''Cotton Wool Kids?'' - conference report

COTTON WOOL KIDS? MAKING SENSE OF “CHILD SAFETY”

This conference, organised jointly by Play Scotland and Generation Youth Issues was held at Hampden, Glasgow on Tuesday 20th September and was attended by 90 people representing many different areas including: PTAs, local authorities, sport clubs and children’s charities. SPTC was pleased to sponsor twelve places for parents.

The morning session was titled: “Making sense of child safety” and the first speaker was Christina Hoff Sommers, a professor of philosophy from Washington, USA. She spoke of the growth of therapism and the “pathologisation of everyday life”, which according to her has led many people to believe that talk is all we need and has increased parental fears as children are seen as being psychologically at risk. The result has been a boom in bestselling books theorising on various childhood matters which have no theoretical basis. Sommers gave various examples of recent changes in the US as a result of this “therapism”:
• Schoolchildren are no longer allowed to play tag. As it lowers a child’s self-esteem to be out, the new game is called “circle of friends” and no-one is out.
• Tug-of-war has been replaced with “tug-of-peace”.
• Rough and competitive play is seen as harmful to children.
• American school textbooks are put through sensitivity tests where any references to nasty or scary animals, such as snakes, rats or mice are erased and also any references to things that may cause offence – like peanuts which may offend allergy sufferers.
• Children are thought to be upset by corrections made in red pen and so new lavender-coloured pens are used. (Sommers suggested sprinkling the paper with pot pourri!).
She argued that such protection takes away the very texture of life. The next speaker was Frank Furedi who was described in the conference programme as “the most influential sociologist in Britain”. He is currently researching issues of risk, childhood and parenting and is certainly a man who pulls no punches!
He was pretty damning of how adulthood has become estranged from children – for example, you can no longer be an “unaccompanied adult”. According to Furedi, we have formalised situations such as play and sports and as a result of this formalisation the relationship between adult and child has been altered. This in turn has bred mistrust and has led to a situation where people who give up their time for children are seen as suspicious and not as someone who just wants to help and do good. The bottom line is now “you can never protect a child enough”.
Why is it happening? Furedi put forward the theory that there is a crisis in adult identity; adults are consistently seen as a risk for children and as potential abusers of children; and that we impose adult fears onto children.
He believes that a community is created through the rearing of children but that this is in danger because society has redefined the meaning of “what is a child”. Human imagination knows no bounds and adults will always find more risks; this will eventually, (or has already) make children more childish and insecure or as Furedi said: “..endow them with infantalising qualities”.

One member of the audience then asked: “Are children still fighting back against this over-protection?” Furedi answered: Children have started to pick up the vocabulary. For example, we constantly hear about stress and this has almost become a self-fulfilling prophecy with both children and adults. He did have something positive to say in that there are examples of a “fight-back” – parents tend to buy mobile phones for their offspring as a sort of control over them and so that they can check where they are; kids use mobile phones as a sort of parental management and switch them off! Message: normal childhood development cannot happen without rebelling.

The following session was: Litigation and Limitations
I picked up the following points:
• It is the fear of litigation that is important and the perception of risk has a paralysing effect on activities and behaviour
• Schools take particular strategies to avoid litigation and this affects the way that they respond and/or interact with children
• Research in England shows that there have been relatively few cases of people suing a school or local authority for playground incidents. In fact insurance companies do not keep a record of claims as playground injuries are very uncommon
• Because of litigation many schools have the following attitude to risk management: “if in doubt, ban it”
• School staff tend to look at the negative aspects of play
• A huge industry has grown around “litigation management” and English local education authorities now direct half of their resources towards risk management
• Road safety adverts have shifted the emphasis from the child’s responsibility to the adult’s responsibility
• Parenthood has now become professionalized so that children are not allowed to have free/leisure time and all their time is organised – children are not given guidance on how to amuse themselves so that they are becoming more reliant on adults

The afternoon session addressed Freedom and Safety in an Anxious Age
The following points were made:
• “Play” also means “hanging about” and should therefore not always be seen as threatening
• Play is also not always about nice, cosy things; it involves both positive and negative emotions; child “horribleness” is very different to adult horribleness
• Many life skills are too subtle to be taught and need to be learnt and practised through such things as play
• Adults should intervene by: helping the child to make decisions about moral dilemmas; helping the child to understand the consequence of their actions; and being clear about why adults do what they do
• Legislation does not take on board what the impact is on child development

I really enjoyed the conference especially the talk given by Frank Furedi. I just wish that the day had finished with more positive comments on how to move forward and fight back against over protecting children.

For more information on these issues, go to www.generationyouthissues.org