of doing so is to engage the publics emotions, for emotion is the enemy of rational argument. And as emotions go, one of them- fear-is more potent than the rest. The superpredator, Iraqi weapons     of mass destruction, mad-cow disease, crib death: how can we fail to heed the experts advice on these horrors when, like that mean uncle telling too-scary stories to too-young children, he has reduced us to quivers? No one is more susceptible to an experts fearmongering than a parent. Fear is in fact a major component of the act of parenting. A parent, after all, is the steward of another creatures life, a creature who in the beginning is more helpless than the newborn of nearly any other species. This leads a lot of parents to spend a lot of their parent- ing energy simply being scared. The problem is that they are often scared of the wrong things. Its not their fault, really. Separating facts from rumors is always hard work, especially for a busy parent. And the white noise generated by the experts-to say nothing of the pressure exerted by fellow par- ents-is so overwhelming that they can barely think for themselves. The facts they do manage to glean have usually been varnished or ex- aggerated or otherwise taken out of context to serve an agenda that isnt their own. Consider the parents of an eight-year-old girl named, say, Molly. Her two best friends, Amy and Imani, each live nearby. Mollys par- ents know that Amys parents keep a gun in their house, so they have forbidden Molly to play there. Instead, Molly spends a lot of time at Imanis house, which has a swimming pool in the backyard. Mollys parents feel good about having made such a smart choice to protect their daughter. But according to the data, their choice isnt smart at all. In a given year, there is one drowning of a child for every 11,000 residential pools in the United States. (In a country with 6 million pools, this