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It is a wonder I survived childhood.

Ain't that the truth. I look around and, yes, many of the things we did 30+ years ago (wow, I'm old) had more than a little measure of danger in them. I got bloody noses from dodgeball; I jammed a lot of fingers playing basketball and volleyball and got smacked in the face with the ball a few times; I fell off swings onto hard ground and flipped my bicycle landing on my head. A favorite neighborhood activity was jumping off a seven foot concrete block wall onto the street below. (What were we thinking?) We all survived and, more importantly, we learned from the times when someone did something stupid and/or got hurt. That was an important life lesson that I fear we're removing from our children's lives.

It's so true. Our kids are shielded from so much of what our childhood contained, that it's like another world. If all these thing were really so dangerous, none of us should have survived to adulthood, and yet most of us have. I had a lot more skinned knees than either of my boys has experienced. Our bikes were basic transportation, with the resultant falls and skinned knees. Our roller skates were the key variety, which had the tendency to fall off when we hit cracks in the sidewalk. When I think about the trees we climbed, it's a wonder we didn't fall out more often and break our necks, but we didn't. I only knew one classmate who ever broke a major bone falling out of a tree, and we all climbed trees and metal monkey bars.

Our experience of recent weeks is that part of the whole safety thing is not just fear of mortality, but fear of medical bills. Our 10 year old son has recently learned not to jump from high places onto hard surfaces and not to get too close to his brother's swinging bat. These encounters have resulted in bills to our insurance company to the tune of nearly $6,000 and co-pays for us of ~$250. All that to diagnose a bone bruise to the heel and place 2 stitches over the eye. Sigh.