"When I look back on all these worries, I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which had never happened." ~Winston Churchill
A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that the American Pediatric Association has come up with new guidelines, again, for child car seat regulations. Don't get me wrong. I am all about child safety. I could go on about how back in my day we sunbathed on the ledge in the rear window, sat on our dads' laps so we could steer, or watched the road while straddling the hump, and I could assert that I'm still alive, so what's the harm in letting the kids bounce around the backseat every once in a while? But I won't because I know that such commentary would be stupid. Small kids are, as a general rule, safer in carseats than not.
But let's just face it. The issue of child safety has shot right past reasonable and into the realm of the absurd.
My grandmother raised eight children--seven of them boys. She used to say that the only way she could maintain her sanity was to not watch everything they did. I'm not recommending that we all throw caution to the wind and just let our kids go free range, but I think there is something valuable to be taken from Grandma's attitude. The truth is, whether we are watching or not, whether we have taken every precaution known to science or not, bad things could happen, and dwelling on the negative possibilities just isn't healthy for anyone.
The older I get, the more I am starting to believe that our corporations, lawmakers, and medical professionals rely on parents to harbor irrational fears about the safety of their children. Why? To sell more stuff, of course.
You know, stuff. Like carseats. We hear all the experts telling us the whats and hows and whys of carseat rules, such as never borrow another person's carseat, kids need to be in (up to three!) different carseats over the course of their childhoods, kids must be the size of the Incredible Hulk before they are large enough to ride without a carseat, and the latest I've heard is that the "sun breaks down the plastic" and makes the carseats unsafe, so we need to buy new ones every three years. I have two kids who are 18 months apart and both in carseats, so this means that I am apparently supposed to buy like 6 to 12 carseats over the course of their lifetimes, and at at least $100 a piece (because you know, the more you spend, the safer your child will be). That's an awful lot of money. Someone is getting bloody rich off of this.
I'm not really one to blame capitalism for all the world's ills--that's my husband's job (love you, honey!)--but I think some kind of Che Guevara vibe has rubbed off on me because today while I was shopping at Target, I just about got downright angry while walking past the breast pumps. And I'm not even pregnant. These things cost a fortune. Women are expected to have babies and work outside the home and pump breast milk lest they be shirking their maternal responsibilities to a child's health, and apparently they also have to spend an arm and a leg in order to properly fulfill their motherly duties. You're not supposed to borrow a breast pump--God no!--not even one that has been sterilized. In fact, your own breastmilk could make your kid extremely ill unless you buy new tubes and gadgets for them every once in a while.
And the cribs. I know, I'm a jerk for suggesting that maybe we've gone overboard with the cribs. But it seems as if every five years there is another reason that we can't hand our cribs down to family or friends, another reason that used cribs are deadly. I have a crib in my basement that is in perfect condition. I keep it out of some superstition that the minute I part with it, I will need it again. And by the time I am ready to give it up, it will likely have to go straight to the landfill because I won't be able to sell it or even give it away because the sides drop and someone could get killed. I just don't want that on my conscience.
If you let infants sleep on their stomachs, they will die of SIDS, so you need to buy a special sleeping contraption that will keep them from flipping over (my son just kicked his way out of the dang thing). Using plastic bottles could kill them, so toss all your Playtex Drop-Ins and get glass. While you are at it, you have the wrong type of bottle nipples and your kid is going to choke. You need a monitor so that you can hear them from the next room. And since you're already dropping half your paycheck at Babies-R-Us, you might as well also invest in a leash.
Listen. We are allowing our wallets and, more importantly, our mental health to be raped. Not only have parents been frightened into thinking that they need to consume more and "better" stuff than ever before, but they are being told that once they are done with it, they can't share it. So now we have more people who have more anxiety, who are taking more pills to cope with the fear, who are buying more Chinese made plastic junk designed to allegedy save them from said anxiety, who are helping to put more Americans out of work because foreigners are willing to manufacture said junk for pennies an hour, and who are polluting the earth more than ever when they throw everything in the garbage (and pee out the antidepressants into what eventually becomes our drinking water).
I'm not a conspiracy theorist; I swear. I don't think the U.S. planned the 9/11 attack and I don't believe in a "New World Order." But something inside just can't help but wonder who is paying the lawmakers and the doctors to bully us into being the ultimate consumers. There is no price that can be put on the safety of any child. But maybe there's a point at which we need to acknowledge that we are not 100% in control of everything that happens, we don't have to allow ourselves to be controlled by the hype, and 99% of everything that we worry about never happens anyway. Worry is, more often than not, just time wasted that could have been spent enjoying your kids. Not to mention that interacting positively with your kids is free of charge.
Or maybe I'm just overreacting. Excuse me while I go research my next carseat purchase.
