KATIE ROIPHE ON MODERN PARENTING: If we try to engineer perfect children, will they grow up to be unbearable? Seems likely. Certainly the parents already are. . . . “Last year, a friend of mine sent a shipment of green rubber flooring, at great impractical expense, to a villa in the south of France because she was worried that over the summer holiday her toddler would fall on the stone floor. Generations of French children may have made their way safely to adulthood, walking and falling and playing and dreaming on these very same stone floors, but that did not deter her in her determination to be safe.”