Dangerous daily lives

This morning, I should have been taking my daughter to her swimming lesson. Instead, she is currently having a Minecraft lesson from her older brother, which is rather cute:

She has broken her arm in two places, unfortunately one near the elbow, so hopefully it won’t be too painful when the cast comes off. She fell off the monkey bars whilst playing some sort of game with the other boys which apparently involved different ways of deliberately falling off – I’m sure you had to be there, and be five. She appears to have tried a horizontal drop-off, which resulted in her outstretched arm taking most of the force. Hopefully her ongoing stomach pain doesn’t mean anything related to the fact she splatted herself down on the ground fully outstretched. The out of hours GP just said maybe she needed Calpol; ok then. I’ll just have wine and stop letting Google illustrate ruptured spleens, the worst case scenarios worming their way into my mind, so that I wake up fully picturing our lives with a late daughter and sister. It is the huge penalty that everyone pays when they become parents, the fact that our happiness is completely dependent on the health and happiness of our children.

The whole concept of safety is so tenuous. A few days later, we went to Flying Tiger, a child favourite, to get some random tat the kids might find entertaining on holiday. They have pocket money, and were allowed to choose and buy whatever they could pay for. One child chose this:

In case it’s not obvious, it’s a banana slicer – pretty pointless, but also the kind of thing 8 year olds love. It is entirely made up of plastic. He was told he needed to be over 18 to buy it, because it is a slicer.

I had to buy this dangerous item for him, lest someone…slice a banana?

This bothers me a great deal, and not in a moronic “health and safety gone mad” way. There are good reasons for a lot of the legislation that has indeed made the workplace much safer over the last half century, and I don’t need to look far to see the terrible consequences of employers in other countries who are able to corruptly ignore whatever legislation there might be. The Bangladesh factory fire is only the first example that springs to mind.

It bothers me because keeping everyone safe all the time is not possible. It is one thing to ensure there are fire stairs on the outside of factories, but quite another to prevent a child from buying a piece of plastic because the programme that coded the purchase restriction couldn’t different “banana cutter” from “butcher’s knife”. And of course no common sense can be applied at the point of sale. We can strive to mitigate obvious risks, but I worry that our efforts to mitigate the residual risk, we give up a great deal of freedom. It is only the UK that seems to operate like this. I recently went on holiday to Germany, and there was an original steam train line that was still in service, operated by Deutsche Bahn. It has an open topped viewing carriage stuffed with children leaning out and looking at the rails. Their eyes shone with excitement at this slightly alien vehicle, at the strange noises and smells. My lungs felt a little on fire from all the coal smoke. There was indeed a tiny sign by the seats, which everybody ignored, asking passengers not to lean out.

Maybe it seemed trivial, but when I discovered adults were permitted to stand on the platforms that join carriages to each other, I felt more joy in theoretical danger than I have in a long time. I should obviously get back into climbing.

The reason I think it matters is because that feeling of “ooh, sketchy; imagine what could happen” is quite important to a healthier mind. It is important to quiet the inner voice of doom by challenging it to a duel. Do whatever is very slightly disconcerting, or uncomfortable. The whole point of the recent vogue in adventure playgrounds is surely to allow children to explore physical risk, and yet we seem to increasingly smother children in regulations that we package up as “safeguarding”. We have taken the real risks to children (which unfortunately are mainly their own parents), and window-dressed them by making every school go through an endless parade of rules about the school play equipment, climbing trees, when and how they can walk to and from school. I daren’t let my nearly 10 year old walk home from school, as he’s rather small and is very likely to be accosted by a stranger telling him that it is dangerous to be alone on the street, and he shouldn’t talk to strangers. One of the mothers I know from school talked quite recently about how she did not want her daughter walking ahead of her, “in case someone stops their car and grabs her” – despite that being the most wildly unlikely scenario I can imagine. I suppose the real issue is the one we all have, namely that we read about some absolutely horrific and unusual case, and our brains abandon all rational thought and are taken over by fear. No matter how many times I tell myself that these events are so rare they’re not a factor, I then read about what happened to some kid in America who was abducted on the way home from school 40 years ago, and suddenly don’t want to let my kids walk alone, ever.

What is so depressing about it is that we do all seem to be collectively willing to deprive children of freedom to assuage our own fears. We were seemingly happy to deprive them of an education to keep older people healthier, for a limited time only. It seems as if there is nothing we won’t sacrifice in our efforts to eliminate residual risk, even when the risk does not pertain to children. We have moved into a world that looks only at the downside risk, not the upside potential. It should not be “what could go wrong”, but “what does succeeding in this slightly risky endeavour do for my child’s positive self-image”?