No one is more susceptible to an expert's fear mongering than a parent. Fear is in fact a major component of the act of parenting. A parent, after all, is the steward of another creature's life, a creature who in the beginning is more helpless than the newborn of nearly any other species. This leads a lot of parents to spend a lot of their parenting energy simply being scared.I've been thinking about it a lot last night and this morning as I contemplate our recalled crib. There's no repair kit; the current owner of the brand is offering a rebate toward a new crib, which sounds great until you see how very tiny the rebate is. So here I sit, eight months pregnant (and arguably not thinking very clearly about the safety of my children), wondering what to do with a crib that is in all likelihood perfectly safe but has been recalled. Not to mention the borrowed crib in our room that is probably more than ten years old and therefore, according to the CPSC, should be destroyed. They don't even issue recalls for cribs over ten years because apparently we shouldn't be using them at all.
The problem is that they are often scared of the wrong things. It's not their fault, really. Separating fact from rumors is always hard work, especially for a busy parent.
Perhaps there should be a government bail-out for parents who have invested in a crib and now are being pressured to go buy a newer, "safer" crib because our kids may die any time we lay them down and leave the room. I suppose if we had an extra $300 lying around we'd just order a new crib, but I have to believe we're not the only ones who foolishly thought we could use one of the two cribs we already have.
Three hours to nap time...
