Keeping our kids safe from harm, after all, is a value that transcends the usual traditional-progressive divide. It doesn’t matter if you’re a strict disciplinarian who closely regulates your kids’ moral development or a groovy “alternaparent” who pays more attention to their iTunes downloads, you don’t skimp on safety.

Hence the preponderance of padded playgrounds and bike helmets, Internet parental controls and, in perhaps the most visible sign of our collective thinking about raising kids, the scarcity of children left unattended outside to play.

But now, at last, that single remaining shared value is crumbling. Parents are now rethinking pricy babyproofing gear and school bans on tag and other “chase games.” Many are taking their cue from bestsellers like The Dangerous Book for Boys and the Daring Book for Girls and shooing their kids off the couch to go build a campfire or cut flint heads for a bow and arrow.

A few are even forgoing the usual birthday gifts of fancy gadgets in favor of - gasp - pocket knives.

Suddenly, safety is pass?.

As counterintuitive as it may seem, our kids will be all the better for it. Children need risk, hardship and periodic jolts of pain to develop into self-reliant grown-ups. Parents who constantly remove obstacles and eliminate perceived dangers - from smearing their little hands with antibacterial gel six times a day to prohibiting them from going to the bathroom or the corner store by themselves - are doing their kids a deep disservice.

Most parents know this, of course. But it’s easy to forget in a time when threats are broadcast from every corner, from the partially hydrogenated oils in food to the “stranger danger” on the street. At a certain point, however, parents inevitably get worn down by the bombardment and must finally learn to prioritize their anxieties.

In other words, while fencing the swimming pool and insisting you know your teenager’s whereabouts are reasonable parental controls, there comes a time when it no longer makes sense to X-ray your kids’ Halloween candy, ban all Internet use for fear of cyberpredators or do your kids’ homework because they’re so stressed out.

Clinical psychologist Wendy Mogel was among the first to describe this modern strain of overprotection in her invaluable 2001 book The Blessing of a Skinned Knee. Too many modern parents, she wrote, try to “inoculate their children against the pain of life” and end up with insecure, demanding, dependent kids.

Mogel’s prescription is a mix of old-school traditionalism and a more modern strain of compassion - she advises parents to limit the time spent worrying about kids to 20 minutes a day, treat bumps and injuries matter-of-factly, and stop attempting to shield children from the ugly and unpleasant facts of life.

The same basic spirit has fueled the runaway success of the Dangerous Book for Boys, Conn and Hal Iggulden’s politically incorrect and determinedly old-fashioned manual for mini macho men. Packed with such apparently arcane tips as how to hunt and cook rabbit and make a good go-cart, the book was a mammoth bestseller in the U.K. in 2006 and was modified for an even more successful U.S. edition last year.

It has since spawned a companion book for girls (which advises girls how to change a tire, build a fire and even press flowers) and led to a TV development deal and a bidding war over movie rights.

The phenomenon proves that kids and parents are desperate, Conn Iggulden wrote in the Washinton Post, to “remember a time when danger wasn’t a dirty word. It’s safer to put a boy in front of a PlayStation for a while, but not in the long run. The irony of making boys’ lives too safe is that later they take worse risks on their own.”

With so many families now rushing to rediscover the joys of sharp objects and sticky situations, it’s easy to imagine the pendulum swinging all the way back into the sort of perilous territory where little thought was given to such legitimate dangers as car crashes and second hand smoke. But for now anyway, our kids will benefit a lot more if we stop trying to protect them from the inevitable pain of being alive.

That knocking on the back of your seat? The chewing gum smeared on your tray table? The whining and screeching and crying - the incessant, high-decibel weeping?  All my fault.

I am the airline passenger you dread most of all, more even than the religious fanatic or flatulent fat guy.

I am the passenger accompanying small children.

I’ll also take the blame for the soggy Sun Chip that landed on your cashmere sweater during beverage service and the intense little sourpuss two rows up who’s been staring at you since takeoff.

I feel your pain. I agree wholeheartedly that children and air travel don’t mix - they bring out the worst in both. With kids on board, leisurely, meditative trips become chaotic, emotional ordeals. Likewise, sweet and docile children become spastic hellions upon boarding a commercial airliner.

