I know I don’t really style this as a “Mummy blog” so you’ll have to forgive me, but this post has been brewing for a while and I think it’s time to let it all out.
Do you remember receiving the chain email that talked about lead paint being used on cots and running around on your bike from sun-up to sundown all Summer and how previous generations have been unsurpassed in terms of problem solving and teamwork? I read that many moons ago with the usual click-read-delete that happens with emails with a subject line starting FW: FW: FW: FW: FW: but something within it has resonated recently.
Back in the olden days when I was but a lass my siblings and I spent pretty much every school holiday out playing with our friends, coming home occasionally for a drink or a ‘piece n jam’ and running wild the rest of the time. We were by no stretch of the imagination perfect kids but we rarely got into mischief, we were polite and most importantly we were out of our Mum’s hair.
I walked to school every day. In my primary school years it meant walking across a road outside my house, down a street and across a road outside the school. I went to boarding school for a few years but came home to start a new secondary school three miles away from home and from 2nd year to 5th year I walked to school every day and I walked home, through rain or shine. I crossed several roads and lived to tell the tale. Not only that, but I was extremely fit and healthy thanks to this regular exercise which allowed me to clear my head and listen to some music on my way.
At playtime we’d run around playing tig or ‘kiss, cuddle, torture’ or skipping or football without any fear of us impaling ourselves on railings or splitting our head open on the asphalt. We’d have ‘cake & candy’ stalls where our parents would actually make things to be sold and the proceeds sent to whichever charitable cause we were collecting for at that time. When it was snowy, we went out to play wearing a coat and maybe gloves and a hat. I don’t recall anyone dying from eating a fairy cake made by someone’s parent. I don’t recall any severe injuries in the playground (unless you count the time I threw snow at Ellen Murphy and it hit her eye which swelled up. I thought her eye was going to fall out, or worse I’d get expelled from school).
I’m not making light of serious injuries because I know they happen. A boy at my eldest son’s school had an accident whilst playing football and damaged his thigh – damage that only happened because the school spent the better part of a year like a building site while a new car park was created – so I understand that health & safety rules are necessary and important. But – and it is a big but. As parents, as products of the so-called ‘free range’ age when did we get so neurotic about safety issues?
Findlay’s school holds regular cake & candy stalls where the donated items must be bought from the shop. Now I don’t know about you, but there’s no way I’m buying a pack of penguins for my kid to take to school to buy back. What is the point in that?! It is removing every element of fun and enterprise from learning. The list of things they can and can’t do is long and varied but seems to serve more to protect the school from litigation than to protect the kids from danger.
Of course, this level of overprotectionism starts at a far younger age than school. A friend of mine recently told me that when she fills her car up at the petrol station she removes her two young children from their carseats to take them with her to pay before returning back to the petrol station to go through the rigmarole of putting them back in their seats. Now perhaps she has particularly well behaved children, but I genuinely can’t get my head around it. I can just see it now: I pull into the petrol station, fill the car up and open the car door. I get Erica out first and clamp her arm between my knees while I lift Greer out of her seat. I close the door and open the boot to let Nairn & Findlay out but I’m holding Erica with one hand and carrying Greer so Nairn will have to hold Findlay’s hand, except he doesn’t want to so we have a meltdown in the petrol station during which one of the toddlers pee themselves and a massive queue of cars are filled with impatient businesspeople staring at us and wishing a slow death on me.
Maybe I’m a bad parent but simply the thought of having to cajole the four of them back into their carseats is enough to put me off, and my car has this magic device called a LOCK on it so I doubt any sneak thief or wannabe paedo is going to manage to break into my car, hotwire it and drive off in the couple of minutes it takes for me to go in and pay.
The reason this is particularly getting to me right now is because Findlay is going to be nine years old in June this year. His Dad lives about eight miles away from us and there is a bus that goes from almost outside our door to almost outside his Dad’s house and I’m willing to take him on the bus to do a mock run so that he can do it himself, but most people I have suggested this to have recoiled in horror. At his age, I made an unaccompanied flight from Los Angeles to Glasgow with a layover in Boston. I regularly walked to the bus stop after school and got the bus to my Nana’s house at the other side of the city. I just don’t believe that our kids today are in any more danger than my generation were.
Unfortunately we’re becoming the products of a twofold attack against our civil liberties – one from the litigous society we are becoming and one from the media hell bent on reporting PAEDO DANGER – and this is threatening to kill off any fun activities which have an element of what could be construed as ‘danger’ to them. I genuinely feel sorry for today’s teachers because how difficult must it be to work with your charges in today’s climate?
I will keep you posted as to how the bus trip thing pans out but in the meantime I’m going to leave you with a rare photograph of my gorgeous firstborn enjoying the terribly dangerous snow.
Posted under family
This post was written by Vonnie on January 8, 2010
