Remember the shitstorm (no pun intended) when somebody said they just let their kid crap in the habitrail because there wasn’t any way in hell they were going to clean it up? Aaah, good times.
fessie, you’re being entirely too fussy.
I tend to believe that extreme protectiveness towards one’s children is, in point of fact, hardcoded genetically.
As someone once pointed out, human children are rather unique in that they have no particular cameoflauge, do not attempt to hide when alone, and that their instinctual reaction to danger is to make an incredibly loud noise, rather than freezing. Contrast this with the young of most other species.
The reason, I submit, is that for thousands of years the instinctive reaction of parents to any hint of assault or danger to their kiddies was to react with such fury and violence that potential predators soon learned to avoid touching the cubs. They either learned that, or quickly went extinct.
This doesn’t of course prevent parents from harming their own children (think for example of bears - the fact that bears sometimes abandon or even eat their cubs doesn’t mean it is safe for you to get inbetween a mother bear and her cubs!), just that their reaction to someone or something attempting to prey on their children tends towards the extreme. An extremity that can be rather socially disfunctional, as people have to live rather crowded together.
As for pedophiles - that isn’t about “protecting kids from sexuality” at all. It is about protecting kids from assault and abduction. The fact that such a fate is rather rare (though not unknown) isn’t much of a consolation.
Been there, done that. Though not because I was worried about dirty words (for a while “people just like to write bad words on walls, but that’s vandalism and wrong” works fine. Although I usually answered with the clinical and bland “that’s a word for sex that most people think is naughty, don’t use it”). Eventually they start learning and being able to read more interesting phrases - but that came with the ability to ask their friends which seems to be far more interesting that asking mom (mom and dad sometimes over explain when they least want it). Some of the conversations I’ve overheard while kids try and reach consensus on what they’ve overheard have been amusing - three nine year old boys being grossed out by oral sex). My kids have heard me yell most of those words when I’m mad, so they aren’t new words to my kids) - my daughter couldn’t get through those things when her brother could - so I got to “help” when she was little (like eighteen months). And its a good thing I’m pretty thin and not terribly tall!
Chances are the McDs will have a cleaner bathroom, anyway. At least they theoretically clean on some sort of schedule…
although the one rest area I really liked was on some route into Oregon from Idaho … a 2 hole privy for each sex … if you wanted to wash your hands you had to jump the fence and use the cow trough 
Plenty of privacy … most people refused to use it so it was dang near pristine, plenty of toilet paper, no trash tossed around by people picnicking and cows …
Very well put.
If I’m at a restaurant and a 500-pound grizzly is guarding the men’s room door, I’ll probably wait till the cub is out of there.
They do make a damned mess with the toilet paper, though.
At least, according to those obnoxious Charmin ads. 
I’d argue that extreme protectiveness is hardwired into the parents (or at least mothers) of any species that invests significant resources of time and nurturing in its young, even when protective strategies include silent freezing. There’s a reason Robert Heinlein rephrased an old saying into:
“Greater love hath no man than a mother cat dying to protect her kittens.”
I suspect the difference is that “top” predators have a realistic chance of surviving if they confront other predators attacking their young, which makes them all the more violent.
Humans have been “top” predators for a great deal of their evolutionary history; and being more social than most, it is not only a child’s mother who will react to a child’s screams, but very often many other human adults as well. I have noticed that a child’s “fear” scream has a very compelling force, you practically can’t help but run towards it to find out what the matter is. Attack a kittens and you have to deal with the mother cat; attack a human child and you have to deal with not only the human mother, but pretty well every other adult human in earshot as well (excluding I supose the most cowardly).
Preying on human children isn’t a very good tactic, even though the children are practically totally defenceless (and presumably tasty 
).
IIRC, that part about not naming children until age 5 still happens. And there are plenty of places in the world where women and minorities are considered less than fully human.
The question is, which group has the luxury of responding to their instincts, the parent in dire straits or the one who has many options? Maslow’s hierarchy suggests that it’s parents in the developed world, whose basic needs have already been met.
If that were true, mothers would never put their kids into a moving vehicle. That’s where most of them die.
As I’ve pointed out above, the fact is that the things which frighten one and cause one to react instinctively to danger are NOT necessariily the things that are objectively the most dangerous.
People react most strongly to those things that push their instinctive buttons. That’s what people find “scary”, not what is most harmful to them. If that were not the case, instead of watching horror movies, people would watch ads for automobiles, cigarettes and junk food in order to get that pleasant thrill of danger and fright. 
I really don’t get all the family-password hatred. It’s not harming the kids in any way (you’re teaching them to have some way of verifying that people are who they say they are, which is a especially important lesson in ye olde internets age), and it’s not inconveniencing anyone else.
What’s paranoid about having a password in case of emergency? Our neighbor also had a copy of our housekey in case we got locked out–also very unlikely (IIRC the spare key never needed to be used), but that didn’t mean it wasn’t a good idea to prepare for the contingency.
And because Mom wasn’t psycho over-protective, she had no problem with leaving the kids in the car for five minutes.
Paranoid would be **expecting **us to get kidnapped, raped, and murdered by cannibal pedophiles. Sensible was having **contingency **plans for highly unlikely but not impossible circumstances. (We also had a “family meeting area” for if the house ever caught fire–do you think that was paranoid, too?)
Eaten by a pedophile, you say?
Oh c’mon, don’t be gross. That’s what the **popcorn buckets **are for.
Is that the brand of juice drink all the crazy people hand out?
Bwahaha! Absolutely.
I’m a grown-ass man, as some would say, and I get creeped out by truckstop bathrooms. It’s like they’re designed with an “abandon all hope” aesthetic in mind.
I trust the rest of you has grown as well.
Not as evenly distributed as I’d hoped.
Yeah, irrational, you’d think they’d realize that boobs are a serious choking hazard.
The family passwords are hated because it would almost never be needed in a real life situation. When would you ever need to send a complete stranger to pick up your kid from school? Between family members, friends of my parents and neighbors, I could probably come up with a list of 30 people that could have picked me up from school if there was trouble.
The idea of a “stranger with the password” is so unreal to me, it may as well be a joke.