If you worried a bit more, I could worry a bit less

My life is, and always has been, dominated by worry. Sometimes it's just a nagging, background annoyance, but on other occasions it escalates to a crippling, stultifying anxiety. I'm ashamed to say that I sometimes berate my family and friends because they don't worry when I feel they should. I just can't help thinking that I worry such a lot because I'm doing everybody else's worrying for them. People, I feel, just don't worry enough.

Like most parents and grandparents, I worry most about the safety and security of my family. What's different, it seems to me, is the length I'm willing to go to, to mitigate every conceivable risk.

Let me give you an example.

To my great delight, I've recently become a grandparent. I soon found myself discussing with the new parents the best position in a car to mount a rear-facing child seat. We all know it's not safe to place such a seat in the front of a car that has front airbags. Even if we didn't know, child seats are covered with warnings to this effect. There's even a warning sticker stuck to the roof of my car.

But what about side airbags? My car has side airbags that cover the rear seats, and "curtain" airbags that deploy from front to back at head height. Are these a hazard to a child in a seat?

There's surprisingly little information about this, and the little there is, is contradictory.

When I was a new parent, cars didn't have side airbags. Well, not the cars I could afford, anyway. So I never had to think about this issue when it would have been my responsibility to do so. These days, most cars have side airbags that reach the rear seats. So there's clearly a potential problem.

So I asked friends and relatives with infants where they put their child seats. The usual response was that they thought that any rear seat would be fine, and even a front seat if the airbag could be disabled. But, when pressed, they didn't know how they knew this.

Worse -- and to my amazement -- they didn't care.

It's not that these folks weren't concerned for the safety of their little ones -- of course they were. Rather, the usual attitude I encountered was that "they wouldn't sell them if they weren't safe." Of course, that's a crazy position to take: businesses will sell anything that makes money if they can get away with it. We only discovered that front airbags were a hazard to infants in child seats after a series of terrible tragedies.

Of course, parents have an endless stream of obvious risks to worry about; human life is contingent, and infants are so terribly vulnerable. Whether it's safe to carry a baby in the rear seat of a car is something that's just too obscure to come to the top of their worry list. People just don't want to think about it because, let's face it, if you can't put your baby in the front or the rear of your car, you're going to be doing an awful lot of walking.

You'd think that car manufacturers could provide relevant guidance. The manual for my Volkswagen has fifty pages of information about carrying infant passengers. But when it comes to side airbags and rear-facing child seats, the only advice it offers is "contact the manufacturer of the seat". I did this, of course, and was advised to contact the car manufacturer.

In the end I answered the question by nagging Volkswagen to send me precise details of the deployment patterns of all the airbags. It was awkward to get this information, but not as difficult as I feared it might be. Then I put the child seat in each position in the car, and measured its clearance from the deployment envelopes of each airbag. It turns out that the car seat will be fine in any of the rear seats. So my friends who just assumed everything would be all right were correct on this occasion -- at least for this particular car and this particular seat. Whether it's fine in general, I really don't know.

I've told this story to illustrate that I spend many, many hours studying and mitigating problems that most people don't even realize are problems, and refuse to think about even when they're put on notice.

I don't think this is because people other than me are ignorant or complacent. Rather, I think we all have a limit on the amount of worry we're prepared to give brain-room to, so we can have a productive life, and not go insane. It's just that my limit seems to be higher than most people's. I've certainly met people who go through life just assuming that everything will be fine. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn't. But most people, I think, are willing to consider risks that are reasonably obvious, and which can be mitigated without extraordinary effort. But where the safety of my family is concerned, I feel I have to consider every conceivable risk, and control those risks, regardless of the effort and expense this involves.

When I was rewiring the house I lived in when my children were small, I went to some lengths to install all the electrical power sockets at shoulder height, so there was no chance of a small finger being poked into a live outlet. Most parents get by with plastic covers over their mains outlets. But what if somebody forgot to replace the cover? Unlikely, but not impossible. So I spent days on a difficult wiring exercise that probably took thousands of pounds off the value of my house.

I'm quite sure my attitude to risk is hereditary: I have relatives who behave in the same way. Yet it can't be productive -- if this level of worry saved lives it would confer a survival benefit, and be favoured by natural selection. That is, if my attitude were productive, it would be universal. But it isn't.

This leads me inescapably to the conclusion that, not only does my relentless risk mitigation bring me a colossal amount of effort and expense, it probably doesn't work. That is, my family is probably no safer as a result of my back-breaking mental and physical labours than they would be without them.

That's a very dispiriting thought.

Nevertheless, I continue to wish that other people would worry a bit more, so I don't have to worry so much.

Published 2026-09-04, updated 2026-09-04

If you worried a bit more, I could worry a bit less

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