So, school is out, the long summer holidays stretch ahead and what do we think will be top of the average parent’s worry list? How to keep the children entertained for weeks while remaining sane? Whether they can afford to take the family on a day out to Alton Towers when there’s still the Tuscan holiday to pay off on Barclaycard? Probably not, actually. The thing weighing heaviest on most parents’ minds will almost certainly be fear of catastrophe: fear of their children being injured in a road accident; of them drowning in the swimming pool; of them hanging around bored on street corners and being mugged or offered drugs; of being targeted by a paedophile.
Parents, of course, have rightly fretted about protecting their children since time began. What is new and perhaps a little weird is that the more that medicine and child supervision, and road, car and playground safety improve, the more our anxiety seems to grow. Study after study indicates that mothers and fathers are palpably more fearful for their children than they were 30 and 40 years ago. We see dangers lurking on every corner that would scarcely have occurred to our parents and grandparents. Conversely, we tend to see our own childhoods as gold-tinted eras in which it was far safer to play out on our bikes all day, to talk to strangers, to walk home from school alone, than it is today. But is that true? Do children today really face more dangers than we did then? Let us go back 30 years to 1976 and examine the evidence.
Most parents in their late thirties and forties will remember the great summer of ’76: Elton John and Kiki Dee were at the top of the charts, the weather was so hot that the Government appointed a Minister for Drought, most kids had a Chopper bike. And in that year a total of 668 children (0 to 15 year-olds) were killed on the roads in England and Wales, either in cars or as pedestrians.
Now let’s compare that with today. In 2004 (the most recent figure available from the Department of Transport) the number of 0 to 15 year-olds killed was 166 — a reduction of 75 per cent. Such fatalities and serious injuries have been falling consistently since the 1970s, thanks largely to better car safety features, child seats and road design. Nevertheless, many parents are convinced that the roads are more hazardous than in their day because there is “more traffic” and “people drive faster”.
The fear of a third person attacking or killing children has increased dramatically. Thirty years ago around half of parents would cite stranger danger as a serious fear: now it is more than 90 per cent.
The media may be partly responsible for this. High-profile paedophile cases, international coverage of horrific murders such as that of Sarah Payne, and instances of children being groomed by sexual predators over the internet are scorched on our consciousness and may account for parents seeing their children as significantly more vulnerable to strangers than they were at their age.
Yet the number of child murders has remained more or less constant for the past 30 years. Though numbers fluctuate slightly each year, according to the NSPCC there has been an average of 79 child murders a year in England and Wales since the 1970s, 11 of which are committed by a stranger. Obviously this is an appalling and, frankly, terrifying statistic, and as the NSPCC says, it shows that the number of child murders is not decreasing. But it does contradict the general assumption that child murder has become more frequent. Tools such as the internet undeniably introduce new potential risks into children’s lives, but it seems that it is their parents’ distorted perception of danger that has increased more dramatically than the danger itself. What does this tell us? Well, certainly that we’re making ourselves miserable by catastrophising every school trip, sleepover or trip to the beach. And it is not doing children any favours.
In his book Paranoid Parenting, the sociologist Frank Furedi recounts the story of a mother who insisted on driving behind her son’s school coach all the way to France to ensure that he arrived safely. (A quick vox pop of my friends finds that most, including me, while recognising this as extremely neurotic, have total empathy with the woman. Tellingly, my local newspaper recently carried a sympathetic double page article headlined “How to survive your child’s school trip”).
Furedi describes a “culture of fear” that has led parents to restrict their children’s independent outdoor lives and remarks that in 1971 eight out of ten eight-year-olds were allowed to walk to school alone. Now it is fewer than one in ten. At the of age 11, almost every child used to walk; now it is down to 55 per cent and falling.
“Fear of children’s safety has come to dominate the parenting landscape,” he says. He cites a BBC survey of parents in Scotland in 1998, which found that an overwhelming number believed children were far less safe than in 1978. “Although the incidence of child murder by a stranger in Scotland is very low and had shown no change in the past 20 years, 76 per cent of respondents thought that there had been an increase in such tragedies, while 38 per cent believed that the increase had been ‘dramatic’.”
Why are we so racked with anxiety? Linda Blair, a clinical psychologist and columnist for Psychologies magazine, believes that because we control conception now, wait longer to have children and have fewer of them, they are increasingly more precious to us. This doesn’t mean that parents of yesteryear loved their children less, it is that while they were prepared to live with risk, we will go to any lengths to try to eliminate it. Also mass media coverage of, say, an abduction is usually broadcast without mention of how rare they are (five to seven occur a year). Meanwhile, say the experts, our children are wrapped so tightly in cotton wool that they never learn the independence and streetwise skills that they need for life — and ultimately they are placed in real danger.
Stuart Waiton, a director of Youth Generation Issues, a research group that campaigns against the over-regulation of children and whose forthcoming publication Cotton Wool Kids addresses such fears, says overprotection seriously affects the relationship between adults and children because the adult becomes afraid that he will be accused of abuse if he so much as approaches a child, even one who is in trouble. “The irony is that the greatest risk to children is when adults in the general population stop taking responsibility for them. There are 45 million potential helpers of children (in the UK) but now it would no longer be something that adults do spontaneously. They tend to hold themselves back.”
