Raising kids can be a risky business

Parents' nightmare number seven: your 3-year-old (or in this case, my 3-year-old) is playing in front of the house one minute, then gone - just gone - the next.

I'm sure you know the feelings: concern, alarm and panic.

Fortunately, by the time I'd determined Natalie wasn't in the back yard, the neighbor's yard or a yard down the street, she rounded the corner, hand-in-hand with an elderly woman who lived on the next block.

As soon as Nat saw me - and the expression on my face - she got one of those stern looks for which she's become famous and declared "I wasn't lost Dad!"

She probably wasn't. She probably knew where she was and where she was going.

She had taken walks around the block with me and with her older brother and sister many times and probably would have found her way home.

And that's why it took me the rest of the day to trust her out of my sight; why I checked on her every 15 minutes, even after she went to bed, and why it took a double dose of aspirin to get rid of my tension headache.

Parenting is scary stuff and sometimes we forget that. We start to believe the fantasy that life for our children can be safe and secure.

Then something like Natalie's little excursion wakes us up to the reality of just how risky raising kids can be.

On the other hand, maybe we need to forget. If all we think about is the dangers our children might encounter in this world, we'd never give them the freedom they need to grow up.

Perhaps out of sympathy for her poor father, Natalie agreed to confine her wandering to the immediate vicinity of our house and to stay where I could see her. And for the most part she did.

A few weeks ago I dropped off Natalie for her first year at a large state college. She now will be able to wander wherever she wants, whenever she wants, with whomever she wants - and Dad will have nothing to say about any of it.

Whether or not Natalie learned her lesson at age 3, she now is setting out on a journey that can be a lot more dangerous than a walk around the block.

I know going away to college is just the next in a series of risks she has taken and will continue to take for the rest of her life. She has to take these risks if she is to grow up and be the Natalie she was created to be.

I will have to stand by and watch - celebrating her successes, commiserating with her failures and sharing in all the ups and downs that are part of life. I guess that's what I bought into when I became a parent.

Somebody pass the aspirin.