Warning labels for hot dogs: Saving our children from a wurst-case scenario?

Meanwhile, says Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the blogger behind overlawyered.com, starting in the early '60s and continuing through the '90s, "you had a long series of liberalizations of the right to sue." Judges willing to hear quirky, one-in-a-million cases meant that where we used to see "bad luck" (or tree stumps), we now saw nefariousness. And called a lawyer.

To defend themselves, companies started slapping preemptive warning labels on everything. "Cape does not enable child to fly." "Remove baby before folding stroller." Those are cautions from real labels. And a lot of hot dog companies did the warning thing, too, telling parents to slice and dice the wieners before serving them to kids.

We got so used to all these labels that we almost came to expect them. Which meant we started to see everything as potentially unsafe, at least in a worst-case scenario. (After all, if you do fold baby in stroller -- yikes!) Which ultimately meant that if you could trace about 12 child choking deaths a year to hot dogs, as statistics cited by Smith suggest, then hot dogs should have a warning label, too.

Or maybe they should be banished in their present form, even if we are talking about one death for every 12 million children -- odds that might previously have been considered pretty safe. For instance, we think of taking a car ride as pretty safe, yet about 250 times more children die each year as car passengers.

So hot dogs are relatively safe but, tragically, not perfectly safe. Nothing is. And that's the problem.

Perfect safety is an impossible goal. Not that we shouldn't try to make things safer if we can, without stifling normal life. Put smoke detectors everywhere. Take the lead out of paint. But to assume we can make a world that is 100 percent safe -- or avoid the world until it is -- has already led to playgrounds devoid of merry-go-rounds (not perfectly safe!) and recess devoid of tag (a child could trip!) and kids cooped up at home (they could get abducted from the lawn!).

One mom in Texas wanted to go to her daughter's kindergarten Christmas party. She wasn't allowed in because every school visitor has to have a background check and hers hadn't come back yet. In the end, the teacher let her enter the classroom, provided she stood at the back and didn't interact with any of the kids.

Today we see every person, place, activity, toy and food as too dangerous for our kids. Our only choice at this point is to keep them locked inside, in their knee pads, watching TV and sipping a hot dog smoothie. It's a perfectly safe childhood.

Minus the childhood part.

lskenazy@yahoo.com

Lenore Skenazy is the founder of www.freerangekids.com and the author of "Free-Range Kids." She also blogs for parentdish.com.