You cannot reasonably infer a 3 year old’s intentions from his statements, thus the first part of your justification is invalid. Yes you can assign a likelihood to his intentions following on from his statements and parents do this instinctively all the time. However, every child is different in this respect and even if you are a vigilant parent, you must by necessity (in order not to go insane) ignore or assign very little weight to a panoply of utterances. Now you might say that if one is in an area of greater potential danger you should adjust upwards the probability that your child means what they say. But our minds don’t work so cleanly, and if the mom believed that the zoo was safe (and why shouldn’t she?), she wouldn’t have adjusted those weights. So my argument is that the likelihood that *any* person who had raised that child to that point would have *accidentally* misjudged the child’s intentions is greater or equal to the likelihood of most other causes, including being distracted by a phone. Of course if your mind is misjudging the child’s intentions then you’re more likely to allow yourself to be distracted.