me for a child-stealing pervert.

I needed to get her inside, and couldn't leave her in the road to go knock on the parents' door, but I dared not approach her. I began to sort of herd her back home from a "safe" distance, and, sure enough, just then the parents came out, scooped her up, with nary a word to me.

I see kids hurt all the time, sometimes from that moment of inattention, other times from sheer stupidity.

Truly constant vigilance is, in fact, simply impossible to maintain. The kids of obviously good, responsible parents do, indeed, still find ways to get hurt from time to time, and I've seen these parents tearing their guts out over it. I always make a point to offer a word of understanding at these moments. Knowing that we aren't judging them seems to help.

But propping a toddler up on a horse, letting a 10 year old run up and down the road in a four-wheeler, or not using an infant safety seat is pure stupidity. likewise keeping fighting dogs and toddlers, passing out and leaving your booze and pills on a low coffee table, and a seemingly endless list of equally Stoopid Parenting Tricks.

My all-time favorite, though: "Donut Day." A multi-gallon pot full of hot grease, a rickety folding card table, and a classroom full of excited kindergartners running about. Do the math.

Jeff

This seems like it's caused by our litigious and suspicious society. You don't want to be near the child for fear of what? Being accused of doing something, I guess. I understand that having received a suspcious look when noticing what seems to be a child left alone and asking. DW rouses less suspicion.

I also felt it once when I found an elderly woman who had fallen on an NYC sidewalk. I helped her, but was real glad when I got away from her without her knowing my name.

It might also be making our society more vulnerable, by isolating us from each other. Humans survive in communities.