Fear is in fact a major component of the act of parenting. No one is more 6 to an expert's fearmongering than a parent. A parent, after all, is the steward of another creature's life, a creature who 7 is more helpless than the newborn of nearly any other species. This leads a lot of parents to spend a lot of their parenting energy simply being scared. The problem is that they are often scared of the wrong things. It's not their fault, really. Separating facts from rumors is always hard work, 8 for a busy parent. And the white noise generated by the experts— 9 the pressure exerted by fellow parents—is so overwhelming that they can barely think for themselves. The facts that they do manage to glean have usually been varnished or exaggerated or 10 taken out of context to serve an agenda that isn't their own.