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Earlier this week the UK clinical psychologist and television supernanny, Professor Tanya Byron, warned that parental ‘paranoia' about child safety could expose children to greater risks indoors. She warned that by denying children the opportunity to play outside, they are likely to face greater dangers inside from cyber-bullying or sexual predators.
It is undoubtedly the case that there are far fewer kids out and about on street corners or in parks unaccompanied by adults. According to research by Play England, a campaign group which calls for kids to have access to good and free local play space, in 2003 67 per cent of 8- to 10-year-olds and 24 per cent of 11- to 15-year-olds had never been to the park or the shops on their own. The much-quoted UK study One False Move shows a dramatic decrease in children's independent mobility over the period of two decades. Whereas in 1971, 80 per cent of seven and eight-year-old children in England were allowed to travel to school on their own, in 1990 the figure was only 9 per cent. Today it is less than 5 per cent.
Similar trends are apparent in the USA. A study conducted by Rhonda Clements, professor of education at Manhattanville College, indicates that outdoor play is in serious decline. Eighty-five per cent of the mothers reported that their child or children played outdoors less often than a generation ago. Seventy per cent of mothers reported playing outdoors every day when they were young, compared with only 31 per cent of their children. The trade group National Sporting Goods Association and the research firm American Sports Data found spontaneous outdoor activities such as bike riding, swimming and touch football have declined dramatically in the US since 1995. Bike riding alone is down by 31 per cent over the last decade.
The drive to reduce risks in children's lives has been relentless. Both in the UK and the US diving boards have disappeared from many swimming pools. Many new pools do not have deep ends. ‘If children are lucky,' Chris Mercogliano writes in In Defense of Childhood, ‘a permissive lifeguard might let them jump into the water'. A couple of years ago an acquaintance of mine told me she wanted to teach her children to dive. Diving was one of her passions as a child. ‘But I had to take them on a family holiday to Sweden to give them a chance to practise,' she said. She had not found a swimming pool in London with diving boards that children were permitted to use.
So, in preoccupying themselves with keeping their loved ones safe, are parents denying children the freedom they need to develop and grow up? Quite possibly so. There is a real danger that by cocooning children, over-protecting and oversupervising them, society could be denying children the opportunity to grow up into capable, confident adults. But we should not blame parents for this. As I have argued in Reclaiming Childhood and on spiked, parents are constantly being inundated with warnings about the dreadful things that can happen to their children if they do not keep a watchful eye on them at all times.
Now parents are asked to worry about the risks lurking indoors, when their children go online. But should they?
A 2006 national survey of teenagers conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that more than half (55 per cent) of US youngsters between twelve and seventeen years of age use social networking sites such as MySpace and FaceBook. As with a UK study titled UK Children Go Online conducted by the London School of Economics (LSE) most of the children (91 per cent) said they use the sites to stay in touch with friends they see frequently. Danah Boyd, popular blogger and internet researcher with the School of Information (iSchool) at the University of California, writes, ‘When I ask teenagers why they joined MySpace, the answer is simple: "Cuz that's where my friends are." Their explanation of what they do on the site is much more vague: "I don't know ... I just hang out"'.
In the UK government-commissioned report entitled Safer Children in a Digital World Professor Tanya Byron admits that the ‘concrete "evidence" of harm resulting from the internet is fairly limited'. Also, a literature review compiled in 2008 for OfCom, the regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries, shows that ‘there is a lack of information about any actual harm (as opposed to risk of harm) experienced by users of social networking sites.' So why all this fretting?
Of course, where there is freedom - as with the relatively unregulated worldwide web - there will always be ‘opportunities' for abusers and criminals. But, interestingly, research indicates that children and young people may be a little bit more savvy than most policymakers and the child protection industry assume.
Children and young people will inevitably need to learn how to negotiate certain risks on line. There is always the possibility that some sinister person will attempt to ‘groom' a child or young person. But every arena of our lives poses potential risks, which ultimately we all need to learn to negotiate rather than try to eliminate. As Danah Boyd said at symposium organized by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, ‘There are potential risks on MySpace but it is important not to exaggerate them. The risks are not why youth are flocking to the site. To them, the benefits for socialisation outweigh the potential harm' (Boyd 2006). Boyd argued that, although letting go and allowing youth to navigate risks is terrifying for parents, ‘it's necessary for youth to mature'.
It would be a real shame if the frantic desire to protect children from the shadowy figures who might wish to harm them threatened one of the few arenas young people have left to conduct relationships with each other outside the increasingly closely monitored worlds of home and school.
Helene Guldberg is author of Reclaiming Childhood: freedom and play in an age of fear. Buy this book from Amazon.
