Frank Furedi

It’s time to take risks with our children
By Jennifer Howze.

I’m in Spain writing a piece for the Times’s website and I caught the last few minutes of a Newsnight last night on Spanish TV. It featured esteemed professor of sociology Frank Furedi, author of Politics of Fear, Therapy Culture and Paranoid Parenting, talking about our outsized fear of risk in modern life, especially as it relates to children. Watching their discussion made me extremely happy to be living in the UK.

Not only do we have newscasters like Jeremy Paxman asking questions and follow-up questions and further follow-up questions (compare with most soft-ball interviewers on American TV) but you have academics like Furedi challenging the popular thinking that when it comes to children we need to be more afraid, more careful and more alarmist.

Furedi spoke to Paxman about the issue of risk and how we now tend to think of risk as something that can and should be avoided at all costs. A child falls down, we look for the person who pushed him; somebody trips, we blame the step.

Furedi talked about this subject at the recent Parenting and Culture Studies conference in Birmingham, organised by Kent University’s Ellie Lee. During a session on parenting and risk, he said, “We no longer talk about risk in a conventional way.” In the language we use and how we describe children’s lives, “what we are saying is there’s a certainty that something is going to happen. There’s a sense of inevitability.”

It’s not just with accidents, where we complain about “cotton wool” kids but then buy rubber corner protectors for our tables (our parents just expected we would learn to avoid the sharp edges). It’s also with relationships.

Chief among the risks for children are men, seemingly all adult men. Many dads I’ve talked to have described feeling conspicuous and viewed with suspicion at the local playground when they take their children. Heather Piper, a research fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University, described a childminder whose 18-year-old son and her husband aren’t allowed to help her with nappy changing or supervising young girls.

Wherever men are around children, we assume a measure of danger and put in place rules to circumvent it. Doors in classrooms must be left open, male coaches mustn’t be left alone with kids.

With the new CRB checks, that’s extended to any person - parent, male, female, no matter – who regularly comes in contact with children (a definition which in and of itself could apply to almost everyone). This issue made big news a few months back but has faded from the front pages. We shouldn’t let it.

It all adds up to a overarching culture of fear for parents and children. We might rationally know that our child is unlikely to be abducted or brain themselves on the sitting room furniture or lose a limb in a horrific jungle-gym accident. Yet we still as a group press for over-and-above safety measures or keep quiet as others do.

Tuesday night Paxman said to Furedi something along the lines of You would feel differently if your child broke their neck and was paralyzed on the playground. Bravo to Frank for responding with the utterly sensible observation that there’s a big range between the risk of breaking your neck and getting a graze on your knee and we have to know the difference.

Let’s start thinking more sensibly about how “dangerous” the world actually is, and not be afraid to say, hey, accidents happen, all men aren’t paedos and then teach children about navigating the real world - warts, knee scrapes and all.

First published by The Times Alpha Mummy, 2 December 2009