Keeping kids safe is a matter of the heart, writes Steve Biddulph.
Many years ago, I was invited to something called a Dangerous Ideas Festival.
Held at the Sydney Opera House, it was a forum for people with new ideas – nothing REALLY dangerous – and I was on a panel and giving a keynote talk.
Alongside me was US journalist Lenore Skenazy, who had written a book called Free Range Kids.
Lenore was a witty and quite normal person who’d become famous for letting her son, aged nine, ride the New York Subway on his own and writing about it in her newspaper column.
She had been both castigated and praised in equal amounts (and this was before social media) and was even labelled ‘America’s Worst Mum’ by another columnist also seeking readers.
Anyhow, this being America, Lenore got a book deal out of it, the book did well, and she was even flown to Australia.
Really, her message was that we needed to relax more about our kids being independent and out in the world, and this is how they gain confidence and capability.
I didn’t disagree with her entirely, but thought it needed a bit of care and knowledge of your child and was very much a situational thing.
What was interesting was that on the way back from the event, I was in Circular Quay train station, and right in front of me, on this of all days, a mum wrangling a pram with a baby while holding onto her toddler’s hand, briefly let go of that little chubby hand. And the toddler somehow managed to slip between the train and the platform.
I saw this with my own startled eyes from about thirty feet away, and it was, I am sure, the widest those eyes had ever been.
Around sixty of us on the platform screamed in unison for the train driver not to drive on, and while we shouted and pointed, a quick person ran forwards and pulled the child out of the gap – they’d become wedged and not fallen right to the track. And a moment of catastrophe was avoided.
I am on the cautious end of the parenting spectrum. I have worked with enough child sexual abuse survivors to never have sent my kids to sleepovers, for example, and I have a watchful eye in all kinds of situations.
But I do think that kids should climb trees, graze knees, and be allowed to get bored until they discover their creativity and inventiveness. That all children should learn to deal with other kids in play situations without intervention unless real violence threatens. That risk-taking within bounds actually builds safety.
I love that after reading Raising Boys or Raising Girls, millions of dads play rough-and-tumble with their sons and daughters.
I am a huge supporter of the social media delay that is now law in Australia, our wonderful e-Safety Commissioner for getting it into place, and organizations like the Heads Up Alliance that fought for this and other ways to keep kids from the sewers of the internet.
The billionaires who profit from those platforms need to be stood up to, and only governments are big enough to do that.
Parenthood is frightening, and we have to look after each other.
Somehow, we have to realize that the great clench we sometimes feel in our hearts around our children’s safety is often just how much we love them, and breathe and soften to let that be so.
But if we have misgivings, then they should also be listened to.
There are people who would do our children harm, and they are sadly not rare. We live in a time when we have woken up to that, and it’s a huge improvement.
A year after the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, in the quite posh New York suburb where Lenore lives, a twelve-year-old girl was dragged into the back of a grocery store by the twenty-year-old son of the owner and murdered.
In between terrifying our children and helping them to listen to their intuition and good sense and gradually grow their zone of comfort and ability, there is a middle road.
We can find that road, though we stumble off it many times.
That our child grows healthy and safe is by grace, really, and that no military forces rain death on them is something we should both be grateful for, and work to ensure is the case for every young human being, one beautiful future day.
Steve Biddulph is in his eighth decade in this world and is the author of Wild Creature Mind, New Manhood, and many other books that are in six million homes around the globe.
