Peter CostelloCotton Wool Kids: What’s making Irish parents paranoid?
by Stella O’Malley
(Mercier Press, €14.99)
We have all seen the evidence. The long line of cars with a single parent at the wheel outside a school waiting to collect some overweight teenager who would have been far better off walking home. Or the harassed mother in the shopping centre wheeling about a sturdy eight-year-old still in his buggy? Or the suburban home with the electronic gates that turn the home into a fortress to withstand the friendliest of incursions.
Those of us of a certain age lament the fact that today’s children do not seem to be as free as we were back in the 1950s and 1960s.
Fear stalks the kitchens of every modern home it seems. But fear of what?
I can speak with some authority on the dangers of the world. At the age of four a Victorian cast iron gate six feet high fell on me fracturing my skull in two places. Patched together by a well-known surgeon of the day, after six months coddling in the men’s surgical ward of the old Vincent’s, I was released into the world.
However, I was not then wrapped up in cotton wool. I roamed free in the fields and woods behind our suburban Dublin home, damming streams, making dens and fighting mock wars.
But as Stella O’Malley makes perfectly clear in this book, all the figures, statistics and studies from Ireland, England and elsewhere show that the fears parents feel, and the paranoia that they feel is groundless.
Your child is more likely to be sexual abused, beaten up, or even murdered within the home than outside it.
There is more to fear from the internet and video games in their bedrooms than in letting them play outside – which is what they really want to today, studies show.
Where do these fears come from? Stella O’Malley suggests they come largely from people anxious to sell us things we really do not need.
She cites the matter of a mattress for her new baby’s cot. The standard one cost €80, the one recommended by the Infant Sudden Death society was €160.
Child care manuals, such as Dr Spock and others, also provide sources of worry and fear; but she points out that over the evolving editions of his book these warnings changed.
In a review I cannot provide more examples, but can only recommend as strongly as possible that every parent in the land get a hold of this book and read it.
Walking
Parents tell us that walking home from school is dangerous because of the traffic. But who are these homicidal drivers they fear. They are largely other parents.
Perhaps if all drivers drove with the courtesy and care they expect from others (which of course they don’t do now), the streets would be safer.
In recent decades the right-minded have lamented the way hens are kept in battery factory. Hence the popularity for free range chickens and eggs.
We need, she suggests, to apply the principles of a free-ranging life to our children.
Our new slogan ought to be “Bring back ‘organic’ children”!