And it’s only getting worse. As rising fuel costs and increased competition prompt airlines to cut back on little “non-essential amenities” like legroom, food and courtesy, the kids are getting crankier.

We grown-ups may gripe and moan scrunched into a middle seat for six hours with nothing to sustain us but a Sandra Bullock movie and a bag of peanuts, but kids aren’t so easily pacified. They won’t stand for it. They act out.

And so they make everyone around them miserable. You, my fellow passengers arrive at your destination incredulous about Kids Today and the parents who let them run riot. Meanwhile we parents are exhausted and embarrassed.

Add beleaguered airline staff to the mix and nightmare scenarios ensue. Last summer on a Continental Express flight in Houston, flight attendants objected when a 19-month-old boy “started saying ‘Bye, bye plane’ over and over,” according to news reports. “You need to shut your baby up,” the flight attendant reportedly told the mother, before adding: “It’s called Benadryl.”

A big controversy followed, with critics raising a stink about the insensitive flight attendant who would dare suggest doping a child.

While the stewardess sounded tactless, I can’t say I entirely disagree with her sentiment. Let’s just say that my 2-year-old always seems badly congested just before takeoff.

Benadryl has in fact been one source of relief during an insane marathon of family travel this month, flying with three kids under the age of eight across the U.S. before taking a quick round-trip jaunt from L.A. to Denmark. At this very moment my eight-year-old son is tipping a cup of Coke dangerously close to a dozing grandmother while my two-year-old repeats the word “cookie!” again and again (and again) in hopes the next utterance will convince his mother to give him one.

And I find myself wondering, must this be so awful? After all, families represent a sizable portion of air passengers—we may be a nuisance, but we’re also a goldmine.

We shell out for family vacations, family automobiles, family restaurants - so where’s our kid-friendly airline?

Rumors have circulated for years about Disney Air or some other startup devoted specifically to families, but the closest we’ve come is Family Airlines, an upstart outfit based in Las Vegas that submitted an application to fly with the US government earlier this year.

They’re definitely on to something. Let solo travelers fly in plush recliners and Zen-like quiet - bunch us families together in mutual chaos, wherein the only people we can annoy are our own kind (i.e. those accustomed to frequent meltdowns and the more frequent spilling of beverages).

Ideally, the planes will be painted in garish SpongeBob yellow and vivid Princess pink (ancillary revenue: kid branding product placement!). On board, swashbuckling pirate pilots and plush costumed stewardesses offer passengers headsets, juice boxes and balloon animals.

It’s easy to imagine the rest: TV monitors and video games at every seat and bubble machines spurting forth at takeoff. Turbulence could be known as “wacky bumpy time,” complete with dramatic sound effects and zany music.  Passengers could do the wave up and down the cabin and bounce beach balls between rows. Little ones would be free to take a spin on the zero-gravity ride or the center-aisle zip line.

And while we’re at it, let’s steal an idea from the old movie palaces and include a “crying room.” That way bawling infants and their weary parents could huddle together and save the rest of the passengers the racket.

Sure, much of this is probably impractical. When airplane bathrooms are no bigger than a broom closet, crying rooms or zip lines are probably out of the question. But on behalf of unruly family travelers everywhere and the innocent bystanders who can’t stand them, the airline industry should get creative and stop ignoring our pain.

Instead, capitalize on it. Forget the in-flight wi-fi—where’s our in-flight bouncy castle?

The popsicles are easy enough to explain. It’s July. And as we all know, nothing soothes the soul on a scorching July afternoon like a popsicle, preferably lime.

The mud balls are more mysterious. Grapefruit-sized and as smooth and spherical as marbles, the mud balls began piling up the week my kids started summer camp.

Other kids fill their days at camp with archery or horseback riding, but for my six-year-old daughter, camp is all about the mud. She gets off the bus every afternoon coated in grime and cradling that day’s creation, which must be immediately transported to the freezer for safe keeping and preservation.

This is a far cry from what I imagined my daughter would be doing back when my wife and I went looking for something to fill the interminably long summer break.

