Our obsession with safety is making kids miserable
All my sons want for Christmas is a trampoline, writes David Penberthy. But in the eyes of some parents, I might as well throw them off a cliff. What ever happened to kids being kids?
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Father Christmas has got some explaining to do.
My two youngest children, aged two and four, have spent much of the past year talking about how much they love trampolines.
Earlier this year we went to a mate’s place for his son’s fourth birthday, with the little guy being the lucky recipient of a flash new trampoline that was enclosed in safety nets.
It was a stinking hot day but the trampoline came with the added excellent feature of some polypipe run up the side from the backyard tap, with a mist sprayer keeping the kids cool as they jumped around.
All of us parents put our toddlers in there and took turns watching them. There were about eight kids in there at any given time and they had a terrific afternoon jumping around.
Now it’s entirely possible, this Christmas Eve, Father Christmas will be landing his sleigh at our place and depositing the same trampoline in our backyard for the boys.
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It has since been brought to my attention that an entire suite of narky recommendations has been drawn up by the relevant busybodies that mean my wife and I, aided by Father Christmas, are about to engage in a wilful act of child neglect.
The rules surrounding trampoline use state that trampolines should never be used by children under the age of six, that they should never be used by more than one child at a time, that they should only ever be used under parental supervision, that they should not be used as a flotation device, and may contain nuts or traces of nuts.
The last two bits aren’t exactly true, but the first three are, suggesting that trampolines should only ever be used by young people who are about to grow out of wanting to use a trampoline.
In this paranoid age we inhabit, there are also vast screeds of online conversation across the mummy blogs about the perils of trampoline use, with the more agitated helicopter mothers saying that if it’s a trampoline you really want for a child, you might as well just throw them off a cliff or send them over Niagara Falls in a barrel instead, you reckless maniacs.
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Earlier this month I had the great pleasure of meeting and interviewing the Aussie cave divers who spearheaded the rescue of the Wild Boars soccer team and its coach from the underground cave system in Thailand.
Adelaide anaesthetist Richard Harris and Perth doctor Craig Challen have just released their terrific book, Against All Odds, which takes you inside the rescue. It’s a truly awesome tale, one where you know in advance it has a happy ending, yet remains surprisingly gripping as they implement the seemingly demented plan to inject the boys with ketamine, bind their feet and hands, and use cave divers to chaperone them individually through the cave system like little human parcels.
Harris and Challen are joint Australians of the Year and they have a simple message for us all. Do more stuff. Take more risks. Get off the couch and outside. Turn off your Xbox, leave your phone in a drawer, and do something.
Challen had a terrific answer to when I asked him if he and Harris had experienced any kind of let-down, almost like PTSD in reverse, at the fact that life would probably never be as exhilarating again as it was over those three weeks last year when they performed that miraculous rescue.
“The dirty little secret is that it was simply a bloody awesome adventure,” Dr Challen said.
“We get asked all the time if we have become consumed by what we did, and whether it’s left some kind of gaping void in our lives. People seem crestfallen when we tell them the answer is no. It was great fun. We were lucky to do it.”
“We don’t have to battle with our demons. It’s almost like people expect or even want us to have suffered during this. They get this disappointed look when you say: ‘It was actually really good.’ What concerns me even more is that they expect the boys to have suffered through all of this too. It’s regarded as not normal if you can go, ‘Well, that was just a great experience.”
Now I am not suggesting for an instant that knowingly inserting your child in a flooded Thai cave system at the height of monsoon season is the best way to toughen them up and teach them outdoor skills.
But I do love the idea, as put by Dr Challen, that both the adults and children who were involved in this mind-blowingly dangerous exercise can look back at it all and say: Well, how awesome was that?
There is a mountain of data out there pointing to rising anxiety levels in young people, rising obesity levels, the loss of confidence in the social media age, the reduction in fine motor skills as children have moved from playing with Meccano and Lego to playing Candy Crush and Minecraft.
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Weirdly, we teach our kids the value of resilience as an abstract concept in school wellness classes, yet as parents and educators, we often seem so paranoid that we spend our time trying to eliminate all forms of risks from our children’s lives.
Our modus operandi as a society is to regard any form of behaviour on the basis of the improbable risk it carries.
Anyway, the trampoline will be assembled on Christmas Eve, not by a team of elves, sadly, but a stressed middle-aged guy swearing at the poorly-translated instructions and regretting having consumed that third beer.
I might see you in the casualty ward at some point in the New Year. But then again, the statistics overwhelmingly suggest that I might not.
Originally published as Our obsession with safety is making kids miserable