Alice Thomson has writen an interesting article called Be a ‘bad’ parent and let your children out in which she decries the enervating risk-averse trends in which parents, with the encouragement of our political masters, try to supervise and regulate every aspect of their children’s lives.
The comments are also quite interesting. One of them , calling herself ‘Mum’, bristles at the suggestion Thomson makes:
People who don’t have children are always telling those of us who do what we are doing wrong. I also had a free and easy childhood, but got flashed at, followed home twice and had numerous near misses at being run over. I don’t let my child play out, although she has the run of the garden where she can make camps, climb trees and do all the usual outside things, and usually has a number of friends out there with her.
Well ‘Mum’, I do not have any children either but I am very happy you were not my ‘Mum. Moreover I, like everyone else, am fully qualified to have on opinion on how children should be raised because believe it or not, I and everyone else was once a child.
I agree totally with Alice Thomson and think it is time people stopped indulging their neurotic need to control everything and just let children grow up without panoptic supervision.
It’s very hard for me to imagine a childhood richer than those of mine and my three brothers and sister. Several years ago, I described to my mother how Michael and I had gone snorkeling in Kaneohe Bay with sharks bigger than our boat when I was twelve years old. She just shook her head and told me that she was glad she hadn’t known that, at the time. And that just scratches the surface of how we were permitted to grow up.
On a camp-out at a nearby lake, to which we’d bicycled miles from where we lived in Louisiana when I was fourteen, my brother and I and two friends were confronted by a homosexual predator late one night. We were ready: it didn’t take us very long to impress him that the four of us would have just killed him on the spot if he didn’t disappear.
My mom and dad coached us through reality, as broadly as possible. They let us have our way as long as we were being good. They might have crossed their fingers and prayed half the time, but I don’t know how anyone could do a better job than they did for us.
We got to take our chances, as we grew to meet them, and, if there is a heaven, then I demand that my parents’ place there is secure. I am always grateful that I didn’t have to grow up under bloody neurotics.
Perry: I certainly agree in principle. Problem is, I don’t know what is more common, those neurotic parents like that Mum person, or parents like me, who have been trying for years now to separate their children from their computers/TVs/videogames. The fact that once we manage to get them outside, they have no one to play with anyway, as all the other kids are indoors, sitting in front of their various monitors, does not make it any easier. I did manage to do one good thing, though: I taught my son how to climb trees when he was 5. The fact that I had to do it, though, just shows you what kind of a world we live in.
I gave it another thought: the problem you raise is more common with younger kids, where parents make sure to keep them busy through various planned activities, such as organized sports, boyscouts etc., which can be beneficial, if not for the fact that the kids don’t have any time left for free and unsupervised old-fashioned play.
The problem I raised above is more common with older kids.
Honestly, the wussification of the western world does not seem to be confined to just the children.
For example, I grew up snow skiing in the 70’s and 80’s and no one ever wore helmets, not even the kids. After college it was about ten years before I could afford to go skiing again. When I returned, it appears that everyone is now wearing helmets, and I felt like some sort of renegade for wearing just a hat. Did the snow become less soft in the years that I was missing? I can’t tell, but what I do know is that the safety-nazi’s aren’t confined to children. And if they can use the excuse to take away our right to get a concussion “for the children”, what’s next? Take away my right to get a heart attack from eating filet mignon?
I like skiing without a helmet, and I like filet mignon, so I’m with Perry- Kindly PISS OFF you safety freaks!
“I agree totally with Alice Thomson and think it is time people stopped indulging their neurotic need to control everything and just let children grow up without panoptic supervision.”
The same can be said about the nanny state. By making everything safe, we can ‘save lives’ in the short term, but we will lose our will to live in the long term.
I grew up in the UK in the 1940-50s and had tremendous freedom to roam about the city and the countryside with out anyone being worried.
Today parents are terrified their kids will be kidnapped, sexually assaulted, etc. What happened?
I remember we used to have asylums dotted around the country to keep the predators locked up. So it was decided this was cruel and so they were let out and now all the kids are locked up.