Our kids are just entering their prime camp-going years, so it was a relief to discover that summer camp is as strong as ever - in the U.S., 10 million kids attend camp every year, according to the American Camp Association. The fad these days is for “enrichment programs” that give children an academic or creative edge over their recreating peers.

This means more kids are being lured away from campfires and canoe trips for computer camps, fitness camps, language programs and college prep courses. Kids with even narrower interests can enroll in camps specializing in cuisine, robotics or even entrepreneurship.

The appeal of such programs is clear enough. Looked at today, traditional summer camps can seem hopelessly hokey or even backward, relics of a long-lost industrial age when middle class parents sent their kids out of the pre-air-conditioned cities to learn crafts, survival skills and Native American hokum.

But in this highly competitive and anxious new millennium, it’s worth pausing to ask: is camp still worthwhile? Do we really need macrame bracelets, food fights and “Kumbaya”?

The answer, of course, is yes. We absolutely need those things and all the backwards and hokey traditions that go along with them.

This is especially true now, as more kids are coddled by parents, bombarded by pressures to achieve and isolated by new technology. In the words of American Camp Association President Nancy Gibbs, today’s kids arrive at camp “digitally aware” but “less familiar with the ideas of sharing their space, their stuff or the attention of the adults around them.”

Amidst all that, summer camp replenishes an appreciation for nature, play and getting along in a big group. The killjoys who would keep our kids “on track” 12 months a year ignore these deep and durable lessons.
I’d go so far as to argue that camp stands alongside free market democracy and public education as one of the great institutions of the modern world.

I say this as a grown-up whose own hazy recollections of camp include nasty wedgies, horrendous food and the night my cabin-mates stuck my hand in a bowl of warm water to see if I’d pee in my sleeping bag (mercifully, I didn’t). On a happier note, there were unforgettable letters from home, intense crushes and epic games of capture the flag.

Summer camp, in short, was both heaven and hell—or as authors Roger Bennett and Jules Shell write in their brilliant new book “Camp Camp,” it was “where ‘Fantasy Island’ meets ‘Lord of the Files.’”

In fact, I see no reason why kids should get all the benefits of summer camp. Which is why next week when our kids’ day camp year ends, our whole family is packing up and heading to the wilds of Vermont for a week in one of the increasing number of summer camps that caters to entire families.

So while the kids are busy with their fellow campers, my wife and I will be free to roam the camp and make some memories of our own.

Mud balls, here I come.

The pooping occurred at approximately 6 a.m. after the 2-year-old leaped into bed and suggested that he’d be most grateful if I got up, escorted him downstairs and turned on his favorite program, a quasi-educational cartoon about a bilingual girl and her pet monkey.

What he actually said was this: “Daddy, up! Dora show! Dora show now!”

On most days, “Dora the Explorer” is good for a solid half-hour of pre-breakfast calm. But not today. Today Oscar motioned to his midsection and said he “hurt.”

Woefully misunderstanding the situation, I kissed him on the head and loosened his diaper. At which point he tore off the nappy and grabbed hold of my leg.

And then he pooped on my foot.

This may or may not have been an accident. Looking up at me in the messy slow-motion moments that followed, his expression could only be described as satisfied.

I have two things to say about this. First: It is truly remarkable how tolerant of bodily waste one becomes raising small children. Before I became a dad, the news that my everyday routine would include being defecated upon would have sent me diving for a home vasectomy kit. It is some measure of how far I’ve come (or how low I’ve sunk) that Oscar’s outburst prompted little more than an exasperated moan as I backed away in search of industrial-grade cleaning supplies.

All of which is well and good—there’s no point getting overly worked up or grossed out over something so ubiquitous to family life that we parents simply call it “number two.”

The second thing I have to say is harder to reckon with. Because the truth is this mishap was entirely in keeping with the general climate of aggression, crankiness, impatience and determined messiness that has come to characterize Oscar’s personality over the last year or so. He demands. He resists. He screeches.

We’ve reached the point where I find myself seriously pondering the question: Is my kid a dick, or is he just 2?

