No Fear

"This is written by a friend of mine, Tim Gill. He is a really, really interesting guy, who is a champion of the rights of children’s freedom. I coined the phrase a few years ago that we raise children in captivity. We live in a society where there are fundamentally no free-range children. He writes beautifully about that. It isn’t a huge book, and it’s very easy to read. He just lays out very simply how we are absolutely screwing the development of children, given our complete paranoid fear of the world we live in. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter He explains that in terms of the reduction in the freedom for children to play and for them to actually have accidents that are really important for them – because they need to be able to take risks, and for the risks to sometimes lead them to learn some hard lessons. He really makes us look at the way that we are letting children down, thanks to the paranoid way that we live our lives. It’s easy to say, ‘Oh, it’s the media’. I don’t think it is the media’s fault, but I think we live in a fast-moving, multi-platform, multimedia society, where as it happens we are watching it happen. So as the planes go into the Twin Towers, we see it happen. We are living it as well as hearing about it later. We are experiencing the trauma as the trauma happens, and then we internalise that, and suddenly the trauma becomes ours and we suddenly look at those we love most deeply and think, ‘I am not going to let that happen to them. So we will just keep you in your bedrooms until you are 18 and hope for the best!’ We can get children to go to school on the bus starting when they are much younger; we can let our kids have more freedom to play outside; we can have communities where cars aren’t allowed on certain streets so children can play out together. We can stop this ridiculous health-and-safety culture where children aren’t allowed to climb trees, or play conkers, or throw snowballs. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Which is fine in the sense that I look at the way my kids use their computers and social networking and I am jealous. I think about how I used to go off to the local library and get a book out of which someone had ripped the key pages – but now they get all the information they need! So I am a champion of technology, but I do think everything is good only in moderation. The irony is that we live in this risk-averse culture; we are perversely paranoid about our children’s safety, so we keep them indoors, and we then allow them to do their childhood – which is socialising, communicating, playing, etc. – online, and because none of us has had the experience of the online space, we haven’t even prepared them for that. So the real-world risks that we understand, because we faced them as children – we are keeping our own kids away from those, and driving them towards spaces where there are risks as well as opportunities and benefits. And we don’t even talk to them about this. There are some recent stats which show that three-quarters of all five-year-olds are surfing the net, and often they are doing so unsupervised. Would you take your five-year-old to a huge shopping centre and say, ‘I’ll see you in a couple of hours’, and then go and have a cup of coffee? That is why this book is so good: because it highlights that irony, and the ridiculous way in which we are not letting children be children."