Question: What should I do when my baby starts teething?

Actually, the question posed by Some Girl, was "Why can't you just soak a corner of a washcloth in whiskey or some other liquor and give it to a teething baby to stop it from crying?"

Apparently Some Girl suggested this technique to a parent and they were unsurprisingly reluctant to take her up on her boozy offer.  It's 2010 now and there are lots of ways to reduce the pain of teething without resorting to liquoring up your infant like grandma did.

Of course we don't give our infants alcohol!  We also ensure that our kids wear helmets while riding their bikes and we monitor their every move on the playground without blinking lest the lurking pedophiles snatch our babies during an ill-timed blink.  WE ARE BEING VERY SAFE!

So, is this meticulous approach to safety the absolute right answer?  Probably not.  Although it's hard to argue against putting a helmet on a kid, half the people reading this blog safely logged many hundreds of biking miles as children without any sort of helmetry, padding, or bubblewrap.  And, yes, I'm going to feel like an asshole if my kid gets kidnapped from the playground while I'm blogging, but isn't there something to be said for letting kids have a bit of independence?  What emotional flaw am I creating in my kid by enveloping her in an unsustainable bubble of protection?

I'm not lobbying for us to ignore safety, but the world is complex and there's little guarantee that whatever safety mechanisms you've employed are actually doing more good than harm.  When my kid was teething, we used infant Tylenol which has been regarded for many years as the most effective and safest way to reduce that kind of pain in an infant.  These days?  Whiskey is looking like a pretty good choice.