A UK Perspective on Computers and Outdoor Play

(Glasgow) Herald – July 21, 2008
By Ron Ferguson

After an inauspicious beginning - the presiding doctor at my birth told my mother that I was the ugliest baby he had ever seen - I had a happy childhood. Being the ugliest baby in Cowdenbeath was not a great start in life; a few months later double pneumonia set in. Poultices and prayers were the treatment, while a mirror was held to my mouth to check if I was breathing. The crisis came and I emerged, still ugly but breathing. Despite parental anxieties over my health, I roamed all over our sinking mining town with my friends for what seemed like hours at a time, inhaling the spirit of a community as well as copious quantities of coal dust.

I recognise now that I was lucky, privileged even. Money was always in very short supply in our home, but I had two parents who cared for me and my three siblings, I lived in a community in which moral, religious and political values were always up for public discussion, and I safely inhabited free roving space.

Fast forward. It seems that parents in modern Britain are the most anxiously protective in the world. Researchers revealed last week that one-fifth of mothers want to supervise their children's every move, not letting them roam much further than their front gardens, even more restricted in the case of tower blocks. All this despite the fact that 64% of parents believe that today's children have been deprived of childhood.

advertisement
Every country has its own challenges. In Malawi, thanks to the twin scourges of HIV/Aids and poverty, the fastest-growing trade is coffin-making. In this country it would appear to be the risk-assessment business, allied to the burgeoning health and safety and litigation industries. Type "risk assessment" into any internet search engine and you'll be amazed by the sheer volume of material that shows up.

If children are confined within a circle round their home so far as unsupervised play is concerned, what are they doing? Better start with what they're not doing.

They're not engaging in the unstructured play through which kids develop emotionally, learn to think, solve problems, and increase the social skills needed for later on in life. They're not enjoying the creativity and imagination which are integral components of free play. Their language skills are suffering. They're not developing the independence and resilience which will help them develop into mature adults. They're not learning how to live in a society which has risk built into it. They're not exercising enough, or enjoying life in the outdoors.

They are, however, munching junk food and becoming obese, with all the health implications of that lifestyle. They're watching hours of television, or staying in their rooms staring at computer screens and playing games.

They are certainly not safer. On the same day on which this research was published, The Herald ran a story with the headline "One in 10 children has sexually explicit chats online". It made sobering reading. More than a quarter of 11 to 18-year-olds have visited adult websites. Nearly 30% of young people have interacted with strangers online, and 10% have met someone in person that they originally contacted on the web. Half of UK children lied to their parents about what they were doing online. Parents who wouldn't allow their kids to play unsupervised 100 yards from their door will blithely imagine their offspring are free from danger as they sit at their keyboards. Children are more at risk from the internet than from a possible encounter with the neighbourhood werewolf.

By being overprotective, parents are damaging their children. There are dangers "out there" from both predators and traffic, but our risk-averse culture is not helping our youngsters live in a world which has risk built into it right from the moment of birth.

We do, of course, need more adequately supervised play areas and decent sports facilities for children. We also need more stringent supervision of known paedophiles as well as robust disclosure procedures for adults who seek to work with children, but the media hysteria about security is making parents very anxious.

To return to my own childhood, some readers will feel I have romanticised it. They will, of course, be right. It was not as safe and secure as I have remembered it, as various court cases and memoirs have shown. Families were only as healthy as their own secrets.

When we look at current societal problems, we come back time and again to the central importance of childhood and the need for support for parents, who face the challenges of bringing up children in a society which fails to put the child at the centre of its concerns.

Whatever the question is, overprotection is certainly not the answer.

Top Stories