By Dr. Edith Bracho-Sanchez, CNN
(CNN) — I just learned from a firefighter on Instagram that leaving my child’s bedroom door open at night makes it much more likely he would die in the event of a fire. Closing it, on the other hand, would keep the flames outside his room and ensure his survival, he assured me.
Yet another new fear I unlocked while scrolling social media.
What did I do with this newfound wisdom, you may ask? Nothing, apparently. My 4-year-old can’t sleep if we close his door, and my 5-month-old still sleeps in our room. I glanced at the smoke detectors and saw the lights signaling they were working, and I called it a night.
The thing about my social media feed, though — and I suspect I’m not alone — is that videos such as the firefighter’s are presented side by side with videos on things like drowning prevention. On some level, most can tell the difference between what applies to us and is a reasonable measure for our kids’ safety and what is not. But the more scary videos I see on my feed lately, the faster I scroll past. I am so tired I cannot do one more thing.
I am embarrassed to admit my exhaustion at looking after my kids’ safety. I’m not just a mother of two; I’m a pediatrician. Vigilance is supposed to be my job. For what it’s worth, I take solace in what I’m hearing in my practice these days — versions of my own scroll-and-flinch from parents who are otherwise thoughtful, engaged and doing everything right.
These parents are not careless. They’re exhausted. I believe there’s a term for what’s happening to us, even if it isn’t official medical language yet: “safety fatigue.” To me, this is what happens when the volume of warnings — real and exaggerated, urgent and negligible — gets so loud that we lose the ability to tell them apart. We start tuning all the warnings out, including the ones that matter.
How to tell risk from fear
The firefighter wasn’t lying. “Close before you doze” is a real campaign built on real research. Fire scientists at UL Research Institutes’ Fire Safety Research Institute found that a closed door can keep a room dozens of degrees cooler and far less toxic during a house fire than one left open. That’s true. It’s also true that it’s rare to have a fire reach a child’s bedroom while they’re asleep in it.
That’s the trap. A piece of safety advice can be completely accurate and still not be the thing you need to worry about the most tonight. Psychologists call this the availability heuristic: We think of danger, or the probability of an event, not by how likely it is, but by how easily we can recall an example of it.
A dramatic video, such as one with side-by-side images of bedrooms of kids who made it in a fire and those who didn’t, is something we remember. A statistic is often not. So, the rare house fire crowds out our attention for something far more mundane and far more likely to hurt our kids, like a car ride without a properly installed car seat, or a pool without a fence.
When I’m trying to sort a real risk from a frightening one, I ask two questions: How often does this actually happen to children? How much does the fix cost me in time, money or peace of mind? Rare events with quick fixes I don’t have to think about constantly — a smoke detector, a safe gun-storage box — are worth doing even if the odds are long. Rare events that demand constant vigilance to prevent, such as the door-closing ritual, are the ones I’ve learned to let go of without guilt.
Who to trust amid the noise
Part of what makes digesting all the advice so hard is that the loudest voice in a parent’s feed is rarely the most qualified one. Researchers who Read more