The psychologist Melanie Joy, in her book “Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows,” coins the term “carnism” to describe belief systems or ideologies that allow a culture to selectively choose which animals to eat.

I have had a lot of discussions with parents about which risky activities they will and won’t let their children participate in, and the differences are often striking. Just as there is no necessarily rational basis for choosing which animals are eaten, there appears to be no rational basis for deciding what activities are acceptable for children.

In one recent example, I was talking with a school teacher in Casper, Wyoming, and she described a typical weekend where her son and daughter, ten and eleven, would leave the house in the morning, each carrying a rifle and a backpack with food and water, only to return at dusk after having hiked around all day in the open countryside behind their house. Don’t you worry that something will happen to them out there? Well, she said, there’s a lot less trouble to get into out there in the woods than there is at the mall.

In suburban contexts, it is now common to find parents who drive their children to an empty lot where the child can ride their bike safely – forgetting that the drive on the freeway exposes the child to orders of magnitude more danger than peddling around the neighborhood would.

My mother is fond of telling the story of when I had been left in the care of her sister. Evidently my aunt had taken me to the beach with her children, and I had spent most of the time scampering around on the rocks like a monkey. That evening she called my mother. “I can’t bear to watch him running around on those rocks, but I can’t get him to stop – what should I do?” Don’t watch, said my mother.

So, I propose the term “dangerism” to describe how a culture decides what is and isn’t dangerous. The sources of dangerism can be traced to both personal and social sources. Our individual perception of risk is based on a combination of personal experiences and family history. The cultural aspects of dangerism are probably best described by anthropologists, but the popular news media certainly plays a part in creating exaggerated portrayals of risk.

Some aspects of dangerism come from deliberate simplification of what may be a complex set of reasons to exclude a certain behavior. “Don’t eat mussels harvested in months that have an ‘R’ in the name” is one way to try and prevent people from being poisoned by a water-borne micro-organism that typically blooms in winter months, but if you happen to have a roommate that is a marine biologist you will quickly learn that the rule is really more of a guideline and with proper training you can safely enjoy fresh mussels in March to celebrate Vincent Van Gough’s birthday.

At some point, everyone will own a knife. For some it will be when they graduate from college and get their first apartment, and for the Inuit children who grow up eating seal blubber it will be at age three. In a culture that begins teaching knife skills to toddlers, it does not seem shocking to give a knife to a three year-old. Just as it may seem normal to someone to send an eleven year-old out into the woods with a lunch box and a rifle.

But it’s not all about the quantifiable risks either. If we were all insurance specialists and used actuarial tables to decide which activities were acceptable, I’m sure we wouldn’t do any better. Just as every situation is a unique combination of environmental and social factors, so is every person. What is safe for one person is dangerous for another, and what is safe to do in one location is risky elsewhere.

So, what is the right answer? I’m not sure that I have all of it, but there has to be some accounting of the merits of an activity when assessing the value. We can’t let our fears of what could happen prevent us from letting children engage in meaningful activities. We must assess the risks, weigh the benefits, know the child, and know ourselves – then we just have to try to make the best decision we can.