The truth of this was tragically demonstrated in March at an inquest into the death of two-year-old Abby Rae, who wandered out of her village nursery unnoticed and later drowned in a nearby pond. A male driver had seen her walking along the road alone but failed to stop to help her. He told the inquest: “One of the reasons I did not go back is because I thought someone would see me and think I was trying to abduct her.”
Waiton remarks that fears become distorted in people’s heads because we are less connected to others in society than 30 years ago, living more solitary, private lives and in some cases never even talking to our neighbours. He also believes that the high-profile politicising by politicians of tragic but thankfully rare incidents, such as Dunblane, compounds the effect. It is why, he says, when parents turn up at school, now they look through 10ft fences and are confronted by electronic keypads.
But hold on a minute. Surely there are new dangers that never dogged us as children? Parental drug use is more frequent now, putting children at greater risk of abuse and neglect in the home. There are drug dealers who offer children Ecstasy tablets at £3 a go; alcoholic drinks tailor-made for sweet, young palates in the form of alcopops; there are paedophiles prowling the internet; there are joyriders and hoodies who will mug our kids at the drop of a hat, aren’t there?
It is certainly true that children are more mug-worthy these days: they have things worth stealing. In the 1970s, few baddies could be bothered robbing a child for his standard-issue bike: now they have slick mobile phones and iPods in their sights. Ironically, the phones that we give our children so that we can constantly check that they are safe have made them more of a target for violence. It is also true that the internet has made child pornography hugely more accessible, though whether it has created significantly more paedophiles is difficult to quantify. But in the 1970s there was no such thing as Childline. It was barely acknowledged that sexual abuse occurred within families. Michelle Elliot, director of the charity Kidscape, says that while much parental fretting is destructive and teaches children that the world is hostile and frightening, there are two areas in which risk has increased. “Sixty years ago everyone knew who the dirty old man in the village was and they kept away from him, but now with the internet there is more danger,” she says. “Paedophiles can now get in contact with each other very easily; once you might have had someone with an inclination to abuse children, but they were isolated. Now those inhibitions can more easily be stripped away by contact with other paedophiles and that makes things slightly more dangerous. Secondly, adults are less likely to intervene if they see a child in trouble.”
Parents should still try to keep things in perspective, though, say the experts. As Waiton says, the police now target and place more child sex offenders on registers than ever before. These things were not dealt with on such a scale in the past. Convictions may have increased, but then so possibly has children’s confidence in raising the alarm.
And while this might be our main fear focus, it is illness and accidents that account for most deaths. Figures from the Office of National Statistics show that in 1976 the number of children who died (from accidents, violence, illness and disease) was 12,000. In 2005, it was fewer than 5,000. Measles and mumps, which were commonplace, have been virtually eradicated, thanks to the MMR vaccine. And yet we worry so much that we even distrust the vaccines: this year Britain suffered its first child death from measles in 14 years and the outbreak of a measles epidemic, thanks to parents rejecting MMR for fear of side-effects.
Roger Vincent, of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA), says that our chances of surviving an accident are much greater today thanks to improved medical expertise and better safety design, such as window restrictors and child resistant bottles.
But each new era brings new dangers. There were, for instance, no extreme sports, microscooters or trampolines in people’s back gardens in 1976 (trampoline injuries have rocketed in the past five years to include three broken necks). But neither were there soft surfaces on playgrounds or restrictions on the length of cord allowed on a child’s toy. People forget the dangers posed by playgrounds in the 1970s: the Witch’s Hat, for example, a play contraption that would spin children around while they hung on to chains, accounted for several deaths a year.
Vincent’s statistics show how the number of child deaths as a result of accidents in the home have fallen over a ten-year period. In 1989, there were 215 deaths; in 1999 that number had nearly halved to 121. Peter Cornall, RoSPA’s head of water and leisure safety, says that the number of drownings has dropped dramatically: in the 1970s about 150 children drowned a year; now the figure is between 40 and 50. There has been a huge reduction in swimming pool deaths because of better lifeguard provision, age restrictions and compulsory parental supervision. The only area of increase has been in pond drownings since a fashion for garden water features developed in the 1990s.
“I remember as a 12-year-old in the Seventies that I would swim with my mate in the local river, but most parents would never allow that now,” says Cornall. “There is generally less exposure to dangers such as this.” But he says that parents’ compulsion to drive their children everywhere is counterproductive. “There are children starting secondary school who have never walked to school on their own. Now they are doing so for the first time at 11 or 12, yet they have the pedestrian skills that a six-year-old would have had in the 1970s. They are less able to do things such as judge the speed of cars. These are things you should learn at an early age. Kids are not developing that kind of independence.”
It is also important that children’s playgrounds are not made too safe. If they become too sanitised, they eliminate the element of adventure and risk that children crave and they are more likely to wander off and play on railways lines and factory roofs. Some have theorised that soft surfacing is more dangerous because it gives children a false sense of security, encouraging them to take more risks. Cornall does not believe this but says that it is primarily designed to prevent head injury, so even if more arms and legs are broken at least they are not life-threatening ailments. It is part of a child’s experience to have permanent scabs on their knees.
Ultimately, as Furedi says, you can never fully protect a child; there will always be something that needs to be made safer. If we are not careful we will forgo enjoying our children in favour of being on a continual nervous quest for safety. Though we worry more it appears that, statistically at least, there is less to worry about. Touch wood, obviously.
