The phrase "helicopter parent" is hurled at moms and dads all the time as an insult. But if you've been watching the news lately and you haven't felt the teensiest temptation to switch into hover mode, you're a better person than me. Let's talk, just for example, about the little girl who died in her own home this week while playing an old-fashioned game of hide and seek. I had to talk myself down to reality after this one, that's for sure.
So far it looks like Kylee Mills Simmerman crawled into her bean bag chair to hide. The 3-year-old's family looked everywhere for her, but by the time they found her, she'd suffocated.
Tell me that Kylee's sad story didn't give you pause? You didn't have a fleeting thought of, "No more hide and seek in my house!"?
It's so tempting.
Every time one of these "OMG, child perishes under freak circumstances" stories crops up in the news, I have the same war within myself. My heart breaks for the family involved, and I put myself in their shoes. I wonder what they do next, what do I do next?
Do I continue to follow the common sense method of living whereby I let my daughter take reasonable risks so she can learn to spread her wings? Where I continue to drive my car, to take the occasional airplane, to eat from the occasional restaurant?
Or do I shut down, hide inside, become the agoraphobic I could very easily (and comfortably) become? The second, tempting as it sounds, is no way to live, it gives us no guarantee that some freak accident won't happen.
Yes, freak things will happen. Little girls get strangled by their own jump ropes. Giant sinkholes open up and swallow teenagers as they walk down the street. Sewer drains suck random bike riders into their depths.
Kids can get hurt, and us adults too. Tomorrow I could walk out into the street and someone could run a stop sign and plow me down. I could become the next victim of flesh eating bacteria or some drugged up loon could try to throw me in front of a train.
But I still need to grocery shop tomorrow. I still need to put gas in my car and hit the bakery for bread and do all the little things that make up a life but could, if we're talking freak accidents, ostensibly put me in danger.
So I'll do them. Because that's how we live our lives, not by locking ourselves and our kids up, by banning hide and seek and ridding the world of jump ropes. We live our lives with common sense, with reasonable risk. We try to enjoy ourselves as best we can, we try to let our kids have fun without flaunting the basic rules of safety.
I'll let my daughter continue to be a kid, to jump rope and play hide and seek, to ride her bike and walk down the street. Because while poor Kylee Simmerman's family mourns the fact that they won't get to see their little girl grow up, the rest of us still have the chance to let our kids live ... we ought to let them live well.
How do you temper the temptation to hide away when these kind of stories crop up in the news?
Image via LocoSteve/Flickr
This Hot Dad Wants to Do Your Ironing
This Hot Dad Wants to Cook You Dinner
This Hot Dad Cooks AND Does the Dishes
Kanye West is Gay?! 
Comments 53
This isn't a "Freak" accident.... Like mleilanim said:
1. How did she get it zipped back up?
2. How come the parents didn't see that confetti packing all over the floor from her crawling in?
3. Where in the world were they looking & for how long that they 1 didn't notice the above & 2 didn't hear the little giggle of a child hiding....if this truly was a game????
None of this makes any damn sense at all!
This is why when playing hide and seek with my kids I kinda peep to make sure they aren't doing things like that.
Nowhere does the article state that the beanbag was zipped up. The article also states that similar accidents have happened. If the beanbag was in a corner or the zipper side was near the bottom, it would be easy to miss all the packing materials. And not all bean bags, especially older ones, are made with double-sided zippers or with the safety specifications newer ones are produced with. The child was assumed BY A NEIGHBOR to have been playing hide and seek. Nowhere does it state that the father was playing a game. The article simply says that he was in the shower. Maybe you could all stop being such harsh critics and remember that a family has lost a daughter, and they may not have been doing anything any differently than any of us would have. Last time I checked, people are innocent until "proven" guilty, and even then, sometimes they really are innocent.
this is so extremely sad!!! i wish people would stop playing detective and just read what is written, and act instead of reading and coming up with their own versions of what happened!!! I cannot imagine the pain they are going through. this is so sad :(
Not all children giggle when playing hide and seek, my niece was the world's best at the game when she was that age because she could fit in the smallest spaces and she never made a sound. Sometime we would look for hrs for her and she woudol ahev fallen asleep. She even got to love it so much that she woudl start playing and forget to tell us we were suposed to look for her. It woudl scare us to death looking everywhere for her and finally find her hiding.
This is sooo sad..... I would be besides myself and all alot of people can do is cause more pain by accusing them of wrong doing