Smother Love
Have we become too protective in the way we’re raising our kids?

BY JOANNA WANE
FROM SUNDAY STAR-TIMES

Every morning, Leanne Brickland and her sister would bicycle to school with the same words ringing in their ears: “Watch out crossing the road, don’t speak to strangers and wear clean underwear in case you’re hit by a car.”

“Mum would stand at the top of the steps and call that out,” says Brickland, now a primary- school teacher and mother of four from Rotorua, New Zealand. Substitute boxers and thongs for undies, and the nagging fears that haunt parents haven’t really changed. What has altered, dramatically, is the confidence we once had in our children’s ability to fling themselves at life without a grown-up holding their hands.

By today’s standards, the childhood freedoms Brickland took for granted practically verge on pa-rental neglect. Her mother worked, so she and her sister had a key to let themselves in after school and were expected to do their homework and put on the potatoes for dinner. At the family’s beach house near Wellington, the two girls, from the age of five or six, would disappear for hours to play in the lagoon and sand dunes.

A generation later, Brickland’s children are growing up in a world more pampered yet more attuned to peril. The techno-savvy generation of PlayStation kids who can vanquish entire armies and rocket through space can’t even be trusted to cross the street alone. “I walked or biked to school for years, but my children don’t,” Brickland admits. “I worry about the road. I worry about strangers. In some ways I think they’re missing out, but I like to be able to see them, to know where they are and what they’re doing.”

Call it smother love, coddled-kid syndrome, parental neurosis. Even though today’s children have the universe at their fingertips thanks to the Internet, their physical boundaries are shrinking at a rapid pace. According to British social scientist Mayer Hillman, a child’s play zone has contracted so radically that we’re producing the human equivalent of henhouse chickens—plump from lack of exercise and without the resilience and initiative of free-range kids of the past. The zeitgeist of our times is no longer the resourceful adventurer Tom Sawyer but rather the angst-ridden dad and his stifled only child in Finding Nemo.

In short, child rearing has become an exercise in risk minimization, epitomized by stories such as the father who refused to allow his daughter on a school picnic to the beach for fear she might drown. While it’s natural for a parent to want to protect their children from danger, you have to wonder: Have we gone too far?

A study conducted by Paul Tranter, a lecturer in geography at the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra, showed that while Australian and New Zealand children had similar amounts of unsupervised freedom, it was far less than German or English kids. For example, only a third of ten-year-olds in Australia and New Zealand were allowed to visit places other than school alone, compared to 80 percent in Germany.

Girls were even more restricted than boys, with parents fearing assault or molestation, while traffic dangers were seen as the greatest threat to boys. Bike ownership has doubled in a generation, but “independent mobility”—the ability to roam and explore unsupervised—has radically declined. In Auckland, for example, many primary schools have done away with bicycle racks because the streets are considered too unsafe. And in Christchurch, New Zealand’s most bike-friendly city, the number of pupils cycling to school has fallen from more than 90 percent in the late 1970s to less than 20 percent. Safely strapped into the family 4 x 4, children are instead chauffeured from home to the school gate, then off to ballet, soccer or swimming lessons—rarely straying from watchful adult eyes.

In the U.S. Journal of Physical Education, Recreation & Dance, New Jersey assistant principal and hockey coach Bobbie Schultz writes that playing in the street after school with neighbourhood kids—creating their own rules, making their own decisions and settling disputes—was where the real learning took place. “The street was one of the greatest sources of my life skills,” she says. “I don’t see ‘on-the-street play’ anymore. I see adult-organized activities. Parents don’t realize what an integral part of character development their children are missing.”

Armoured with bicycle helmets, car seats, “safe” playgrounds and sunscreen, children are getting the message loud and clear that the world is full of peril—and that they’re ill-equipped to handle it alone. Yet research consistently shows young people are much more capable than we think, says professor Anne Smith, director of New Zealand’s Children’s Issues Centre. “The thing that many adults have difficulty with is that children can’t learn to be grown-up if they’re excluded and protected all the time.”

Educational psychologist Paul Prangley reckons it’s about time the kid gloves came off. He believes parenting has taken on a paranoid edge that’s creating a generation of naïve, insecure youngsters who are subconsciously being taught they’re incapable of handling things by themselves. “Resilience and the ability to resist pressure and temptation are learned skills,” Prangley explains. “If you wrap kids up in cotton wool and don’t give them the opportunity to take risks, they’re less equipped to make responsible decisions later in life.”

Sadly, high-profile cases of children being abducted and murdered—such as ten-year-olds Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in the United Kingdom; five-year-old Chloe Hoson in Australia, whose body was found just 200 metres from the trailer park in which she lived; and six-year-old Teresa Cormack in New Zealand, who was snatched off the street on her way to school—only serve to reinforce parents’ fears.

Certainly, the spectre of stranger-danger “scares parents to bits,” says Sgt. Mark Cousins, officer in charge of youth services in Wellington and a father of two. “I don’t blame them, but it’s an unrealistic fear. Such incidents are very few and far between.”

Teresa Cormack’s death, for example, was one of the rare New Zealand cases of random child abduction. In Australia, the odds of someone under the age of 15 being murdered by a stranger have been estimated at one in four million. A child is at far greater risk from a family member or someone they know.

However, parental fear is contagious. In one British study, far more children feared an attack by a stranger than being hit by a car. “We are losing our sense of perspective,” write Jan Parker and Jan Stimpson in their parenting book, Raising Happy Children. “Every parent has to negotiate their own route between equipping children with the skills they need to stay safe and not restricting or terrifying them unnecessarily in the process.”

Dr. Claire Freeman, a planning expert at the University of Otago, points to the erosion of community responsibility as another casualty of that mutual distrust. Not so long ago, adults knew all the local kids and were the informal guardians of the neighbourhood. “Now, particularly if you are a man, you may hesitate to offer help to a lost child for fear your motives might be questioned.”

As a planner in the mid-1990s, Freeman became concerned about the loss of green space to development and the erosion of informal places to play. In a study that looked at how children in the British city of Leeds spent their summer holidays, compared with their parents’ childhood experiences, she found the freedom to explore had been severely contracted—in some cases, down to the front yard.

Freeman says she cannot remember being inside the house as a child, or being alone. Growing up was about being part of a group. Now a mother of four, Freeman believes the “domestication of play” is robbing kids of their sense of belonging within a society.

“You get some kids who are very knowledgeable about the Amazon and endangered species, but it’s getting more difficult for children to go out and interact with their own environment in a natural way—messing about in sand and climbing trees,” Freeman says.

Freeman is also disturbed by a trend towards “safe” parenting where parents are seen as neglectful if they leave their children unsupervised, even for a moment. It is one of the reasons initiatives such as Walking School Buses —where groups of pupils walk to and from school under adult supervision—have sprung up.

Nevertheless, Freeman says children’s needs are starting to get more emphasis. In the Netherlands, child-friendly “home zones” have been created where priority is given to pedestrians, rather than cars. And ponds are being incorporated back into housing estates on the principle that children should learn to be safe around water, rather than be surrounded by a sterile landscape.

After all, as one of the smarter fish says in Finding Nemo, there’s one problem with promising your kids that nothing will ever happen to them—because then nothing ever will.

© 2003 BY JOANNA WANE. SUNDAY STAR-TIMES (FEBRUARY 15, ’04), AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND

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