I think the problem here is what are you supposed to do with very low probability really bad events. I.e. your kid being kidnapped or similar. The probability of this extremely low, but it is unimaginatively bad. Therefore any small thing you do that will reduce the chance of this happening may seem reasonable. It is not clear to me how to think about this rationally.

▲

bemtevi 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Part of the way to think about it is that you simply can't control such events. We never could and we never will. Trying to do so is a losing game for temporary psychological comfort only. I think the key is that the "small things" that you do are unlikely to actually reduce the probability in practice.

▲

alex43578 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Stranger kidnapping is an extreme black swan, but there’s plenty of more realistic scenarios where tracking could mitigate a bad outcome. Kid gets off the school bus at the wrong stop: found in minutes. Kid is riding bike, falls and knocked out: found easily.

There’s a ton of rare, negative scenarios where risk reduction is so cheap and easy that you’re silly not to do it. Car accident deaths are about 1 in 100 million miles driven, you certainly can’t control other drivers, but not putting on a seatbelt is stupid.

▲

graemep 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Kid gets off the school bus at the wrong stop: found in minutes.

if they have a phone they can call for help. before mobile phones they used payphones.

> Kid is riding bike, falls and knocked out:

Unless its somewhere very lonely, someone sees the kid, calls emergency services, who contact the parent. I do not know how this works in the US where you pay for ambulances though.

	▲	SoftTalker 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's the same. Ambulance gets billed to insurance, if they don't have insurance then it's written off (actually just everyone else pays more).

▲

bemtevi 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That is true.

▲

_doctor_love 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't know that it is possible to think rationally about things like that. It will always be a challenge for parents.

IMHO the key question is: what do you with that fear? If you let it rule you, there is a high risk of becoming such a controlling and overprotective parent that the child never gets the real-world experience that they need in order to survive.

I have seen many real-life cases of parents who were way too overprotective, out of a motivation of love and concern. But it really hurt the children because while they were kept safe, they hadn't developed a lot of street smarts. By the time they then ended up in college, they were a ripe target for predators.

Timeless problem faced by probably every halfway decent parent that ever lived.