Trying Too Hard, Part 3

If many parents don’t insist on their children being with them for supper, they do insist on staying in touch. Cell phones are now being described as “the world’s longest umbilical chords’: a sign of modern parents’ obsession with keeping their kids safe. A priori, this is a good thing; the problem is that parents aren’t necessarily very good at it.

Every single thing a person does carries a risk. Lying in bed carries a risk because the roof can collapse. Getting out of bed carries a risk, and I actually know someone who broke multiple ribs and a collarbone after tripping on sheets while getting out of bed. Since we can’t avoid risk, the trick is therefore to manage it. Luckily, nature has given us some useful tools: instinct and the capacity to learn.

Instinct tells us that jumping off a cliff is likely to result in death. We know that, simply by being human. Learning is more complicated because it only works through experience. To learn that turning too sharply at high speed can make a car tip, it helps to start by tipping a tricycle. To learn that work done at the last minute is not usually very good, it helps to hand in a science project late in grade 7 and get a C-.

The danger of parents who try too hard to keep their children safe is that they stop them from experiencing life and thus make it impossible for them to learn to manage risk. This is very easy in a world where we are constantly bombarded with stories of boys and girls being kidnapped in residential streets or run over at crosswalks by drunk drivers, even if such events only have a one in a million chance of occurring.

Parents who try too hard only let their children get to school by their own means once they reach grade nine. Even by that age, they discourage their children from going through so called “dangerous” neighbourhoods and stay in touch constantly with the cell phone. They monitor internet use, censor emails and movies, and make sure that their children hang out with the “right” friends.

Unfortunately, the children of these parents miss out on countless opportunities to make mistakes. Because they can’t walk to school alone as ten year olds, they don’t learn that it’s dangerous to cross a street on a red light. Because they aren’t allowed to chat to their friends on MSN at twelve, they don’t learn how to self-limit computer usage and to detect scams and false identities. In other words, because they are being brought up in a bacteria free environment, they don’t develop antibodies.

This means that when the inevitable moment comes that these children find themselves without the guiding hand of their parents, they end up in unknown territory a make big mistakes. Because as children grow older and become, regardless of what their parents want, more independent, the stakes also increase. If, at twelve, the risk of being alone on MSN is that a child will use swear words are write nasty things, at fifteen, the risks are online gambling, cyber-bullying, identity theft, and others. These are the kinds of things that parents should really be worried about. After all, it’s not the end of the world if an eight year old injures his knee while biking alone in the neighbourhood. It’s more serious if a sixteen year old is rushed to hospital because he had never been out alone on a bike and hadn’t learnt that it was foolish to race with cars.