Sitting at our local park today, I watched as a group of children (my own included) played with a few old strips of yellow caution tape.  Some benches had been painted earlier that day and the tape had been used to prevent parkgoers from sitting on the wet seats.  But the paint had long since dried and I sat and watched as the kids had their fun with the discarded yellow ribbon, playing tug-of-war, fashioning bandanas and headbands and having an all around good time. 

No sooner did I sit back to soak in the sun, than I was bombarded by a fellow park mother, huffing and puffing and gathering up bits of caution tape as she went.  "Do you see what the children are doing with this tape?", she asked.   "Someone could get hurt!   They're tying it around their necks, for goodness sake!   Why isn't anyone stopping them.!!"

I think that last statement was directed at me. 

As she collected the last bits of tape from the disappointed children and threw it in the trash, I thought about how my perspective had changed since I first began this parenting journey.  I think that at one time, I would have agreed with my compatriot at the playground and tried to insulate my daughters from anything that might be even remotely dangerous from them, while I closely tracked their every move.  That was back when I thought that my viglience was somehow related to their safety.   The more I've parented, the more I've begun to wonder if  the two are related at all.  Try as I might, I can't protect them from every evil in the world.  And I'm not sure that I should.  A little pain can be a pretty good teacher, from as I recall.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not an advocate of careless parenting.  Maybe its just that I've just become lazier over the years.  But I'd like to think that I've grown to realize that sometimes to experience life to the fullest you have to be exposed to a little danger.   Maybe even scrape a knee or two.  Sometimes you have to throw caution to the wind.  Or at least a little caution tape.