Often, parents tell me the world is more dangerous than it used to be. Others tell me we’re restricting our children too much and don’t let them run free. I guess I’m the worst of both worlds in that I think we should give our children more independence, but am too terrified to do so.
I sometimes accuse my wife of being a helicopter parent, because she sees threats around every corner. Her response, and it’s a hard one for me to argue against, is that I have the opposite affliction; an ‘It’ll be fine’ attitude borne from an inability to evaluate risk. The argument between ‘helicopter’ and ‘free-range’ parenting is not really one I find that interesting, not least because the proponents of both are equally annoying. It’s hard to think my children live in a more dangerous world than I did, if such a thing were even measurable, not least since everything from road deaths and abductions to household accidents have seen numbers drop precipitously. It’s possible that this is because children are more restricted now, which would make my instinctive rebuke of short-leash parenting even more facile, like the guy under an umbrella who says he’s not seen much rain lately.
I’m also raising my kids in a city of eight million people, whereas I grew up on Derry’s rural border with Donegal, where seeing someone walking down the road was a major event. My children are rarely, if ever, allowed to stray 10ft from me, whereas I spent most of my home life almost recklessly unmonitored. I suppose that was safe, since where I grew up now seems almost pathologically safe and boring to me, but it was also the site of at least one IRA bomb during my childhood.
The square mile around our house was mostly open fields, but featured a few busy roads, and the Irish and British border checkpoints either side of the top of our field (the latter being the site of the aforementioned explosion in 1988). We were not merely allowed, but encouraged to traipse around this area for hours at a time. I’m tempted to add ‘so long as we were back for dinner’ but, if I’m honest, I don’t know that such a condition was ever verbalised.
This sense of abandon even was seemingly portable, and followed us on holiday. My brothers Dara and Shane discovered this on a trip to Fermanagh, when – aged just 12 and 10 respectively – they sloped off from the group to take a rowboat on Lough Erne. They had already pushed off from the shore before they discovered they’d forgotten to grab any oars and thus spent an entire day in tears, drifting uselessly across the water until they finally hit shore and made it back to our caravan, mud-drenched and crying, without anyone having missed them at all.
My wife doesn’t find that story as funny as I do and I swear to her there and then I will never sanction an unsupervised sailing trip for either of our children. Somewhere, between the helicopter and the rowboat, I have to believe a happy medium exists. But for now, I’ll let others find it.
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