Parental fears

John Podhoretz captures something of what parents of young children today feel as they hear all these warnings of potential risks for their children. Despite living in the safest age of all history for young children, American parents are being fed a seeming steady diet of stories about possible dangers out there. And, even though we can compute the average chance of something happening to our baby, it's still too scary to ignore the potential risk.

It's human nature. Parents are anxious about their children, and when there is no immediate threat to their offspring, their anxieties will seek out something else to worry about. A potential threat may be more anxiety-provoking, in a way, since it causes no worrisome symptoms that can be treated.

The insidious quality of these potential threats is that the putative consequences will appear years if not decades later, like an invisible and silent ticking time bomb.

Reports about these possible hazards represent a new kind of voyeuristic bad news. It used to be said, "if it bleeds, it leads." In other words, acts of violence were news.

Now the mere threat of potential injury to children is news - because parental anxiety gives such stories exactly the kind of addictive kick that the news business desperately wants to generate in its audience.

And then there is the fact that even a skeptical and relatively new parent like me can't just dismiss these worries out of hand, the way I did before I had kids.

If my wife announces we need to replace our infant daughter's bottles with ones that were made without bisphenol A - even though the new bottles cost five times as much as the old ones - how could I disagree? The threat, say the experts, is "minimal" - but am I willing to accept even a minimal threat if I can afford to avoid it?

It's the parental equivalent of Dick Cheney's "1 percent rule" as regards terrorism - that we need to treat a threat with a 1 percent likelihood of success as though it were a certainty.