Since December, when the report came out, the mayor, neighborhood activists and various parent-teacher associations have engaged in a fierce battle over its validity: over the guilt of the steel-casting factory on the western edge of town, over union jobs versus children’s health and over what, if anything, ought to be done. With all sides presenting their own experts armed with conflicting scientific studies, whom should parents believe? Is there truly a threat here, we asked one another as we dropped off our kids, and if so, how great is it? And how does it compare with the other, seemingly perpetual health scares we confront, like panic over lead in synthetic athletic fields? Rather than just another weird episode in the town that brought you protesting environmentalists, this latest drama is a trial for how today’s parents perceive risk, how we try to keep our kids safe— whether it’s possible to keep them safe—in what feels like an increasingly threatening world. It raises the question of what, in our time, “safe” could even mean.
“There’s no way around the uncertainty”, says Kimberly Thompson, president of Kid Risk, a nonprofit group that studies children’s health. “That means your choices can matter, but it also means you aren’t going to know if they do”. A 2004 report in the journal Pediatrics explained that nervous parents have more to fear from fire, car accidents and drowning than from toxic chemical exposure. To which I say: well, obviously. But such concrete hazards are beside the point. It’s the dangers parents can’t—and may never—quantify that occur all of a sudden. That’s why I’ve rid my cupboard of microwave food packed in bags coated with a potential cancer-causing substance, but although I’ve lived blocks from a major fault line for more than 12 years, I still haven’t bolted our bookcases to the living room wall.