I read this fantastic piece in The Atlantic two weeks ago, and I’ve not been able to stop thinking about it since. It’s a goose-pimpling piece on how cultural and socially we’ve been programmed by a few, very rare abduction cases and the litigious nature of some parents (particularly in the US) to think good parenting is about keeping our children in view (and on rubberised floors) at all times.
Our kids are all under 7, but since reading that article I’m already so aware of all the things I’m doing that I once promised myself I wouldn’t. At the play area (which I confess, I find enormously boring - here’s a slide. Go down it. Walk along this padded, fenced in walkway. Walk back. Go down the slide again. These internationally-replicated play areas are *just* like hamster runs) there are fences the whole way around with only two gates out, leading just to the play area for the slightly older kids. Yet I can’t relax and read a book there. If there are ten seconds when I can’t see the (sensible, non-wandering-off) older two, I’m up, pacing the perimeter until I know exactly where they are and what they’re doing. In M’s last swimming lesson before the holidays, the whole class just had a free swim with floats and balls in the pool. As I watched M and buddy swim around, inventing pool-noodle games and splashing one another under the watchful eye of their swimming teachers, I suddenly became conscious of the weight of my stare, pressing, pressing, pressing down on them, squashing them until one day they finally just stop bouncing back into their own forms.
In the Atlantic piece, Hanna Rosin writes:
When my daughter was about 10, my husband suddenly realized that in her whole life, she had probably not spent more than 10 minutes unsupervised by an adult. Not 10 minutes in 10 years.
Although this lot are younger, I can’t see what’s going to change in those intervening years to make it any different. It’s all on a spectrum, and J and I are definitely on the slacker end of the parenting worrier scale, yet even for me The World’s Panickers are one of the major forces stopping us letting our children have space to grow - when I discussed it all with my parents last week, my dad’s response was a thoughtful, ‘Yes, their independence is important, isn’t it?’ My mum’s? 'But what about all the paedophiles?’ Yup. That’s how I was raised to think about child safety, even when I was a free-roaming child myself. There are plenty of people giving panicky glares to children allowed to walk a street alone, and who’ll give you filth-on-toast once they realise the child is yours.
On top of that, the price you pay if you are in that 0.001% affected by the one in a million person, or the terrible, fluke accident, is too high to consider. My sister feeds me plenty of tales about friends of friends whose child was snatched and found only after helicopters were mobilised. And yet… what if we’re being both safe *and* sorry. What key piece of our kids are we taking from them when we’re paying for their ballet lessons and Scout groups and swimming classes and always, always going with them, all the time, every moment, watching, watching?
Friends I’ve discussed this with say that things were different when we were young (of course) - they knew all the houses on their street, so if anything went wrong they knew they could knock anywhere. I pointed out that they knew everyone *because* they played out there, while our kids know only the children in the house directly next door, despite at least ten houses on our street having kids of comparable ages. The playspace of these kids now is safely behind a closed front door.
My excellent mother-in-law said that she survived her husband taking their three precious children to moors scattered with giant, neck-breaking boulders by simply never going with them to watch. Perhaps that’s my best option.
And when I asked M how she’d feel about a play area filled with tyres, mattresses, streams and planks, with no adults around, just kids, I don’t think I’ve ever seen her look so excited. Now we just need to find one.
NB: Looks like we now have two places to move to: North Wales and New Zealand. And check out the comment from a parent at the NZ school.
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*Fire and Hemlock, by Diana Wynne Jones. Bally tumblr won’t do the quotes like I want them to.
