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Baby: Taking risks, responsibility, and a society grown on fear
Wed, 17 Jan 2007

We've all said it, but maybe it bears repeating -- too many people are either opportunistic or stupid (or both), resulting in all those completely frivilous lawsuits that sometimes pay out. You know the ones - you hear about some jackass who will sue some entity or person when really they just did something stupid. How soon until someone goes after the city due to tripping on sidewalk cracks? The problem we have is not only is this expensive on the system, but out of fear the cities will no doubt invent crackless-sidewalks, or rubber-sidewalks.. at enormous taxpayer cost. Anyway, this instinct to sue makes organizations sometimes overly cautious.. all bad for advancement as a society. It breeds corporations into a culture of lawsuit defence, which can be benefitial, but is it where we want to spend our energy? Anyway.

I write today because sometimes it annoys me when I think about how paranoid people have gotten with respect to their kids, and how other people and organizations will prey upon those paranoid people. Ex: Many sources suggest 'baby mirrors' are actually a bad thing, but really.. they should never have been invented, and paranoid people should know better than to buy them. (A little mirror system to make it easier to see your baby while they're tucked in the backseat of your car; to wit, the baby mirror can become a projectile in an accident, and really.. should you be watching your baby when you should be spying on the road? Just as bad as the cellphone I say..) Example the second: Bouncy-chairs for babies have seatbelts now, since some tiny percentage of children got hurt, likely due to silly parenting or bad luck. Most likely bad luck. Ex: We're all guilty of using training wheels on a bicycle, but maybe thats not so bad. Ex: Bicycle helments as a legal requirement.. another toughy -- saving the medical system costs, or frivilous?

Either way -- when I was young we let physics teach children lessons -- if you biked too fast, with no helmet, no training wheels, and wiped out.. well, you learned not to do it like that again. Sure it hurt a little (and I had some winners!), but you learned both physics, and how to not be stupid.

With all this technology to protect companies from lawsuits (not really to protect people as you might assume), we're really just building a society that is scared -- a generation of wussies.

How are we to expect to return to the moon, or to head to Mars, or do anything halfway interesting really, when our kids aren't allowed to go to the park and play without 50 parents standing in a circle around them? Will they take the dive and start a new company to produce some cool gadget, when they've been raised never to take risks, or that someone would always be there to run to?

While we will for sure take good care of our future child, we'll try not to go 'too far' and over-protect the poor thing .. sometimes you need to let a knee get skinned, don't you?

(I have worried for months about what we will do the first time our very own child comes home with a bloody nose; I know every parent will come down and crap on me for this posting, but I do not suggest letting your kid run willy-nilly around.. but I just mean -- lets not teach our children fear, lets teach them to have spirit and take calculated risks.. or even to just take a jump shot once in awhile.)

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