Stop that you'll get hurt

It seems that around 30% of European 11 year olds are now considered overweight or obese. Partly this is down to the ready availability of high calorie foods and partly down to a lack of physical activity. The arguments about food are now well rehearsed, with a key role being played by the sugar in soft drinks, those about physical activity have been less so. In the UK there has tended to be a preoccupation with the role that sport can play in encouraging children to be more active but this is unlikely to be effective for very many young people and the arguments in sport's favour tend to emphasise the importance of developing young people's competitive spirit, a useful quality if your view of human nature, and your politics, is that both are fundamentally hierarchical with us, the winners, quite rightly at the top.

The other reason that there's been an emphasis on sport is that it avoids talking about the other factors that prevent children being as active as the might and the main one of these is that many parents are simply too afraid to let their children out to play. Part of this fear can be summed up by the unfortunately memorable expression "stranger danger" and reflects a general distrust of other adults. This is despite the fact that the vast majority of child abuse happens within the home, and is perpetrated by adults known to the children, and that abductions by strangers are so rare that the odd case which does occur can easily dominate the news, at least in the UK, for weeks at a time. Another part of this fear has much stronger roots in reality and that is the fear of traffic.

Such fears have become the social norm to such an extent that parents who let their children out to play on their own are seen as "irresponsible" by their peers and so, apart from the time children spend doing God, or is it Google, knows what online they often have very few unsupervised moments.

Now we were lucky that we brought up our children in a small North Yorkshire village which still contained a fairly large proportion of grown ups who'd been brought up there themselves. We were not, therefore, considered irresponsible by the older villagers for letting them roam free and if they wanted to spend all day up a tree, building a dam or sliding down the face of the old quarry with a rope tied around their ankles, bungee sliding, then so be it. The only real concession that we needed to make was to accept that other adults might well tell them off from time to time, thereby displaying old fashioned collective responsibility and, as far as we were concerned, if Mr Braviner thought you were being a nuisance then you probably were and don't annoy him again.

Of course they had accidents, but that's how you learn, and each time they had one the thought that went through our minds was "at least they won't do that again". 

Now all of this was brought to mind on a recent visit to the local supermarket which has just had a new extension built and the cycle parking is now provided by a long row of so called Sheffield stands (simple metal hoops that rise up about 1m from the ground). To young children this long row of hoops is simply an ambient assault course. They can be clambered over, ducked under or vaulted over in whatever combination you fancy. So, what happens when a child comes along and gives in to the temptation? Well every time I've noticed, they get told to stop it or they'll hurt themselves. Its as though children would willingly endanger themselves if it wasn't for constant adult intervention and this simply isn't true.

There have been many experiments with babies and visual cliffs (a glass platform that extends out over a drop) and even though they've never been explicitly taught about heights, drops and what happens if you suddenly meet the ground, none of them seem prepared to take the risk. So, the problem may be that we're turning naturally risk averse babies into risk averse children who, in turn, will become risk averse, and probably sedentary, adults. 

When our children were small we did try to make sure that potentially harmful objects were kept out of reach. We did not, however, gate off the stairs. Instead we somehow established the habit that if you were going to crawl downstairs you shouldn't go head first but should turn around and go down backwards. One day, for some by now unknown reason, we'd left a mirror on the floor. Along comes the baby, looks down into the mirror, turns around and tries to go down into the image backwards.