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Risky Business
by Wenda Reed

Life is a risky business. We, as parents, want to protect our children from as many risks as we can.

At what cost?

I’ve been thinking about the balance between risk and protection for some time, and several stories and conversations have brought it to the forefront of my mind.

One was a recent press release from Safeco Insurance in Seattle about its new Teensurance™ product. Parents are supposed to have a “conversation” with their teens about how far, fast and late they can drive and come to an agreement on limits. A GPS-based Safety Beacon then transmits real time information about speed, distance and location to the parents’ computers, phones or other mobile devices when limits are exceeded.

Another was a conversation with a friend who attempted to give some tickets for a daytime Mariners baseball game to her 16-year-old nephew. The trip for the boy and his friend would have involved a ferry ride to downtown Seattle and a walk, with crowds of other people, to Safeco Field. His parents would not let him go.

I also had a recent conversation with local parenting columnist and educator Jan Faull about parenting trends over the past 30 years. She mentioned that the “stranger danger myth” and fear for our children’s safety causes us to curtail our children’s adventures so that many of their experiences come about vicariously, through media entertainment instead of real life. (The “stranger danger myth” refers to the fact that although incidents of child abductions are rebroadcast and amplified through the media, the actual number of abductions is going down. According to the National Incidence Studies on Missing, Abducted, Runaway and Thrownaway Children, issued by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2002, between 200 to 300 children were abducted by strangers in1988 and 115 were abducted in 1999.)

I have the uneasy feeling that we are sheltering our children too much and trying to keep them on too short a tether.

Of course we want our children safe, so we keep them in car seats, bicycle helmets and life jackets on boats, which is essential. But if a child is always in a life jacket, even when under close adult supervision in a safe swimming area, how will he learn to swim on his own? If swings are always low, how will she soar into the clouds? If he only climbs on safe, brightly colored plastic play structures but never on trees and rocks and uneven trails, how will he gain balance and coordination and control of his own body? Will children later have the confidence to challenge their bodies in skiing, kayaking, mountain climbing or horseback-riding, or will they face the potentially greater danger of becoming sedentary, overweight or even obese?

As children get older, our vigilance extends to their social contacts and range of exploration. Many of us used to play in our neighborhoods until twilight and ride our bikes a few miles from home, but our children live and move within a much smaller radius of our homes. We certainly want to give our children realistic information and tools about talking to strangers and watching out for traffic, but we stunt their growth and independence if we don’t allow them to venture out on their own or with a buddy. How can our children learn to keep themselves safe when all the dangers have been removed?

The balance between the parents’ need to protect and the child’s need to explore comes to a head in the teenage years, especially when it comes to that heart-stopping moment when our “babies” drive off in a car. Still, I think the monitoring of the Safeco Teensurance goes too far and is likely to promote inventive ways for teens to circumvent the technology and escape from their restrictions. If our children are not allowed to make mistakes, how will they learn to solve problems and adjust to dangerous situations?

The danger in confining children to carefully circumscribed boundaries is that they will not learn to take risks. If they are afraid to fail or to be unsafe, how will they, as adults, venture farther into outer space or across scientific and technological frontiers or into new forms of artistic expression?

I’ve found surprisingly little written about this topic, but I do like the perspective of Michael Jellinke, M.D., chief of child psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. “In today’s society, especially in middle-class families, it’s possible to create a sheltered, low-risk environment for children,” he writes in a recent article in Developmental Behavioral Pediatrics Online (www.dbpeds.org). “The only problem with the strategy is that it ignores the key goal of human development, which is to gain autonomy. From the moment a baby is born until he enters college or moves away from home, the central theme of development is building independence and self-sufficiency.”

He particularly addresses parents in his practice who are over-controlling of their children, asking them a key question: “What things are you doing now to help your child learn to be self-confident, to manage autonomy, to make choices and weigh circumstances?”

It’s a good question for all of us to consider as we try to maintain that delicate balance between safety and growth.

Wenda Reed is parenting columnist for Seattle Woman.

©2007 Caliope Publishing Company