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Gervase Phinn: He who dares...
Why are you all wearing goggles?" I asked a boy during playtime at a primary school.
"We have to wear them," he replied. "If we don't, we might get a bit of conker in our eye."
"We've scrapped the sack race this year," explained the headteacher in another school. "A child fell over last year and hurt himself."
"We decided not to go to the castle," a teacher told me. "We did a risk assessment and we felt there were too many potential dangers."
"I drop my daughter off at school on my way to work and collect her every day," another parent informed me. "You have to be so careful these days with all these strange people about."
Over-anxious adults who wrap children in cotton wool are doing the young no favours. I know the world is a very different place to the one in which I grew up, but if children are to develop a degree of independence and confidence and become equipped to cope effectively in an adult world, then they must be allowed to take a few risks.
As a child, I had a freedom denied to many children these days. I used to climb trees, walk on walls, paddle in streams, make dams and dens, sledge, play cricket and cycle without a helmet, get crushed in a rugby scrum, light fires, drink water from a garden hose, suck a sweet which had been in my pocket for a week, swing from the arms of lampposts, play marbles in the dust, play leapfrog, propel my home-made trolley down the hill – and all without adult supervision.
I guess many people of my generation did the same and we managed to survive. Perhaps also, when we fell out of a tree or off the wall, scraping a knee or breaking a bone, by experiencing danger and seeing what happened to people who don't take sufficient care, we come to appreciate our own limitations. By suffering the consequences of our actions, we felt more in control of our lives and developed a sense of judgment.
In Paranoid Parenting, the sociologist, Frank Furedi, describes a culture of fear that has led parents to severely restrict their children's independent outdoor activities. In 1971, he states, eight out of 10 eight-year-olds were allowed to walk to school alone. Now it is fewer than one per cent.
Children should be allowed to take a few measured risks. Of course, we need to warn them of the dangers and not encourage them to be reckless or irresponsible but let us not mollycoddle the young. My revered father-in-law, the celebrated "Legs" Bentley who played rugby union for Yorkshire, once told me that he played the game for sheer physical exhilaration. He has been knocked out a few times and come off the pitch sore and bruised and bloodied but, as he told me: "If you confront risk and go in with your eyes open, you are very often safer in the long run."
Life is full of risks. If you laugh, you risk being thought silly; if you weep, you risk appearing mawkish; if you ask a question, you risk sounding foolish; if you show your feelings, you risk revealing your true self; if you try, you risk failure; if you tell someone you love them, you risk not being loved back. But the risk is worth taking because the person who risks nothing has a pretty tedious life.
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Weather for Yorkshire
Saturday 11 February 2012
Today
Cloudy
Temperature: -1 C to 1 C
Wind Speed: 9 mph
Wind direction: South east
Tomorrow
Light rain
Temperature: 1 C to 6 C
Wind Speed: 8 mph
Wind direction: North west