Was this a reasonable trade? Society sometimes has to make a decision of which is the greater good.
Perry, you are wrong!
Play is supposed to prepare you for the real world.
Governments everywhere are increasing regulations and restrictions exponentially.
Therefore, responsible play will involve being monitired all the time, and superiorvised at every moment!
To increase their chances of fitting into the real world, schools should issue wallets and ID cards to all kids, and randomly require them to ‘prove’ their identity.
After all, if they grew up unsuperiorvised and f-r-e-e, the shock when they join ‘grown-up’ society might prove too much!
There is the ocassional small reversal of this insanity. Here is one example, that I’m rather chuffed about.
In the sport of flying sailplanes, we in NZ used to have a minimum age of 16 for flying solo. Some other countries had a minimum of 14 (e.g. the USA) and it was decided to review it here.
The outcome? The NZGA removed the minimum age entirely!
An adult can not fly solo unless their instructor believes that they are competent to fly the aircraft, and to make reasonable decisions in various unexpected situations. And this is tested by, for example, the instructor releasing the tow rope unexpectedly soon after takeoff (generally while continuing to chat happily to the student about what they’re going to do later on in the flight). Or by distracting the student into chasing after weak thermals downwind from the airfield, looking for the student to point out that … aren’t we getting a bit far away for our height? And then an A category instructor has to agree as well.
So it was decided that this kind of process is already a completely sufficient test of the student’s suitabilty for flying solo. Their age doesn’t add anything more to the picture. No doubt being very young (or very old) makes it harder to have the responsibility and decisionmaking skills to safely be in charge of an aircraft, but if practical experience shows that a person does, in fact, possess those attrbutes then why question how they came by them?
We dropped the minimum age requirement about ten years ago. So far, as far as I can recall, there has been at least a ten year old girl and a twelve year old boy who have been approved for solo flying.
I’m sure that in practice, the instructors involved with such young students do probably go to even more lengths to be certain, and get more second and third opinions from other instructors than usual. But it’s good to not have that arbitrary restriction any more.
It would appear I am a bad parent, my 13 year old son goes out with his skateboard and his hoodie, and with an uncharged mobile phone, which has no credit anyway, to skate with mates.
I do walk my 8 year old daughter to and from school so maybe that balances things out and I can be an ok parent.
Unfortunately I then let her go out and play in the street with her friends, so I expect my bad parent quotient increases again.
I also let them eat McDonalds, I realise that this may get me in trouble with the Social Work Department so forgive me for using an assumed name.
Though I don’t particularly like his example (why not wear a helmet if you are going to be going very fast down a hill, as long as no-one forces you to?) I do endorse Tman’s wussification theory.
I suspect a few main causes (not necessarily an exhaustive list):
1. “I’m brave! [at the weekend]”
It is a sort of inverted risk compensation. As life gets in general richer and safer, people become in general more fearful and more risk averse. The same accounts for the popularity of pseudo-risky extreme sports. Both sorts of behaviour give dull, safe people the internal impression of intrepidity.
2. Someone must pay.
Risk aversion is being boosted in the culture by corporate responsibility mechanisms, vicarious liability and the idea that if someone can be found to blame, that someone will have to make recompense. Tort makes organisations quasi-fearful, and they thus indoctrinate their people with caution.
3. Clerks rule.
Also from corporate sources (corporate includes state bodies, but large firms are also responsible) the increasingly bureaucratic nature of society adds risk aversion, because the bureaucratic personality cannot tolerate uncertainty.
4. Sisterhood.
The effects of social or technological change take a while to work through. Risk aversion in the noughties, is being boosted by feminist progress since the 60s and 70s. Women have more influence than for ever in western society, which is a good thing on an individual level, but collectively sways us in the direction of safety first. The watchfulness of “Mum” is amplified through politics and the media; an appetite for fear leads to a supply of scares.