Because you never know. As much as it goes against the current mode of progressive, project-management-style parenting, I take it for granted that some kids are trouble right out of the gate. They’re the preschool gangsters and playground terrorists, flicking boogers and insults at those they’ve identified as too weak to fight back. Just as some kids are born sweet-tempered and naturally gentle, others arrive as thuggish as HMO claims adjusters.

But heaven forbid you ever speak this basic truth among parents. Acknowledging a child’s dickishness is truly one of the last taboos of modern family life.

A child may have “behavioral issues” or “developmental challenges,” but the basic character of a kid must never be called into question. It’s always, “Cody must be tired,” or “Dakota needs a snack” and never, “Wow, Taylor’s kind of a prick.”

The trouble, of course, is that it’s exceedingly difficult to distinguish garden-variety assholery from the normal psychosis of toddlerhood.

Some naughtiness is entirely normal, I know. The pileup of parenting books on my bedside table assures me that kids between 13 and 36 months often experience “challenging developmental steps.” They’re testing limits, exploring their autonomy, learning to control their emotions.

One need look no further than the table of contents of the modern standard, “What to Expect: The Toddler Years,” to get a quick and terrifying picture of how toddlers operate. Whole sections are devoted to “antisocial behavior,” “caveperson language,” “crankiness,” “annoying habits picked up at play group,” “jealousy,” “biting,” “wall art and other destructive drawing,” “toothbrushing tantrums,” “coat combat,” “repeated ‘no’s’” and “impatience (now!)”

You’d never know it looking at him, but my son samples freely from the standard menu of misbehavior. In pictures he’s doughy and sweet with a mop of blond hair, big blue eyes and an irresistible grin. He couldn’t be cuter, really. Most of the time, especially when he’s at play, in the bath or asleep, he is by any measure the most perfect creature ever to grace the earth. Then he whacks you on the head with a spoon, laughs like a banshee and tells his mother that her new earrings are ugly and stupid.

Much of this nastiness is standard-issue obstinacy, but it mostly takes the form of an obsession with control. Control and honor. It often feels like I’m living with an embittered and incontinent samurai who must enforce his will and save face at all costs. As such, he’s ritualistic and rigid, demanding that I and not his mother unbuckle him from the minivan or that he receive one red and one purple Flintstones vitamin or that his diluted fruit juice go in the cup with the frog and not the one with the rabbit. Any deviation from the script is met with screams of protest and a flurry of little flailing fists.

We’ve tried discipline, distraction and even strict adherence to his demands, but the maddening fact is you never really know when he’s going to go ballistic. At an airport security checkpoint recently, he blew up when we removed his shoes and then found a new, more extravagant pitch of tantrum when we tried to put them on again. Later at a Chinese restaurant, he dumped his noodles on the floor and then ran among the tables, licking the tops of the Hoisin sauce containers. At a family barbecue last week, he greeted an elderly relative with a swift punch to the nuts (mercifully, he aimed left).

I wish I could say I take all this in stride, but the fact is it bothers me more than I can say. I’ve heard people without kids complain that parents have a blind spot when it comes to their own kids, that otherwise reasonable adults are only too happy to gush over the preciousness of their progeny while their little darlings run riot like English football hooligans.

I seem to have the opposite problem; instead of glossing over my son’s misdeeds (or, say, chalking them up to standard-issue tomfoolery), I latch on to them as terribly important signifiers of my kid’s true identity. Far more troubling than the chaos or general untidiness of parenthood is the ongoing agony of distinguishing passing phases from the first signs of what sort of person your child is and will forevermore be.

Never mind that his days are spent gnawing on blocks and smearing mucus across his cheek. Somehow, I can’t help feeling that he came in fully loaded, that his identity is complete and while he may get better at sharing his toys and using the potty, this is pretty much it. This is him. Behold my son, the dick.

No wonder so few parents are willing to acknowledge their own kids’ misbehavior. Doing so not only insults your offspring, it inevitably leads to reflection. For if my kid is a red-hot pig, what does that make me?

