Jaeger points us to this interesting piece on one of Britain’s rising Tory stars, Oliver Letwin who …

“ … believes people are being throttled by bureaucracy designed to minimise risk and that childhood has become "inert and antiseptic" because youngsters are kept indoors for fear of the perils lurking in the outside world”

The attempt to completely neutralize and negate risk is perhaps one of the greatest social ills of our days. The wealthier we have become the more access we have to insurance and all sorts of fancy risk mitigation strategies, the ultimate one of course being staying indoors in a sterile environment as Letwin suggests. What’s worse is that oversensitive and ignorant parents are letting their children grow up in an environment like this in the totally mistaken and ignorant belief that their kids are safe and protected. The actual outcome is that children so raised are totally unprepared to the deal with the perils of the real world once they leave the elderly home. I can write a thousand-word post about this phenomenon but here are two examples from the Dorsman household which pretty much sum up my thoughts about this topic.

Our oldest, four-year old Nora fell from the “monkey bar” in the playground last week breaking her arm in a pretty bad way. Of course it became a long journey through various hospital departments but at every juncture Nora elicited amazement and disbelief from medical staff about her stoic and calm behaviour, it was something they had never seen before. Nora as every other four-year old takes her cues from her parents and as it happens in the face of adversity and disaster we remain very calm, no hyperventilating here. We don’t do that on purpose, it just the way we are, but you can tell that most children if hurt have a fit because their parents have. I don’t have to describe the clueless mother screaming her lungs out because something has happened to her child, often prompting the sane comment that the mother is probably more in need of help than the injured child. One of the cardinal rules is to let children deal with danger and adversity responsibly; an unhinged parent is likely to achieve the opposite.

But here’s an even better example. Yesterday I took my two-and-a -half year old, Maeve, for a bicycle ride on her four-wheel Radio Flyer. Ever the cautionary parent I put on her helmet, hilarious to see, and she on her bike and me on my feet negotiated a fairly long stretch along the waterfront. Halfway however Maeve had gained so much comfort that she put off her helmet and handed it to me with a look saying; “don’t need it Dad”. And of course, she doesn’t, her parents grew up on bikes and once you know how to use these things the last thing you need is a helmet. Sterilizing the bike ride I would call it. That’s not the way most jurisdictions in North America see it, whenever you bike you got to have protective gear on your head, a requirement we proud Dutchmen of course totally ignore. And so did little Maeve, she assessed the risk and once she was comfortable with it she made her call: no protective headgear necessary. Oliver Letwin would be proud of her.