5. More signals mean worse information.
Electronic news-gathering and dissemination spread alarm faster and cheaper than ever before. That means a myriad of small incidents with local import that would once have been kept in the perspective of ordinary experience, have started to supplant that ordinary experience. If a bird spots a cat and gives an alarm call, then the local flock are alerted and take avoiding action until the threat is gone. Replace that self-limiting mechanism with a set of massive loudspeakers giving the alarm to all birds in a 100-mile radius, every time a cat is spotted in the zone, and they will never settle except in anxious exhaustion.
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Children become a focus for imposed anxiety of this sort precisely because they are inclined to explore their world for themselves and not quite so plugged into the network of alarmism. Not only are fears on behalf of children based on exaggerated ideas of the riskiness of the real world, but their failure to fear is a challenge to authority.
I regard myself as risk-averse, but this doesn’t mean I run away from every risk. Surely, a reasonable man will try to quantify a risk before acting to avoid it, especially where pleasure or potential profit has to be given up.
Sorry to echochamber but nick.g + guy’s sisterhood rings true for me.
As an additional note, Ed Derbyshire’s point about not locking up one group so all are locked up is all part of the levelling down and constant insecurity of the individual so loved of Sociofascists everywhere.
How will our children ever grow up to be entrepreneurs if they are not allowed to learn how to calculate and judge risks during their short childhood?
You will see from my staff’s post on the same subject that my parents had a very liberal attitude to play and upbringing, I extend the same length of rope to my own children.
I think it may have just got worse Watched By Mother
I am at a loss for words, I wonder where they get their samples from ? Do I want to spy on my kids every minute of their lives ?
This gives me a chill down the spine.
In the very late 50s and much of the 60s I played in the street, in my garden and friends gardens, but mostly on/in nearby commons, parks and woods.
From an early age we knew to steer clear of Public WCs on our own and avoid ‘dodgy’ people, mostly men. As kids we had our own legends, hair raising tales of children who disappeared, or were hideously murdered, trapped in old fridges, drowned in ponds and buried in caved in tunnels. I am not at all sure they were all entirely true, or accurate, but they kept us careful, so served a purpose.
We had to check in with our parents and we always made sure they knew where we were (ie who’s house we were using as a ‘base camp’ and who’s mother would be providing refreshments) we had marvellous times, sneaking into car junk yards and making camps in old vehicles, climbing trees, exploring woods. Populated in our imaginations by villains, monsters, Cowboys, Indians (Native Americans) and German soldiers. We went camping with the cubs and in twos and fours roamed all over London with ‘red rover’ tickets visiting sights and museums.
We got in scrapes, fell off scooters and bikes, gashed and grazed ourselves.
But truthfully – we had the time of our lives.
When my children were young, despite the fact that it terrified me I cautioned them about dodgy people and road safety. I made sure I knew where they were going and when they would be back and as much as possible, tried to allow them as much freedom as possible.
It sometimes felt like a horrible risk. Then again all life is a risk and it absolutely will kill you, sooner or later, one way or another – but what’s the point of living to a hundred if it wasn’t worth the effort?
In daily living we balance risks, every day, many times a day, against benefits obtained from taking the risk. We should be careful we don’t become to miserly in the price we are willing to pay, or what we are ‘buying’ may not actually be worth having.
I used regularly to see parents (usually but not inevitably mothers) who could be pushed to admit they always wanted a “baby”; when baby grew into a toddler they got bored and wanted another. Are these the same overprotective, neurotic “mums” the same people who now realise that large families are no longer fashionable so they slow their children’s development so as to keep them as “babies” for longer?
I generally despised those who just wanted a “baby” because I consider the most worthwhile aspect of parenthood to be seeing the baby you have nurtured and protected for so long, now maturing into an adult you would be pleased to meet, and being proud that my parenting skills contributed to that.
My elder daughter has survived being allowed to play out of my sight when very young, to travel the 15 miles into Oxford alone a little later and being allowed (encouraged even) to make those decisions she seemed ready for (and to accept the consequences of her choices).
