Choosing between risks

I'm still thinking about risk. I needed to go to the post office today and pick up a parcel. The baby was asleep in the back of the car having just dropped off after a slightly troublesome night. I needed the parcel but was loathe to wake her.

The road outside the post office has three lanes of traffic and is just after a bend that cars often take too fast. The parking bays are on the right hand side of the car and the baby sits in the back on the left hand side. So I had two choices if I was to pick up my parcel: leave her locked in the car, which was visible from the post office or take her with me but get her out of the car with traffic zooming past me on a busy road.

I took her with me of course. But I did wonder for quite a while what to do. Truth is I suspect taking her out of the car was more dangerous than leaving her in it alone, with an accident more likely than an abductor. Perhaps it is because I am a journalist though that my brain works in headlines. Mother Leaves Baby in Car would be worse than a headline about a road accident.

I was of course influenced by the fact that she was asleep. Any parent knows that sleep is sacrosanct. I have an image of a cartoon in my head in which a mother holds a sleeping baby while the house is on fire. "Come on," says the firefighter, "we need to get you out of here". "Later" says the mother, "She's just fallen asleep."

But where do you draw the line when it comes to risk? If you are buying petrol and you need to go to the kiosk to pay, can you leave your child in the back of the car? At ten years old? At five years old? At ten months old? I have always done this at the petrol station yet wouldn't outside the supermarket. What about if you need the loo when you are out shopping? Can you ask a stranger to watch them much as you would your bag or coat? I would not dare just in case the worst happens. Yet what is more likely - she is abducted by that stranger or she gets ill from licking the toilet floor as she sits in the cubicle while I pee?

Raising a child is about gradually allowing them the independence to weigh up and take risks. I'm fine with that (until she wishes to do as I did and backpack around the world alone anyway). But goodness me the risks we take with them are many and the chances we take are abitrary.

Related posts:
The risks you dare not take
Searching for lost children
My baby, my daemon

The risks you dare not take

I've been thinking about the cases of Ben Needham and Madeleine McCann again. Both happened when the person looking after them took a risk. Ben Needham played outside while his grandparents were inside. Madeleine McCann was asleep in the holiday apartment while her parents had dinner a short distance away. 

And I've been thinking how easy it is to judge them for this but also how easy it would be to do the same. There are some evenings when the baby is asleep and I am home alone when I think I could really do with picking something up from the corner shop, or posting a letter, or feeding next door's cat. And I think to myself that the baby is asleep and will probably be asleep when I get back, and that even if she wasn't she's safely in her cot and can't get out. 

I never do of course. Fear of fire and abductors and foxes and dingos and fits and choking and me being run over or locked out all prevent it. But I think it would be easy to do, and once you had done it successfully it would be easy to do again, going a bit further, staying out a bit longer. And what I think about the Needhams and about the  McCanns is just what poor poor people, paying such a horrendous price for taking such a small risk - one that I reckon we've all considered, and one that because of them we'll now never take. 

Related:

Searching for lost children
My baby, my daemon