And the truth is I’m very familiar indeed with many of the despicable aspects of my 2-year-old. I too am often overwhelmed by a desire to kick and scream and punch creepy old strangers in the nuts. Like my son, I’m often irrational, hate being told what to do and cranky when sleep-deprived. But, really, who isn’t? Aren’t we all, on some deep and rarely acknowledged level, temperamental toddlers? We’re just better at hiding and managing it, thanks to helpful crutches like cocktails, reality TV and cardio boxing classes.

For now all I can hope is that my son finds some crutches sooner rather than later. He just turned 3, actually, graduating out of “terrible twos” and into a period rumored to be less traumatic and tumultuous. My two oldest kids are 6 and 8, and I like to think they’ve never been anything less than the sweet and mostly respectful darlings they are today. If I’m being entirely honest, however, I’m pretty sure I could recall a horror story or three.

None of which lessens today’s trauma. Developmental misbehavior may be a normal part of growing up, but pooping on your dad? That’s just wrong.

Of course this righteous indignation doesn’t amount to much, beyond feeling jealous of Canadians, justifying my Starbucks habit because I heard they cover their baristas, and cheering through Michael Moore’s “Sicko.”

So I guess that makes me a flaming liberal. But I’m also, I admit, a raging hypocrite.

Why? Because in addition to being a relatively well-off lefty, I’m also an employer; eight years ago, my wife and I hired a devoted, capable and impossibly sweet El Salvadoran immigrant to help with the kids while we’re at work.

And while I’m the first to rail against stingy corporations and slime-ball politicians for their failures to provide decent health care, I’m less likely to admit that my family’s single full-time employee is uninsured. Meaning that when my nanny gets sick or needs a checkup or gets a cavity, she’s on her own.

We’re not breaking any laws—our nanny has a green card and we pay federal and state withholding taxes. Besides, small private employers like us aren’t legally required to provide insurance.

It’s also surprisingly easy to justify something that’s done by so many. According to a 2003 survey by the International Nanny Association, 80 percent of nannies don’t receive health insurance from their employers.

But just because we can get away with it doesn’t mean we should. Any halfway compassionate parent who sees the shoddy and exploitative care available to the uninsured must conclude that they have a moral obligation to do what they can to help. The county hospital in Los Angeles looks more like a Civil War triage tent than a modern medical facility. Patients often wait six or seven hours for a cursory exam with an overworked, underpaid intern.

So it’s not that I don’t want to do the right thing. I do. But it turns out the system makes doing the right thing exceedingly difficult. Premiums are insane, tax laws are antiquated and, despite the hopeful talk from our presidential candidates, reform is unlikely any time soon.

My own insurance provider, Blue Shield, offered a quote of $975-a-month for a basic HMO policy that would cover my nanny and her teenage daughter. Prices are even higher in places like Massachusetts and New Jersey, where policies can run $1500 a month.

The picture gets even uglier when you consider the role government plays. Child care might be essential in two-income working families, but the tax code still looks on it as a luxury. So while businesses are allowed to pay premiums out of pre-tax income, families receive no such benefit. All of which means it costs well-meaning do-gooder families 10-15 percent more to insure their employees than it does business.

“It’s an outrage,” says Wendy Sachs, co-president of the International Nanny Association. “The system makes it harder for good people to act on their generosity. It drives people to pay their nanny under the table and it holds down nanny’s salaries.”

Still, many parents find ways to cover their nannies, paying medical bills out of pocket, listing them on the rosters of family-run businesses or turning to brokers who specialize in covering domestic help. Richard Eisenberg, president of Eisenberg Associates, which has been handling nanny health insurance since the mid-’70s, says his customers are motivated by far more than bleeding-heart liberalism.

“There are plenty of selfish reasons why you want your nanny insured,” he says. “You want a healthy nanny, someone who isn’t worried about themselves and can concentrate entirely on your kids.”

In short, it’s in everyone’s best interest to maintain the health of the person responsible for your kid for up to 70 percent of their waking life. So as difficult as it may be, I’m determined to find a way to get our nanny covered. According to Eisenberg, I can get adequate coverage for a third of the Blue Shield quote.

It’s still expensive, but in the end I know simply complaining about the sorry state of health care won’t make a bit of difference for my nanny or her family. It’s time to pay up.