Worst-Case Scenario

Several years ago my wife, Dale, bought our boys a book titled The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook. It has short chapters that cover almost any extreme problem, ranging from “How to Escape from Quicksand” to “How to Escape from Killer Bees.”

Not that my wife is a worrier.

On the contrary, she is a hyper-worrier.

But she is no worse than 97.9 percent of women, who seem genetically predisposed to assume that if their kids are more than an hour late getting back from the mall, they have been in a horrible auto accident, gotten kidnapped or struck by a meteor. Or all three.

As a guy, when my kids were growing up, my default position was to assume that if my kid was late he just lost track of time, forgot to call or got a flat tire on his bike. None of these scenarios involved calling the Missing Persons Bureau.
This is not to say that tardiness in your offspring does not matter. It does. I think it calls for appropriate, measured consequences so that it does not become a habit. But lateness does not require going to DEFCON 1.

One of the women in my wife’s “Scrabble group” admits that when her boys were in college, if they were one hour late calling home she was already picking out the hymns for the funeral.

Can you spell “n-e-u-r-o-t-i-c”?

All parents — men and women — will inevitably worry about their kids. I think that reflects a protectiveness God built into us. But we need to take measured risks with our kids as part of their maturing process.

When our kids started climbing trees in our backyard, Dale got all twitchy about it.

“I climbed trees when I was young, and I’m not dead yet,” I pointed out to her.

Dale loves it when I use logic on her.

The Bible has precisely zero to say on the subject of how high you should let your kid climb a tree. Or what to say when your 18-year-old announces he is going to try skydiving. And the odds are that men and women will have different comfort thresholds with these options.

When Brad, at age 17, decided to get a moped, Dale was reduced to a bowl of quivering Jell-O every time he left the house.

“This is part of the letting-go process,” I told Dale. “It makes me nervous, too. I understand the risk, but I don’t feel that we should forbid it. I’ll talk to him about the risks and about how to be safe. But we can’t be nervous wrecks every day over this. I rode a motorcycle when I was his age, so what can I say?”

“You could tell him it was stupid,” she said.

When Brad got his scuba-diving certification, it opened up yet another vista to get nervous about.

When he signed up for his first ocean dive, Dale got cold feet.

“We have no idea how competent the dive instructors are,” she said. “They could be a fly-by-night outfit.”

“Or felons, or drug lords, or Mafia dons,” I said. “Hon, the dive company is a big operation, and the hotel concierge suggested them.”

“The concierge could be getting a kickback,” she said.

So Dale randomly picked out a dive equipment shop and asked them if they knew anything about the scam artists who were poised to dump our son into the ocean with a tank of substandard air that was probably imported from Bangladesh.

“They are the best in the area,” said the dive shop guy.

Dale felt much better.

Same planet, different genders.

It never would have occurred to me to double-check the bona fides of the dive instructors, who had been in business for years.

Because none of this stuff is subject to a “Thus Saith the Lord” announcement coming from an angel, it is yet one more of those areas where husbands and wives will have to sort it out by talking, and praying, and working out an accommodation with each other.

Life has risks. We have to accept that.

And pray a lot.