Livre d'Or

For the avoidance of doubt, I'm personally very in favour of freedom over safety. And I think if you're happy to put your child in a car (which pretty much everyone is) the freedoms that have less risk than driving your child down the road ought to be embraced for all that is good about them.

But... while I don't want to fall into a classist trap of 'white middle class English people with one or two children Really Love Them, and other people don't' - children have been loved throughout history and cultures - I do think the cost of children is strangely high in this society - particularly in direct parenting time, but also in the effect that maternity leave has on careers, and the increasing materialism - and families are smaller. I think also we manage to reduce risk and pain from other bits of our lives as adults much more than in other cultures. And that's before thinking about how judgy we are as a culture - the pain of losing a child is always great, but must be very different in a community that sees that as something that Just Happens Sometimes, than in a community that thinks you Messed Up, and the loss was a consequence of that.

I guess, the decisions of how to manage risk are always cost-benefit, and vanishingly small risks that come with great costs are hard to judge well. Pregnancy and food are a very obvious example of this, and a very similar thing - there are very small risks, quite big behaviour modifications that you can make to mitigate the very small risk, and a world where 20% of pregnancies will end in miscarriage anyway, most with no obvious cause. And yet nearly everyone follows the food laws.