Confessions of a modern mom

“You don’t have to make yourself neurotic, but the one time you don’t do it is the time something bad is going to happen,” she adds. “You don’t want to look back at life and say, `I can’t believe I didn’t do that.’ Those are things that are going to haunt you.”

Still, it’s a standard daunting enough to make a modern mother shake her head in disbelief — or cry.

“We have so many rules that make people feel guilty about things they shouldn’t feel guilty about,” says Fran Silverstein, 36, a New York City attorney who has handled child neglect cases. She personally rolls her eyes at the anti-TV zealotry proposed by experts and lets her 16-month-old toddler watch "Sesame Street." “As long as they’re not watching constantly, I don’t see what’s so wrong with it.”

No perfect parents
“There is not a parent alive that is perfect,” agrees Jackie Lebihan of Petaluma, Calif., who has been scolded for letting her two children hang off a shopping cart. “You do certain things that you’d said you’d never do, to get through the day. You aim for the big stuff, and you have faith the little stuff will work itself out.”

Lebihan, 35, believes parents should be able to use their judgment to take a calculated risk without so much second-guessing. “We need to have enough discernment as a society to recognize true negligence, and to differentiate it from parental shortcomings that pose no real harm to a child.”

The problem, according to Kimberly Thompson, an associate professor of risk analysis and decision science at Harvard’s School of Public Health and director of the KidsRisk Project, which analyzes risks to children’s health and researches strategies to reduce them, is that we are generally bad at assessing risk. We believe nothing bad will happen — especially if we’ve done something before with no repercussions. And we place far too much emphasis on worrying about things that are far-fetched but get media buzz, such as car-jackings with babies in the car, compared to the basics, like wearing seatbelts and washing hands.

“People have to understand, it’s a conscious decision. Every time you do something, like leaving a child alone in a bathtub, you are making a choice, and you won’t know what the consequences will be,” Thompson says. “Can you live with the uncertainty of the potentially bad outcome?”

A cautionary tale
Sadly, for every 99 instances of life-as-usual, there is always a worst-case scenario that comes to pass.

Tracey Hoyle, of Charlotte, N.C., will never forget the time she left her 5-year-old twins parked in her landlord’s driveway and briefly stepped inside the house to pay her rent. Her son somehow put the minivan in reverse — and she watched in horror as the car almost rolled into a pond.

“My children were scared to death, and so was I,” recalls Hoyle, 35. Now, “I'm obsessive about everybody getting out with me — no matter what. We have all done it, and I’m here to tell you, it’s not worth it.”

But Carolina Busse of Plainfield, Ill., says that as a single mom of three, she has often been forced to “color outside the lines.” She recalls leaving her children home alone, her 9-year-old supervising the sleeping 5- and 7-year-olds, to run out for cold medicine for her asthmatic son.

“When you don't have a husband to send out or to stay home with the kids, you have to do things like this,” says Busse, 42. “Just make sure you're smart and take precautions.”

“You check that the doors are locked, you run to the store. It’s reality,” she says. “The question I used to ask myself, how am I neglecting then, running out 5 minutes, and aren’t I endangering them more [by] waking them and running out in 20-degree weather?”

Busse believes scare tactics and paranoia have overtaken common sense. “Tragedies will happen, even if you take every single precaution,” she says. “There’s a point where you go, `Am I going to worry myself sick over it — or enjoy my children and my life?’”

Melissa Schorr is a Boston-based freelancer who has written for the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe Magazine, Reuters Health, Working Mother, Self, GQ and People. She is the author of the young adult novel "Goy Crazy."

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