Frank Furedi

Child Prisoners Of Paranoid Parents
By Colin Brazier.

Half of all British kids are prisoners in their own home, or parents’ cars. This is a deduction based on interviews with 1,000 parents by the charity formerly known as the Pedestrians Association (but now inevitably groovied-up to Living Streets).

Traffic and the - unjustified - fear of paedophiles are to blame, says LS. We know all this. Sociologists like Frank Furedi argued in his ground-breaking book Paranoid Parenting, how the risk of child abduction had been static for decades. But the fear has multiplied exponentially. We know from charities like Play England that kids don’t learn how to manage risk because their parents won’t let them leave the house for unsupervised recreation. And studies into car use reveal that our children are getting fatter, not least because parents cannot countenance the idea that they should walk anywhere.

This latest report supports that finding, identifying the reluctance of parents to let little Johnny walk to school as a particular problem.

In short, we have lots of academics, charities and lobby groups correctly diagnosing our travails but none of them getting to the heart of the problem. I mentioned Frank Furedi, an iconoclastic author, for whom I have the greatest admiration. A few years ago I travelled with a camera crew to interview him in Kent about a story in that week’s news. As equipment was being assembled, I told Frank how much I agreed with him that Britain was in the grip of paranoid parenting. But why did he not consider sibship - family size - as one of the problems and solutions. I don’t know whether his answer - which I am bound to keep to myself - owes anything to the fact that he, then at least, was the father of one.

Yet, it seems indubitable to me that sibship is a critical factor here. Take the failure of parents to let children walk to school. Children from large families form their own ‘walking bus’, with the eldest child often acting in loco parentis. And is the state encouraging that? Quite the opposite. Look at recent changes to the so-called Sibling Rule. Hitherto, a parent securing a place for one child did so in the expectation that younger siblings would automatically follow. Some education authorities are now resiling on that principle, forcing children into different schools. Gone at a stroke is the critical mass which allows parents to relax when their kids walk - with safety in numbers - to school. Suddenly, where three children burned-off calories and took a car off the roads, the reverse becomes true.

Living Streets also says many of our neighbourhoods have been robbed of their community spirit. Opportunities for inter-generational interaction are particularly limited; unsurprising, since the most pensioners see of children is their little faces squeezed up against a car window. But I detect a hint of paranoid parenting here too; I see it in the timorous exchanges between some parents, out with their child, and the older generation. There is an unfounded suspicion in anyone showing friendly interest in a child.

And here again it is probable that parents of larger families respond differently, because of their well-evolved sense of risk. A father-of-four is exposed to the same media focus on child abduction as a father-of-one, bu the experience of bringing up children, without those scare stories translating into reality, is prone to produce a more relaxed parent who does not see paedophiles lurking under every park bench. With each additional offspring, parents learn to let children out of their sight.

First published by Sky News, 13 August 2009