Nevertheless, I still found myself compelled to read stories about unfortunate events. Back in the mid-1990s there was a rash a mechanical-failure type plane crashes, and I consumed all the coverage about them. I told myself I'd feel better knowing all the details, but they just frightened me. In fact, for a year or two I developed a real fear of flying, sweating it out over every bump and strange noise on an airplane.

But that anxiety was nothing compared with what it feels like to be a parent. For me, two things crashed together at once: the sudden emotional vulnerability of being a new mom - you know, weeping at lullabies and phone company commercials; and the overwhelming sense of responsibility for another life. I avoided freeway driving when the baby was in the car, picturing our vehicle being run down by one of those speeding trucks on 880. If I heard her cough on the baby monitor at night I'd go in and sleep on the couch in her room. I worried about whether her window was big enough for someone to crawl through and snatch her.

Which brings us to one of the most anxiety-producing news events a mother can experience: child abductions. I won't get into the details because you don't need that television footage running through your head again, but there have been altogether too many of these incidents being reported lately. Almost as bad are the subsequent stories about people sending their five-year-olds to karate class to fight off potential attackers.

Let's be real here, folks. The chances that your child will be approached by a stranger who wants to do him harm are extremely minimal. I know we've all changed our lives to accommodate the rare times when it happens. We keep an eagle eye on our kids at all times, and it's too bad, because I'm not sure how they're supposed to learn any kind of independence or self-confidence with us monitoring their every move. But OK, this is modern life and keeping our kids safe can't hurt them or us.

But what can hurt us is worrying incessantly about the possibilities. We lose sleep, we avoid doing things that might be fun, we waste precious emotional energy, we transmit anxiety to our kids, we just make ourselves miserable. As a veteran worrier myself, I'm familiar with all these symptoms.

Which is why I listened with interest a while back when a Harvard psychiatrist was interviewed on National Public Radio about worrying in the post September 11th world. The shrink, Dr. Edward Hollowell, had written a book called "Worry: Hope and Help for a Common Condition" that had some helpful advice.

First of all, he explained that worrying is partly a genetic trait, connected to our own individual brain chemistry. When I thought back to my own family's worry-wart factor, this made sense to me. When I was 17 and would take the family car to visit a friend after dark, my father would make me honk the horn when I came home because he'd read about a girl who'd been attacked in her own driveway. Too many crime headlines.

What makes worrying worse, Hollowell said, is doing it alone. In fact, he argues that worrying has become epidemic because our society has become so disconnected. Share your worries with someone else and maybe they'll shrink to normal size and stop knocking around in your head. There's also a feeling of safety in connecting with those close to us.

He also recommends getting the facts. For instance, every time you hear about another bad thing happening to a child, remind yourself of how rare it is. Terrible, but rare, and unlikely to happen to your child. And be a good consumer of information. Watching the same local television report about an unhappy incident over and over isn't going to help. Seek out information on the topic that could put it in perspective, maybe with an Internet search.

Finally, make a plan. Taking action against a worry is the best way to keep it at bay. That might mean having a conversation with your child about staying safe, or making sure you have her friends' phone numbers handy.

Parenting is a frightening business. But it's up to us whether we allow the inherent anxieties to paralyze us. As Hollowell told the radio audience, children and their antics can also be a distraction from the worries of the day. So the next time you hear or read a frightening piece of news, look around the house. The dirty socks in the corner or the half-eaten bowl of Cheerios under the bed should keep your mind off it.