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.