Risk a Bit

13 June 2007



British Non-Profit Says Let Kids Play

Much has been made of the British nanny state, but two recent announcements from the UK’s leading non-profits suggest a few scrapes and a broken wrist might be just what kids need. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents [RoSPA] issued a press release that opened, “The Children need wilder places to play where they can take risks, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents said today ahead of its International Play Safety Conference on Thursday.” Last week, Britain’s Children’s Society pointed out that kids’ “freedom to play out with their friends is being curtailed by adult anxiety about the modern world.” A little risk taking is, indeed, in order.

In a flash of concise brilliance, RoSPA also said it “believes that children can learn valuable life-long lessons, particularly about risks and how to deal with them, from playing in the natural environment, and that parents have to accept that their children may get injured. Bumps, bruises and grazes are not serious injuries and are part of growing up.” Peter Cornall, who as Head of Leisure Safety at RoSPA has a great job title if nothing else, said, “When children are able to interact with the world around them, they learn to push their boundaries and develop their own assessment skills – rarely, for example, will children climb above where they feel comfortable.”

Meanwhile, The Children’s Society published a survey taken by GfK NOP, that found “about playing out unsupervised means that adults are denying today’s children the freedom to spend time with friends that they once enjoyed themselves. When asked the best age for children to be allowed out with friends unsupervised most respondents (43 per cent) said aged 14 or over, despite the fact that most of them had been allowed out without an adult at the much younger age of 10 or under. Respondents over the age of 60 went even further, with 22 per cent saying children should be over 16 before going out alone.”

Well, say the protective types, that was then. The world has got meaner, crueler and more vicious. What about pedophiles, and kidnappings, and child murders, and on and on? What about them indeed? They exist, certainly. They are a parent’s worst nightmare. And they are not terribly likely. In England and Wales fewer than 10 kids are abducted and killed each year. According to the National Statistics Office, “In 2001 there were 14.8 million children aged under 20 years in the UK.” The odds are around 1.5 million to 1 against; America’s National Lightning Safety Institute suggests the odds on being hit by lightning are 280,000 to 1 against. Dying from a bite or sting by non-venomous insect and other arthropod is 312,339 to 1 against, according to the US National Safety Council. Dying of an allergic reaction from a bee sting is five times more likely than a kidnap and murder in the UK.

When children don’t get away from adult supervision (and granted that probably shouldn’t happen at age 2), they don’t learn independence nor do they develop an “I can” attitude. It is ludicrous to expect someone who hasn’t had to take much responsibility for his or her actions to turn 18 or 21 and suddenly act like a grown up. A parent’s duty is not to protect the child from everything that can go wrong. It is to help that child develop into an adult capable of fulfilling his or her potential. The trouble with the current view is the focus on the costs of letting children be free rather than the benefits.

© Copyright 2007 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.


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