She is now looking forward to leaving home to go to University in London while some of her friends are stressing about leaving home, or even choosing to go to universities nearer home to avoid having to leave.
I was given pretty much total freedom to rampage around my neighbourhood as a child. It is a special and precious thing to be a child roaming free. You get to know every nook and cranny of your domain: which trees are best to climb, which dogs should be avoided and which hills give your bike the best speed. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so free as I did in a couple of golden summers when I was ten or eleven.
I feel genuinely sad when I think about my girlfriend’s eleven year old brother who has seemingly never built a den in a local field or been involved in a hide and seek game that lasts six hours over serveral square miles of suburbia.
You can laugh at Mum, but she is right when she says that low-level grubby sexual abuse (flashing and worse) was extremely prevalent when we all used to play outside from a young age and go camping with dodgy teachers/scoutmasters/sixth formers. I find it rare to talk to anyone who has no experience of this.
So you can argue that this doesn’t really do any harm, or you can argue that it simply exists only in our fevered repressed memories and didn’t happen (e.g. the rather personal ridicule I got last time we had this argument).
Personally I encourage my children to play outside as much as I can; however, I can also see that playing online adventure games with dozens of their mates remotely provides them with a sort of freedom which I’d have really loved at the same age.
I knew children who had been flashed at, and it once happened to Mrs MarkE but never to me (I almost feel left out) and only one was harmed by the experience, or rather by the experience of seeing his parents overeaction which left him feeling he had done wrong in mentioning it.
My own children were both flashed at on separate occasions, and each time we tried to walk the line between between laughing it off so as not to cause them any distress (all that happened was they got flashed at, there was no physical contact) and using it as a warning that there were dodgy characters out there and they should take care.
I like to think we got the balance right as neither seems to carry any long term scars and they have survived to their present ages.
Were you harmed manuel?
I was never flashed at as a child – but then Kettering was a small town then. A dirty mac type person has a problem where most people know each other – it would not be a question of “a man…….” it would be “Mr …….”.
There was “toilet patrol” when I was a prefect, but we never actually knew what we supposed to be checking for. It was only years later that it occured to me that the teachers might have been concerned that the older boys might bugger the younger boys. If such things happened at Kettering Boys School I never heard of them.
As for “PISS OFF” – well the English have a chance to tell the powers-that-be to that on July 1st – when the smoking ban comes in.
It is almost worth taking up a pipe, just to be able to smoke it in “public buildings” (which include private business enterprises).
It should be up to the owner of a building to decide whether to allow smoking or not. If you do not want to work in such a building – go and get a job working for an employer who is anti smoking (or work for yourself). You may get a lower income – but that is the choice you have made (less money for supposedly better health).
And as for government building. The government should ban smoking in them on the same day it says that smokers no longer have to pay taxes (the money that is used to build and maintain these buildings).
“But the health service….”.
I am not exactly a fan of the N.H.S. (so using it as argument does not impress me), however taxes from smokers (even counting just the smoking tax – let alone all the other taxes that they pay) is vastly greater than N.H.S. spending on health problems that are supposed to be caused by smoking.
It’s not about “risk aversion” really. It’s about a complete lack of people being able to compare risks.
The risks from traffic or peadophiles are real and while extreme when they happen, they are rare. They are far out-weighed by the less dramatic but vastly more likely risks of kids growing up fat and unable to navigate the world for themselves because they’ve only seen it from the back of Mum’s SUV.
Oh and the whole idea of growing-up entirely having spent my childhood leisure time pursuing “structured, supervised” activities fills me with dread. How dull and deadening!
But there’s also a flip side to the peado thing. Adults used to be able to interact in the street with kids they weren’t related to. They could tell them off, help them if they were lost or mildly injured… If I were, around here, to do anything like that there’s a reasonable chance I’d get filled-in by an oafish father coming round the corner. Even the non-oafish parents would look upon me with suspicion.
