Why Your Children Probably Aren’t Going to be Murdered

Son

You would have realised by now that the way we treat you is different from your friends, like with respect to safety. You are allowed out late, riding bikes and and and from a very young age while your friends were cosseted. That's because we feel that it's important of you to learn how to look after yourself and gain confidence. Take risks son, have fun. 

But this article is interesting due to the numbers cognitive bias issue. Fascinating study. 

Love

Baba

The Availability Heuristic: Why Your Children Probably Aren’t Going to be Murdered | Why We Reason
http://whywereason.wordpress.com/2011/11/12/the-availability-heuristic-why-your-children-probably-arent-going-to-be-murdered/

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The Availability Heuristic: Why Your Children Probably Aren’t Going to be Murdered

by sammcnerney on November 12, 2011

Journalist Lenore Skenazy is called a number of things: “Americans Worst Mom,” “A Heretic,” and, “Abusive.” Her crime? In 2008 she left her nine-year-old son go home by himself on the New York Subway. Her son’s solo trip was made famous by a New York Sun column written by Skenazy and it’s almost too easy to imagine her critics: up-tight mothers so overly protective of their children that they wouldn’t even think of letting them wait at the bus stop alone. You know, helicopter parents. As one recent Time.com article describes, they are the type of parents who “[buy] macrobiotic cupcakes and hypoallergenic socks, [hire] tutors to correct a 5-year-old’s “pencil-holding deficiency,”… [and demand that] nursery schools offer mandarin.”

Can you really criticize overprotective parents?  They are, after all, only trying to ensure the safety of their children. But sometimes the numbers tell a different story. In regard to Skenazy’s “abusive” decision, consider that only about 100 people are abducted by a stranger every year, half of whom are eventually murdered. Factoring in that there are 50 million children in the United States, the annual homicide rate via abduction comes out to be one in a million. In other words, “if you wanted your child to be kidnapped and held overnight by a stranger, you’d have to leave the child outside and unattended for 750,000 years.” Similarly, consider that, “more than twice as many children are hit by cars driven by parents taking their children to school as by other kinds of traffic.” That is, every time a parent drives their children to school the chances that a child gets killed increases.

Unfortunately, the parents don’t usually buy these types of arguments; “those are just the numbers,” they might say, “they miss a larger point: don’t rely on statistics when it comes to your children’s safety.”