I still have to fight my protective instincts. Nearly every day, I feel that familiar frisson of anxiety—a tightening in my stomach when my 6-year-old wants a skateboard, a jump in my heart rate when my 8-year-old asks to go sledding—but that feeling isn’t a reliable gauge of risk to my children. A quick search of CDC data suggests that skateboarding causes fewer injuries than trips to the playground or playing soccer do, which I let my kids do without thinking twice. I thank my adrenaline-pumping amygdala for its work and pass the baton to my more rational neocortex on parenting decisions. Tolerating risk for my kids is tough, but vital, so I practice.

Unfortunately, if understandably, the message in the early days of the pandemic was to do the opposite. The public-health message “Stay home, stay safe” had the advantage of being simple. But the slogan, restrictions, and the intense social pressure that accompanied them actively discouraged logical, individualized analysis. If you weren’t at high risk for severe COVID yourself, you could still carry the disease. Discussions of trade-offs were verboten. Going to an outdoor neighborhood gathering or seeing family was tantamount to the morally depraved murder of undetermined numbers of grandmas and immunocompromised people…

A one-size-fits-all approach to risk, and top-down encouragement to take as few risks as possible, may have been reasonable in 2020, before we properly understood how the coronavirus was transmitted and before we had vaccines. Spurning risk analysis made us all worse at it, however, and children have paid the highest price.