This is an opinion column

When I was a child at the beach in Florida or Alabama, we didn’t have the flag system to mark the days when the sea was too rough to swim in. We had the mother system. A mother—ours or somebody else’s—sat under an umbrella close to the waves and watched. That was her job—keeping an eye on children, her own and anybody else’s who might get in trouble when the tide pulled them out too far.