Counterintuitive

"A Surprising Risk for Toddlers on Playground Slides," headlines the New York Times.  Surprising to whom?  To the childless editors?  To parents who haven't yet remarked that the more you hover over your children the more likely they are to get bashed up?  The answer:  to adults who have failed to notice that their own bottoms do not fit well in kids' slides, much less their bottoms plus their kids' parts, some of which [SPOILER ALERT] tend to get broken on the way down.

I've been watching my kids throw themselves down slides--straight slides, curly slides, head first, butt first, top, bottom, what have you--since they were first able to scootch around a playground, and not just my kids, but hundreds of others, day after day, and I can't recall a single kid-alone-on-slide accident.  It seems the designers of these devices (at least the ones intended for small children) have thought some about what happens when a body accelerates down a declined surface and--get this--have specifically designed them to prevent that body from flying off the end, falling off the side, or generating excessive amounts of friction en route.  I am not surprised that some parents don't think of this when weighing the dangers of the device, but what does surprise me is how often a parent, having just observed one of my babies safely navigate a slide on his own, will compliment me on that baby's boldness and then, minutes later, insist on accompanying their own at-least-as-large-or-larger kid on that very same slide.

It seems to me that many of our protective instincts in general, and perhaps most especially when we function as parents, run counter to the goal of real safety.  It's a hard lesson to learn, but a harder one not to.