Like all first-time parents, my wife Barbara and I are hyper-sensitive when it comes to the safety of our son Max. A few months ago, when Max first began crawling, we child-proofed the house. Just the usual things: covers for the electrical outlets, locks on a few cabinet doors (the ones which contain things Max shouldn't play with or eat) a gate for my office (I've got some 6,000 CDs crammed into two IKEA shelves, which are pretty unsteady even without a baby rocking them back and forth), etc.

Whenever Max has hurt himself by falling down or slamming a door or drawer onto his fingers or whatever, we always beat ourselves up. Of course, after he's forgotten all about the incident a couple minutes later and the damage heals in hours (or a few days, if the bruise is good enough), there is a bit of chagrin about how we overreacted. Just a bit.

We do differ from some parents we know in that we don't try to keep Max from hurting himself in small ways. Like the aforementioned slamming of a cabinet door or drawer onto his fingers. It hurts when he does it, but he's never really hurt himself doing that (no bruises, anyway). Also, he falls down a lot as part of the learning to walk process (he's gotten a couple bloody lips there) and he tends to bang his head into walls and tables and just about anything else available. As far as we're concerned, such minor bumps and bruises are part of being a kid, and as long as we make sure to avoid the big injuries, we're doing fine. After all, children have to learn, and they won't if parents shield them from all potentially harmful things.

My parents gave me a bicycle for my sixth birthday. I was a very active kid, and I think there was an assumption that I'd figure the thing out pretty quickly. After a couple months with training wheels, my mom took them off and started shoving me down the sidewalk on two wheels alone. I'd manage to stay balanced for a few feet and then crash--into the easement grass, if I could. Even though I wasn't getting any better (and it could be argued that I was getting worse), she did this day after day. After a while, I became afraid of the bike and my mom cut her fingers pretty badly on the metal part of the seat during one of her more emphatic shoves. It seems to me that we kinda gave up on the thing the last month or so that we lived in Salina, Kan.

In August of 1976, my family moved to Lawrence, Kan., and the first thing I can remember about Lawrence was grabbing the bike the moment it came off the moving van and riding it to the corner and back. I'd never done anything approaching this before, but for some reason the fresh start gave me enough confidence to jump on and simply ride. All those times my mom pushed me and then watched me crash and burn a few feet further down the sidewalk finally paid off. I was riding a bicycle.

In order to learn, a person has to experience failure. Whether this failure is simply an acknowledgment of ignorance or something much more dire, such loss is necessary to truly learn and progress. The longer a child is shielded from failure, the harder that first fall becomes.

The seven astronauts killed Saturday morning when the Space Shuttle Columbia burned up as it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere weren't the first deaths related to the U.S. space program. They won't be the last. The engineers at NASA will learn a lot of new things from this disaster, and my guess is we won't lose another shuttle in the same way again. If we do, then we have failed those who died.

But I'm sure that the heat shields on the three remaining shuttles will be checked and quadruple checked, and that future missions will contain extra supplies if repairs need to be made in space after something is damaged during the launch. There might even be a design change, some new way of protecting a surprisingly fragile hunk of metal.

This logic also applies to our presumed imminent war with Iraq and the greater war on terrorism. If Iraq actually becomes a modern, democratic Arab state soon after such a war, I'll be the first to say that the conflict--while immoral on a number of grounds--did have a positive result. Those who go along with the "By any means necessary" sorta logic will have a right to crow at us naysayers. This has happened before. Our instigation of the Spanish-American was of 1898 was decidedly immoral, but it did free up many possessions from Spanish imperial rule. Sure, those island chains then fell under U.S. imperial rule, but by and large those possessions are independent nations now. Viewed in the long term, it is a defensible position to say that war was beneficial to the people of Cuba and the Philippines and so forth.

As for the war on terrorism, perhaps the best question to ask is how safe is safe? We can't actually kill all the terrorists. Israel has discovered the futility of such tactics. Killing thousands of presumed terrorists has merely inspired even more people to commit terrorist actions. Are we actually hurting ourselves in our zeal to make the world safe for Americans? I think it's possible. The Prez thinks of himself as the father (with a small f) of the nation, a paternalistic figure whose job is to protect his people. He's right to think this way, of course. My only fear is that he's trying too hard to shield us from the ugly realities of the outside world, and that by doing so he's setting us up for much bigger failures down the road.

It's often said that the role of parents is to relinquish control bit by bit as children grow up. Max isn't even a year old, and yet Barbara and I are already loosening the reins, if only a bit. It's dreadfully heart wrenching, but Max has to make his own mistakes. We must let Max fall down from time to time. We must let the outside world make its own imprint on him. We must let him become his own person as his world begins to grow and grow. Most of all, we've got to realize that we cannot protect Max from everything that can hurt him, no matter how much we wish we could do so. Even to try would make us utter failures as parents, which would be the biggest nightmare of all.

Jon Worley banged his head a lot when he was a child.