The Protected Child

Dear parents

“No! Don’t let him out in the streets alone! What if something happens?”

“Let her just play in the garden, she’s much safer inside.”

What is this happening? Is this really only ensuring safety for the little children?

Today, these parents are so busy keeping their children out of sync from real lives, with affluent and middle-class parenting norms that when parents even think of a certain degree of freedom of kids like camps and school tours even, the most common sentence from the other parent is “This is insane!”

But this over-protectiveness only jeopardizes the self-esteem, outdoor skills and the ability to not crumble under pressure, of the children. A preoccupation with safety has stripped childhood of independence, risk taking, and discovery�"without making it safer.

In the late 1940’s, the UK, Lady Marjory Allen (a landscape architect and a children’s advocate) took an initiative to build these adventure playgrounds with mechanical equipment that the children could move around and manipulate to create their own make-shift structures. But more importantly, she wanted to create a free and permissive atmosphere with as little adult supervision as possible.

The park was staffed by professionally trained “play-workers,” who kept a close eye on the kids but did not intervene all that much and hence, safety was ensured. The idea was that the child could face, what seemed to him, really dangerous and conquer it on his own. This, according to Lady Allen, built self-confidence and courage in children.

It can be a social experience to sit around with friends, make friends, to sing songs to dance around fire, to stare at; it can be a co-operative preparation for when the children have jobs. Depriving the children of these small exposures is actually taking the risk to directly expose them to real jeopardy in life. Kids take special pride in things like “knowing how to get places” alone, and in finding shortcuts adults normally wouldn’t use.

I have memories of childhood so different from the way my parents have of them growing up that sometimes I think they might be making them up, or at least exaggerating them. I grew up in quite a few places. Big cities like Mumbai, Pune and Bangalore. The scenario is quite different from that of a bunch of identical looking buildings in unit-6, Bhubaneshwar, in the mid 70’s, where my mother happened to spend a majority of her childhood. Now, since we all know about the traffic situation in the cities where I grew up, instructions given to me by my working class parents were pretty clear. Do anything you want to as long as you keep off the streets. And like a ‘good girl’, I would listen and obey (which is probably why I learnt how to ride a scooter at the age of fourteen while my mother could ride by the time she was barely 11).

When I use the word “freedom” It should not be mistaken for leaving children absolutely uncared for but it should be considered that reasonable risks are essential for a child’s healthy development.

The irony is that the close attention to safety has not in fact made a tremendous difference in the number of accidents children have only, the childhood is lost somewhere amidst this situation.

I’m no expert. And I’m no parent. So I clearly know nothing about parenting. But all I want to say is creating a perfect safe environment for a child is no more possible than creating a perfectly obedient child. Believing otherwise is a delusion, a harmful one!

Therefore, dear all amazing parents, remind yourself of this every time the panic gets the best of you. So that the next time you regret on missing out on something in your childhood, you make sure your child doesn’t do the same.