Their press release reads:
"RoSPA believes that children can learn valuable life-long lessons, particularly about risks and how to deal with them, from playing in the natural environment, and that parents have to accept that their children may get injured. Bumps, bruises and grazes are not serious injuries and are part of growing up."So there you have it.
So why do we wrap our children up in cotton wool? There are two reasons, one is an unreasonable fear of risk, and the second perhaps is fear of the baby snatchers.
4 comments:
I think back to days as a child, staying with friends in the country. Taking the dog, wlking across the field to the dry creek bed amongst the towering pines trees. Great stuff.
I can't imagine in a million years letting my own children do that. Mind you, they are only 4 and 2 at the mo'. maybe when they're older...
My 2 yr old does like to try handstands on concrete, and I get funny looks from other adults when he does it. I think that children do learn valuable lessons from accidents: neither child stands up now whilst playing under the dining table.
flashgordonnz, So why do you think you are doing what your parents didn't?
That said, perhaps it is because of the way people look at you if you expose your children to any risk.
This made me laugh, as a mum of three boys I remember the middle one almost getting his own personalise cubicle at A&E when he was younger.
In one month he managed 3 trips and I duly got a "visit" from the health visitor. While she was there he managed to crash into a door while on a bike receiving a nasty bump despite wearing a helmet (don't ask!), and asked if "he needed to go and get his picture taken again?".
Another friend who also has three boys had a least one of them in plaster on four consecutive summer holidays.
While boys try to push the limits of what it is possible to achieve on bikes, skateboards and in tree's we mums will spend many hours in worrying and in waiting rooms!
I know what flash is saying; as a kid I remember riding the subways with my cousins and brothers, now I'd never let my son go off alone in the city without me.
Times weren't that different, then, either... this was only about 15 years ago.
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