How to Fight the Obsessive Fear of Unlikely Dangers

Inside Out 2 gave kids a way to picture anxiety. For parents, all you need is this classic Modern Love column, “A Marriage Stressed by Obsessions and Compulsions.”

In it, Seattle novelist Nicole Comforto writes about the first time her husband seemed to freak out about a non-danger. He’d spotted a red spot on their 4-month-old’s lip and immediately went to Google it.

The results had him so distressed that “he even had to put his head between his knees to keep from passing out.” Naturally, with enough searching, he’d found evidence that the red spot could mean his son had a fatal disease. (He didn’t.)

Gradually, Mike’s worries started to metastasize. He grew afraid of their backyard blueberries (had chemicals leached into the soil?), leftovers (botulism!), and running a kid over (okay, I have that fear, too).

One time, after he tossed a bit of scrap lumber into the wood stove, he succumbed to absolute grief, convinced that the wood “was probably treated with arsenic,” so he’d poisoned his family. (He hadn’t.)

Diagnostically, this is obsessive compulsive disorder, OCD. But it shares a lot with modern parenting. The poor guy has it worse than most, but all of us must deal with the Child Safety Industrial Complex.

It is everywhere you look. Wander over to Parents.com, and its top story is, as of this writing, “The Dangers of DIY Baby Formula.” Also on the home page: The dangers of AI. The dangers of food pouches. And the dangers of fake nail glue – whatever that is — billed as a “Must Read.”

A huge swath of the parenting world thrives on implanting and augmenting OCD. That’s why there are baby knee pads and spoons that change color if the food in them is hot, and even classes teaching kids to crawl in gyms advertised as “safe” places for kids to learn this skill.

As if your living room is actually lava.

In her column, Comforto says she and her husband finally found a specialist who explained that Mike’s obsessive-compulsive parenting behavior was particularly focused on contamination and that he coped by looking up reassuring research. But, “Like an addictive drug, the reassurances had less effect each time, so he required more and more to get over his fear.”

The therapy given to Mike was to expose himself to the things he found scariest – for instance, wearing dirty shoes in the house – to see that this didn’t result in death.

We need exposure therapy for America. Maybe have everyone visit a country where they don’t sell baby kneepads. Or have folks circle the craziest advice in a parenting magazine.

Another suggestion is to get The Let Grow Independence Kit (it’s free) or ask your child’s school to assign The Let Grow Experience. (Also, free.)

Both of these are based on the same idea as exposure therapy: They get kids to do some new things on their own, without a parent. That way, parents can see for themselves just how smart and safe their kids really are. It’s even okay if the kids DO get a little hurt because then everyone will see that this isn’t the end of the world either.

Therapists and counselors should look at the Independence Therapy Manual, which was inspired by The Let Grow Experience. It’s free, too.

The big lie peddled by the Child Safety Industrial Complex is that we can make our kids completely safe if only we control every variable, supervise every interaction — and toss that fake nail glue. But they aren’t telling us about the potential side effects for parents and kids.