Every time my daughter asked if there were sharks in the water, if jelly fish were going to sting her, if there were fish biting her toes, I said no.
At this beach, I said she needed to worry about angry, mini-Bernadoodles running along the bottom of the ocean floor and nipping at her!
When she looked at me like I was bonkers, I said, it was like the stories she’d read about hippopotamus running along riverbeds. Same thing. She smiled. And it became our joke.
Kids are afraid of things that have little chance of ever hurting them. They worry about sharks. But in 2024 there were only 24 unprovoked shark bites in the United States – and only 47 worldwide, according to the International Shark Attack File. They’re not a rational thing to fear.
Kids worry about jellyfish biting them, and as someone who has been stung by a jellyfish, it hurts. It’s akin to getting attacked on your bald head by hornets – also something that’s happened to me. Painful to the point that you want to cry. But it doesn’t kill you.
And I guess little fish do sometimes slurp at your toes, but that just feels weird. Zero to worry about.
As a parent, I worry about the things that my kids are blissfully unaware of.
I worry about school boards overstepping their governance role and impacting what my kids are taught, provided and have access to. A school board – like any board – exists to help the superintendent make difficult decisions. That’s governance. It does not exist to make curriculum choices or to hire and fire teachers.
I worry about the apps that keep my daughters safe – I’m talking to you Qustodio and Bark for doing your best and being way better than Apple’s time limits, which are so simple for my kids to circumvent as to be useless. I worry about the constant game of wack-a-mole when it comes to balancing my children’s ability to interact online with their peers while curtailing their screentime and protecting them from creeps.
I’ve got daughters so I worry about companies that talk about promoting women into senior roles but do nothing of substance to support them when they’re there.
I worry about HR departments that roll out fantastic parental leave plans to much fanfare but do nothing to train managers on how to communicate the benefits and implement them in a meaningful way. When will conversations stop that begin: You’re entitled to parental leave? Let me tell you how I never had it…
And of course, I worry about big systemic changes that could curtail my daughters’ rights in the future.
I do not worry about angry, mini-Bernadoodles running along the ocean floor. I wish they were what I worried about. But I’m glad I could make them up to distract my daughters on vacation from the sharks and jellyfish that aren’t threats either.
