Well while I’m sat here, I might as well get my next journal entry typed, ready to post before going to bed in the morning… And maybe one ready to post when I get up again
I was watching the television while I was sat here last night… I can confirm, beyond any doubt… There sure is nothing but mindless c:censor::censor::censor: on tv during the night!

There was one interesting program (but it was a repeat of a documentary shown earlier in the day, which explains why it was more interesting :-p) which asked the question of whether society is over protecting their children.

I thought it was interesting, after reading one of those email things the other week about how, by todays standards, children in teh 70’s and 80’s shouldn’t have survived, since everything we did then is now concidered to be bad for us…

Well the program discussed how children lived back in the 70’s and 80’s… How children went out and played in the morning, and frequently wouldn’t return home until tea time. Children would also go to see the Saturday morning cartoons at the cinema, without their parents.

Nobody thought anything of it.

Yet apparently, today more and more parents are scared to let their children out of their sight, because of the dangers today.

Parents are scared of their children being abducted, abused by adults, bullied by children, beaten up, robbed, raped, killed or hit by traffic.

There were two cases which I thought were interesting. The first was a 13 year old girl, who is walked to and from school by her mother. The teachers have told her parents that they want her to walk to and from school on her own by the end of the term, because she needs to be given more freedom to develop and grow. Her parents are refusing, on grounds that they don’t want anything to happen to her, and all of those things mentioned, could happen to her if she were to walk to school without her mother.

Now I can understand their position… We are assaulted by more information and more grusome detail about crimes involving children than ever before… But is it worth it if the child has no life?

The girl is taken to school, brought home and then spends the rest of the night in the house, or back garden. She isn’t even allowed to walk to the corner of the street to the postbox or corner shop without her parents standing in the middle of the street watching her ever move.

Is that any kind of life?

I understand they want their child to be safe, but I know from experience that it can be taken too far.

My parents were very protective of me as a child.

My mother walked me to and from school until I was 10 and went to the next school. That one was further away and my mother couldn’t walk that far.

But then that was the stupid thing. I went from being walked to and from the school that was just around the corner, to having to walk on my own to a school over a mile away.

At 14, when I reached High School, I helped out at the school youth club. It took weeks of persuading before I was allowed to do it, because it meant walking the 5 minutes to and from the school in the dark on my own.

What I thought was interesting, was that a psychologist was interviewed on the documentary about the effects of this kind of upbringing on the children. He said that more often than not, the children would develop the fears their parents had.

I found the same thing. My parents were so terrified of me walking alone in the dark, that I actually ended up being terrified of walking in the dark. It took months of doing it before I eventually felt ok about it… Nothing had ever happened to me, or to anyone in the area… Yet there I was, slinking and scurrying along like a victim.

I was never alowed to go to town on my own either. Same thing happened. Whenever I did go, I was always terrified that I was going to be mugged, moletsted and murdered… And that was when I was with my parents. And again, it had never happend to me, nor to anyone else in the area to my knowledge.

Yet my parents fear had somehow started in me.

It was only when I was 16 and went to college that I managed to take myself in hand. It was the first time I had to get a bus on my own, the first time I had been out of the village on my own… I decided enough was enough. I was sick of feeling fears that I had no right to have.

After that I started going to town every Monday morning, during my free period at college, I started taking advantage of my travel pass and started going to different places… Just to get into the habit of going places on my own and learning that I really could do these things without getting raped, mugged, robbed, bullied, beaten up and then hit by a bus.

At the time, I just thought I had very nervous and overly controlling parents… I did but it turns out that, at least in this aspect of parenting, they are far from being alone. Not only is there a trend, but the trend is actually growing at an alarming rate.

They got a group of about 30 parents to take a test, just to find out why they were so worried. The results indicated that they all felt that these types of crimes and incidents were on the increase and that most of them remaind unsolved.

The truth is that it is all perception.

We have more sources of news than ever before. When something happens, you don’t just hear about it, you see it in graphic detail and have every aspect of it shoved down your throat for days at a time. This all creates the illusion that children are in more danger than they were 20 years ago.

In truth they are probably in the same level of danger. There are the same types of people around, but children are more aware now than they were then.

Personally, I’d say it’s more worrying that, the way things are going, we are going to end up with a generation of nervous, anxious, terrified emotional wrecks.

Like I said, I know from experience… It’s scary when you go from that cotton wool environment to actually having to stand on your own. Eventually you have to face the world… But when you live like that, you never get the chance to discover things for yourself… You never get to find out what is and isn’t possible. You find yourself bound and restricted by other people’s fears and inibilities… You don’t learn to just try, because you already have someone elses faliures telling you that you shouldn’t try because something bad could happen.

What use is childhood to someone who never gets to enjoy it?