“THERE IS A CHANCE YOUR CHILD MAY BE SERIOUSLY INJURED OR KILLED BY PARTICIPATING IN THIS ACTIVITY BECAUSE THERE ARE CERTAIN DANGERS INHERENT IN THE ACTIVITY THAT CANNOT BE AVOIDED OR ELIMINATED.”

That was the waiver — yes, in all caps — I had to sign last week for my daughter to participate in a basketball clinic. But it’s a waiver that could cover all a kid’s normal life, and I almost wish schools sent them out for everything because a surprising number of parents have lost sight of how to calculate risk as Omicron panic spreads.

Sure, COVID poses dangers to our children. A fall study from England found the infection’s child-mortality rate is 2 per million. Of those who died, “76 percent had chronic health conditions, 64 percent had multiple comorbidities, and 60 percent had life-limiting conditions.” For comparison, about 2 million children in America play baseball each year, and about three or four die from it each year, for roughly the same mortality rate. But most parents don’t think twice about putting our kids in Little League.

The reasons our risk aversion is higher than our own parents’ was are well-rehearsed. We have fewer children. We now see kids as things into which we pour resources rather than potential labor to increase farm yields. Stillbirths and childhood deaths from disease are rare. Because of all this, our desire to protect our children from physical harm has evolved from a natural instinct into an all-consuming obsession.

And at no time has this been more obvious than during the pandemic.

Despite knowing for well over a year that kids are at very little risk from COVID and also poor vectors for transmitting it, we have upended their lives. We have worsened our childhood obesity epidemic and created an adolescent mental-health crisis. We’ve lost years of academic progress in older children and missed basic developmental milestones in younger ones.

And it looks like we’re about to do it all over again. Our local superintendent Wednesday ominously mentioned the possibility of remote schooling on January’s return. A number of public and private schools went remote this week, and others are planning to delay openings in the new year. “Now more than ever,” a recent district communication read, “it is important for everyone to maintain safe protocols in order to help slow the progress of the virus.”

Now more than ever? Really? What about when COVID was putting perfectly healthy adults on ventilators and there were no vaccines or treatments available? Do we need to be more careful now that the Food and Drug Administration has finally approved pills we can take at home to treat COVID? Fellow parents, I am asking you to read these missives with some skepticism.

It would be easy to pin this game of pretending it’s March 2020 on incompetent politicians and corrupt teachers unions. They deserve much of the blame. But we have reached a new phase of the pandemic, one in which public- and private-school leaders seem to be reflecting parental anxieties.

Many parents no doubt worry about being inconvenienced by quarantine rules. But others are asking whether school can go remote again to keep their kids safe. In November, before the latest surge, I heard a parent with a medical degree saying that our kids weren’t masking enough and that masking outside should be more strictly enforced.

Sure, some parents didn’t want their travel plans ruined by having to isolate a kid. But what is the explanation for multiple private schools requiring everyone be tested before returning after break?

Half the kids will be absent in January, for no reason. Omicron is a much milder variant. We are no longer trying to prevent death — we are trying to prevent sniffles.

Kids getting COVID now — many of them fully vaccinated — have the symptoms of a cold and a short cold at that. Three years ago, when half my daughter’s grade came down with the flu, the symptoms were much worse — high fevers, nausea, horrible coughs, even after flu shots — but the school simply asked that kids be fever-free for 24 hours before returning.

Three years is a long time, especially when our lives have been so transformed. But I for one hope that parents use this break to recalibrate their assessment of risk. Children have lost so much already. It’s time to sign the waiver and move on.