This is how it started: Daughter Number Four would ask to take little expeditions by herself. A walk around the block or a short bike ride. And, because she’s nine and we want to foster a bit of independence and resilience and all that good stuff, we’d say yes.
Not that this was easy. The first few times we were in bits, glued to the front windows waiting for her to return. Then we’d have to act all cool when she got back, unharmed and totally unfazed by her solo travel experience.
But quickly – far more quickly than we imagined we would – we got used to it. There was a natural progression to allowing her to go to the park – a five-minute walk away – where she would meet her friends. The occasional weekend excursion turned into every weekend. Now we can’t keep her in the house.
There is a golden rule that you should never, ever criticise another parent’s decisions. To their face, that is. Wait until you get back to your own house. But given that you’re reading this, you can get stuck into the judgment straight away. There are parents who wouldn’t dream of allowing their children to leave the house by themselves. The world is too dangerous, too full of potential threats. Or that’s the way it seems.
Being a parent nowadays seems to involve the grim business of risk assessment. So here is ours: last Christmas, we got her this phone/watch yoke that allows her to call friends and family and also allows us to track her location. Her friends have similar devices. We know where she is and we can check in on her to make sure she’s okay. Some of her friends live right beside the park, so we know an adult is less than a minute away. We also live in a very child-friendly area: the park is routinely filled with children and parents. If Daughter Number Four got into some sort of difficulty, I’m sure they would intervene.
But most of all, it’s down to Daughter Number Four herself. She’s careful crossing roads (which aren’t busy anyway), and it’s been drilled into her to be wary of adults she doesn’t know. Especially if they claim to know me or her mother.
Does this absolutely guarantee her safety? Of course not. We could have opted to go full helicopter and accompany her to the park, but that goes against the very idea of going out to play, of exploring her environment, using her imagination, of building up her own social network – the same way we did when we were children. The slight risk is worth that enormous benefit. And how great is the “risk” anyway? Panic-inducing social media and nervous parents WhatsApp groups would have you believe that our public spaces are crawling with child abductors. But such cases are, in reality, exceptionally rare.
Keep them at home, and give them internet access. That’s where the real monsters are.
You might have detected a slightly defensive tone here: and you’d be right. Every time she leaves the house, we both experience a low hum of anxiety. We check in on her regularly. She always answers our calls and comes home when she’s told.
And when she returns, she always has something to tell us: a squabble among her group or something she witnessed in the park. One day she ended up going to a barbecue.
On a recent Saturday I rang her to tell her to come home for lunch. She answered, ‘Okay. How long will that take?’ And for some reason that flung me back to my own childhood. Not a specific memory; more a feeling of what it was like. It’s not the most appropriate word, but it was intoxicating, being out playing with friends. Far more important than boring lunch. And that’s how it should be.
