Back in the days when I was responsible only for myself, I’d commute to work and often just goggle. So many people had, individually, got themselves out of bed, washed, dressed, to a station and on to the right train. The level of collective competence seemed staggering. These days, the feat of someone getting to the office on time and not naked seems like child’s play. Now I stop and goggle instead at other people’s offspring.
Not because they are doing anything remarkable, but because they exist. Serious accidents have not befallen them. They have, somehow, survived. Their carers have miraculously managed to keep them going all the way until now. It seems endlessly astonishing.
In my limited experience, looking after a toddler is like living in a nonstop, real-life version of Final Destination, albeit a happy and rewarding one. For those unfamiliar with the films: they involve people dodging death, only for their end to find them in some labyrinthine fashion. A typical sequence sees a chap cooking supper in a flat strewn with red herrings – smoking pan, exploding microwave, malfunctioning fire escape – before being finally finished off by slipping on some spaghetti.
Caring for a toddler in your own home is much the same: an obstacle course of mundane deathtraps – a living, breathing public safety film. But it’s a walk in the park compared with going on holiday. In France this summer, our son was ill three times (mystery virus, allergic reaction to ant bite, moderate vomit). In an Airbnb in Swansea earlier in the year, I thought I had finally cracked the combination of pyjamas/sheet/fan/window to prevent both overheating and hypothermia, until the door was closed and I noticed that the window opened directly on to a ledge accessible from a sloped roof above the kitchen.
The possibility of passing abductors popping in seemed too far fetched even for me. But what about that cat from next door? And if it did successfully shin up the roof, would it be more likely to savage the baby or suffocate him? After all, “a dingo ate my baby” sounded far fetched in 1980. Such is the circumstance that leads to bleary-eyed research into the incidence of mog-caused tot mortality, followed by tiptoed bedroom re-entry, and resignation to the idea that a woken baby is better than an ever so slightly endangered one.
And this is why I am secretly relieved the holidays are coming to a close, and with them the need to navigate never-ending thin ice. It’s also why, when I see a report about, for instance, how at least 20 children have drowned in swimming pools in Germany this summer, I’m amazed the number isn’t higher. Everyone knows pools, like stairs, are especially iffy. But you only need lose focus for a second for tragedy to happen. Mobile phones copped some of the blame: parents apparently too engrossed to notice a child in difficulty. But I bet some were Googling “can you overdose on Calpol”, or “German word for Lyme disease”.
Being a parent involves a constant monitoring of both your baby and your paranoia levels. I’m a relatively elderly first-time mother who has seen a lot of horror films – and I realise I may be late to some of these realisations – but it’s not just me who is affected. Parents today are broadly more alarmist, and children are counting the cost in terms of limits to their freedom.
Yet, looked at coolly, much of this apparent irrationality reflects a reasonable reassessment of the value of children’s lives. Once, people saw parenthood as an inevitability. Now, as many of us have fewer kids, later in life, people are more heavily invested in what offspring they do produce, both for their own sake and as extensions of their own identity.
Parents are therefore far more concerned about the safety of their children than the children are themselves. Teenagers keen to try tombstoning are happy to gamble with their own lives, but when someone in whom you have invested all you have is your direct responsibility, knowing it takes only one silly incident to lose it all is overwhelming – and accurate.
For our distant ancestors, their own lives and lineages were not their sole stake in the world. Today the self is, for most of us, the only repository of value. If you endanger it, you can’t console yourself with the thought that you’ll be all right in the afterlife, or that it is the group that matters, not just you. And if that is what’s making me jabber madly about cats at midnight in Wales – well, no matter. Better that than even the slimmest possibility of a worse alternative.
• Catherine Shoard is a Guardian columnist
