Give our cotton-wool kids their freedom

[philw]

http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/opinion/give-our-cotton-wool-kids-the-freedom-they-need/story-e6freagu-1225832977565

A NEW State Government guide to the Fleurieu Peninsula includes on the front cover a colour photograph of a young man leaping from rocks into the sea.

The picture is active, exciting, adventurous and with an edge of danger - just the image to tempt tourists to explore the diverse peninsula.

But in Sydney recently a television program campaigned against youngsters leaping into the sea. Doctors and safety experts warned that it was dangerous and someone could get hurt, even killed.

That's true. But how low are we going to set the bar in the present cotton wool culture? Are we going to ban young people from doing anything which more cautious and less physically competent elders deem to be dangerous?

What are we really frightened of? Is it children getting injured or is it being sued for negligence if a child is hurt?

Let's be clear. Children are our greatest resource and we are all charged with the responsibility of ensuring their safety. But keeping children safe does not mean they can never be exposed to risk or danger.

In Britain the parliamentary secretary of the Department of Children, Schools and Families, Kevin Brennan, says more than one third of children never play outside.

Why? Because of adult fears that they will be kidnapped or abused, or that they will fall off playground equipment or a skateboard.

Molly-coddling children, shielding them from any form of reasonable risk, leaves them ill-prepared to cope with the hard knocks they will inevitably face in later life. Eliminating risk creates an aversion to failure. Anyone who succeeds inevitably takes risks and confronts failure.

Children shouldn't be raised to believe life is easy and that things never go wrong, that they will never get hurt.

In a new book, Fifty Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Children Do , Gever Tulley and Julie Spiegler argue that by taking risks children learn how the world works.

"When protection becomes over-protection, we fail as a society, because children don't learn how to judge risks for themselves," Tulley says. "So we must help them understand the difference between that which is unknown, or unfamiliar, and that which is truly dangerous."

Perhaps children who are allowed to take risks when they are young may appreciate the dangers of bad driving when they are older.

Is the explosion of high-risk sports like rock climbing and bungy jumping a spin-off of the cotton wool society? Today's parents are propagating a fear-based culture in which they scold each other for letting their kids do dangerous things. Tulley says children should be allowed to play with fire, throw rocks, smash glass, lick batteries, climb trees and even glue their fingers together.

If children are allowed to climb trees they will learn to do it safely. If they are prevented by over-cautious parents they will eventually do it anyway, possibly without an understanding of technique or danger.

The head of the Independent Association of Preparatory Schools in Britain, David Hanson says: "From the youngest age children need to be allowed to take risks. We want them to have scabby knees occasionally."

That's why the photograph on the Fleurieu promotional magazine is so exhilarating. A young man taking a risk. Yet cautious bureaucrats, perhaps misreading the public mood, have banned young people from jumping off the end of our metropolitan jetties. They are closing playgrounds they perceive as dangerous.

Children are precious, of course. But it is time we removed the cotton wool and the safety net and allowed them to be more like Ginger Meggs or Tom Sawyer. More like children.