That is an absolute breakdown in civil society because obviously only police, paramedics and social workers can intervene. If I gave a kid a sticking plaster for a grazed shin I’d probably be done for practising medicine without a license!
While, for example, the kidnapping of Madeleine McCann is dreadful I wonder how many millions of kids will suffer from being treated as “royal prisoners” as a result of the media frenzy over it? It’s called a “sense of proportion”. It’s something that the media and especially ITV News (who were flying a helicopter all across Portugal and giving breathless “updates” that “nothing new had happened”) for a full segment recently could do with developing. I only watch ITV news because it’s on just after “The Simpsons” – oddly enough a show that portrays kids acting very independently.
Paul,
Excellent idea. If 10 million Brits take up their meerschaums on July the first we can defeat ’em with rough shag. Which would be fitting because they’ve been taking us forcibly from behind for years…
, like everyone else, am fully qualified to have on opinion on how children should be raised because believe it or not, I and everyone else was once a child. Maybe it’s different for you but most people have a different level of maturity and responsibility as parents. I’m not saying that parents should be more restrictive but they should show responsibility in safely exposing their kids as they feel is appropriate. I don’t take a lot of parenting advice from my kids – if I did we’d have ice cream and hamburgers as the main course about 4 times a week.
“A poll commissioned as part of the inquiry found that just under half the adults questioned (43 per cent) thought that 14 was the earliest age at which children should be allowed to go out unsupervised.”
That’s really, really sad. That’d be most of my best memories of being a kid gone. But hey, at least I wouldn’t have been murdered by a paedo or run over. Er…
Amazing how quickly things change. I’m only 25, and my 21 year old brother and his friends were out and about just as young as I was (young enough that I have no exact idea of when it actually was). Our 18 and 16 year old brothers just never really knew many kids round the area. Now, when they go out, it tends to be half way across the city with friends from school. Not, as far as I know, our parents fault. And I’m pretty damn sure it’s unlikely to have been caused by an actual lack of other children.
The child on your street who was run over has a name and may be identified, as does the child in the newspaper who was abducted and abused (the child who was abused by uncle Ernie yesterday and will be again today is another debate). The children who are being denied their childhood and who will be prisoners until they leave home are an anonymous mass, so they are less amenable to scare headlines in the tabloids.
If children are going to be monitored and supervised and regimented every moment of their lives with no room for improvisation or creativity, how in hell are they going to grow? What sort of world will end up with? (Please don’t answer, I think I would be afraid).
MarkE:while some of her friends are stressing about leaving home, or even choosing to go to universities nearer home to avoid having to leave.
That is one of the saddest things I have read. Those kids may never leave “home” if they are not careful.
Interestingly I was in Oxford the other day and Mrs TimC made an interesting observation: the students act like high school kids.
This is truly the fruits of infantilisation.
What scares me is that my reaction to that article was initially “sod the lot of them, I’ll raise my children (when I have them) how I damn well please”. But suppose I let my kids, as in the article, go across London at age 6 and suppose they get into trouble, break a leg for instance. Now to me obviously I’d be distressed at my child breaking his or her leg but that’s part of growing up – they won’t be doing whatever caused the break again! But I wonder if everyone else would see it that way. I can just see solemn faced police officers turning up at the hospital and asking me questions about why my children were ‘abandoned’ in London on their own…
“long passed time” I suggest. Ain’t you got no grammar? Not even an aunt?
“14 is the youngest age to go out unsupervised”
My parents let me travel from London to Marseilles by myself so that I could stay with a pen friend when I was 13. At 16 I hitchhiked around Europe for 4 weeks by myself. I used to play outside with other kids certainly from age of 7 or 8. At 10 or 11 adventures were everywhere.
I encountered two sexual predator types, poor men who obviously couldn’t get it on with women, part of growing up and risk.
I’m now 65, living in Canada but I lived in Zambia in the 60s and still enjoy taking risks. I recently went rafting on the Thompson river with a visiting Australian cousin.
I certainly encouraged my children to play outside in Vancouver, 25 to 30 years ago.