They're calling them the 'cotton wool generation'. Kids who are not allowed to play outside, or at least too far from home, by their over-protective parents.
When I was a kid, perhaps aged about six or seven, I'd walk a good 20 minutes to and from school. Through a building site, by a river, through some woods and across some wasteground, then into the leafy, empty streets to home. I never saw another living soul. When I talk to my mum about this now she's horrified she ever let it happen, but the thing was, it was perfectly safe and no one though twice about strange men in woods.
For sure they existed, and at another school when I was older we had a letter round about a man in the moods who was to be avoided at all costs, but the real danger was actually within the (catholic) school itself, thank to the paedo head, but that's another story.
Friends I know with kids won't let them out of their sight nowadays. How did this happen. Surely paedophilia is no more rife now than it was 30 years ago - then it was hidden better and we weren't so aware. There was no Childline, or soaps like Neighbours and Home and Away, which have bought issues into living rooms way too early for some people's liking. Nothing that made us aware of what the world was really like if you scratched the surface. Most importantly there was no hysterical media whipping everyone up into a frenzy of anxiety about what's out there. Have things really got more dangerous or is it all in the mind?
When my (then) 14-year-old country girl of a niece came to do work experience with me in rough around the edges Camden, north London, she disappeared into the depths of the market on lunchtime, causing me to panic and imagining all sorts of things. She turned up an hour or so later casual as you like with a sandwich and some new clothes, totally unfazed. She wasn't - so why was I?
If parents are over-protective, it's quite easy to see why.
1 comment:
Statistics* show that paedophilia and violent crime are no more prevalent now than fifty years ago. We live in age where these crimes get huge amounts of coverage in the media, that's because they are so rare.
I was talking to a colleague today about this story and he was saying that he had an idyllic childhood in the country but he'd never let his kids play out 'in this day and age'. I worry about him.
*'86.5% of statistics are made up' - Vic Reeves.
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