Cats don't care if you take away TV and internet access. There are methods to keeping track.

I fully plan on having those microchip thingies inserted into the back of my kids' necks.

The greater lengths a parent goes, the higher a child must reach to climb over. Vicious circle.

I drugged myself heavily through my son's teen years. I don't remember all of the bad stuff clearly so... bonus!

At least your cat doesn't have a driver's license.

Constant low level panic attacks that erode them inside.

Constant low level panic attacks that erode them inside.

Easy. Indoor kid. Gets harder once they learn to walk, though.

Is he normally an indoor cat? I can understand your anxiety, if so. Ours is indoor/outdoor and comes and goes as he pleases. He always comes back, & in the winter only goes outside to pee.

I have no children...

As anxious as I get over four-footer injuries and accidents and such, I can not imagine having an actual child.

Yeah, this is the price we pay for loving others.

Indoor kid....I shouldn't have been drinking coffee at the PC when I read that... :)

I had a cat. She occasionally went walkabout but always made it home, because she liked to be fed regularly. Cats are pretty good at functioning in the world.

Astonishingly, so are kids. Read about Free Range Kids/Parenting. My kid made enough Really Bad Decisions to scare me really a lot, and to make me doubt his ability to achieve independence. But he's pulled it together and is an amazing adult.

If you try to make your kid an indoor kid, their adolescence will change your mind. Trust me on this.

Having a kid means wearing your heart on the outside of your chest. It changes everything.

I was an indoor/outdoor latchkey-ish kid, within reason. At the apartment complex where I spent my younger years, my sister and I would play with the neighbor kids at the central playground or in the area right near our complex till it got dark and then we had to come home.

As we grew older and our friends moved away (or in my sister's case, her friends were in a different part of town, so she went to their houses to study and hang out) I moved to being an indoors kid after my mom picked me up from the babysitter's. And then when we moved to the townhouse condo, I came straight home from school and was almost exclusively indoors till I got my driver's license.

If I had any oats to sow, I think I sowed them mostly during my 16th year of life, and then I "settled down" with a boyfriend.

Wow... that was a lot of text that just felt like it needed to come out.

What Kangaroo said. And what bearwife said.
Parenting is the scariest and most rewarding
thing I've ever done.