This post from razorart reminded me of a conversation I regularly used to have with parents who brought their non-swimmer children to the municipal pool where I was a lifeguard. It went something like this:

Me: "Hi. I just rescued your child. The shallow end gets deeper than you might think. Your son got in over his head, and he began to drown."

Parent: "Oh. Can he go back in?"

Me: "All parents who bring their children here are required to supervise them at all times. Since your child is a non-swimmer, you must be in the water with him in order to supervise him properly."

Parent: "You mean I actually have to get in the pool? I can see just fine from where I am."

Me: "Did you see your child drowning a few minutes ago?"

Parent, defensive: "No, but I wasn't watching just then."

Me: "Exactly."

Parent: "Well, what are you lifeguards here for, then?"

Me: "We're here in case of emergencies. Our regulations require that parents supervise their children at all times so that we can keep emergencies to a minimum. Look, I'm not here to argue with you, and it's important that I get back to my post. However, I will tell you that the rules are not optional, and if you would like details on the reasoning behind them, my manager would be happy to talk to you. In the meantime, please wait at least 10 minutes before going into the pool with your child. He needs to rest for a bit, because—as I mentioned—he was drowning a few minutes ago."

Last month, a friend of mine who has been living in Tunisia wrote about Americans' obsession with safety. I think he raised some good points, and I think it's probably true that the average American parent is relatively safety-conscious. Does it go too far at times? Sure. Risk management procedures these days often have less to do with preventing accidents than preventing lawsuits, and on a more individual level, there are certainly parents out there who are overprotective.

At the same time, I'm coming at this from a different angle. I worked in parks and recreation every summer from age 14 to age 24. Most of that work was at a YMCA camp, where I was a junior counselor for 3 years, a counselor for 3 years, and an assistant program director for 2 years. I worked at the municipal pool where parents tried to drown their children for 2 years, and I was a program director for a day camp in Santa Monica for another 2 years. (If you're actually doing the math and are confused, I worked at both the pool and the YMCA camp one summer). During that time, I came to believe in three basic principles:

Kids will fuck themselves up. Even under the best of circumstances, accidents will happen. Kids will fall. They'll swallow things they weren't supposed to swallow. They'll get poison oak, they'll be stung by bees, and they'll run into each other. Some things are inevitable. However,

Kids who have help fucking themselves up will fuck themselves up worse. Let the five year-old with anger management issues draw with a sharp pencil, and she will use it as a weapon at some point. Leave a nail sticking out of a wall, and someone will get caught on it. That nub from the old horseshoes pole that's still in the ground? Some poor kid is going to fall on it and end up with a huge gash in his side. Anything you do—or fail to do—that makes injuries more probable will make those injuries more common.

Parents are idiots. All parents are not idiots. In fact, most of them are not so bad. That doesn't matter, because there are still a whole lot of idiots. They're a veritable army. Those of you who have ever worked retail will know what I'm talking about: 90% of your dealings with customers in a given day might be unremarkable, but the other 10%? Hooboy. Seriously, I'm sure I could find parents who would act surprised if I advised them to stop letting their kids eat broken glass.

And that's why I'm all for hyper-awareness when it comes to things like child safety. The rules and regulations might seem overwhelming; they might be overwhelming. If you work for a childcare organization, the documentation of safety procedures required by your insurance company might be excessive. Still, until common sense becomes far more common than it actually is, we'll just have to keep codifying it.