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Point of View with Barb
Sumner Burstyn - August 4 2003
Risk-averse society will lose ability
to manage adversity
Summer in Montreal is a sweltering affair. As if to wipe away the
memory of -25C months, the temperature soars and the locals throng
into the streets and parks.
I'm taking my Kiwi daughter to the park. It doesn't take her long
to figure out the bars are set so low that her 9-year-old legs scrape
the ground and the edges of the climbing frame are rounded so she
can't transform them into a challenging gym.
We give up trying and she climbs a tree instead. A small group
of boys quickly gathers round. Climbing trees, it seems, is a novelty
here.
The bravest of the group, perhaps a year older, follows suit,
struggling to climb past the lowest branches, his upper-body strength
so poor that he barely makes it. We hear his mother's voice well
before we see her. "Be careful," she screams out across the grass.
He looks at my daughter perched in the top branches and regretfully
climbs down, where he is immediately pounced on by his mother and
inspected for injury. Another mother shrilly instructs her child
not to run, even though we're in the middle of a grassy park.
Walking back, we pass pushchair after pushchair bulging with 4-
and even 5-year-olds, their knees almost around their ears. As we
pass the local playgroup, a bunch of 3-year-olds are riding tiny
plastic trikes, no more than a foot off the ground, their heads
lolling under the weight of helmets.
At the local swimming pool there are so many rules that there's
little else to do but huddle in the water and eyeball the ring of
staunch lifesavers. Bored, my daughter climbs on her stepfather's
shoulders and dives off, and we are evicted from the water for unsafe
play.
In Britain, many schools have outlawed handstands and tag, and
even yo-yos are no longer on the play menu. The British Children's
Society reports that in some parks and playgrounds, children can
no longer play in bushes or climb trees in case they fall. Some
authorities have banned playing with balls, to prevent children
from throwing them onto nearby roads and then running out into traffic.
And in California every child under 18 who rides skateboards,
scooters or in-line skates must wear a safety helmet or face a $25
fine.
We've become so risk-averse as a society that some child professionals
insist we should refer to a youngster's bruised knee as a "preventable
injury", rather than an accident.
In Britain and America even the word "accident" is so politically
incorrect that public health organisations want to phase it out
- claiming that most injuries are preventable.
It's as though safety has become a fundamental value, as though
risk has replaced sin in our emotional lexicon. For society, an
accidental injury is now an affront to culture. For parents, allowing
risk into your child's life has become the stigmata of bad parenting.
But what happens to children growing up so overprotected that
they rarely experience adversity?
According to Frank Furedi, the author of a number of books on
the subject, the obsession with childhood safety is new, reflecting
a different attitude towards parenting.
Traditionally, he says, good parenting has been associated with
the nurturing, stimulating and socialisation of children. Now, it's
about monitoring activities, to the extent that allowing a child
to play outside on its own is seen as an act of neglect.
Furedi and others envisage a future population that is less resilient,
more fearful and less adaptable, less capable and confident in its
abilities than previous generations, a population so risk-averse
that entrepreneurship will be a thing of the past.
Essentially, the next generation may have been so protected from
its own mistakes or accidents that its development will be stunted,
and its very ability to think and act for itself will be threatened.
Taken to its logical conclusion, fear of risk will become more
dangerous than risk itself, ultimately creating a society paralysed
by fear, a society without innovation.
The easy response to all this is to say that the rampant litigation
that defines America is at fault. But maybe there's something deeper
going on here, some slow counter-evolutionary process that is gradually
turning us all into timid creatures, as if for all our dominion
over the environment and technological prowess, we are, on a human
scale, overwhelmed by the very society we have created.
We may wake up one morning and find the human race is in decline,
undone by something as simple as being unable to take a risk.
Far-fetched? Last week it was reported that across America new
public and private pools are being built without deep-ends or diving
boards, while older pools are being modified to remove these dangers.
In Tallahassee, Barbara Law, a recreation department spokeswoman,
said "a lot of people can't swim well enough any more to use the
deep end".
An off-hand comment about a small, quantifiable change in society,
but how unintentionally prophetic. The precautionary principle of
the shallow swimming pool as metaphor for the contraction of society
and its diminishing capacity to respond to adversity.
ENDS
© Barbara Sumner Burstyn, 2003
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Barbara Sumner
Burstyn.
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