Climbing trees and making mud pies

THROUGH the window, I can see my second-born, five in August, standing in the class of downpour that would give a monsoon rain-envy. He’s just two weeks out of hospital, hale and hearty once more, but I’m still operating on hyper-neurotic parental mode.

Yet, I say nothing as he throws aside the umbrella inviting pneumonia to do its damndest, I keep schtum as he kicks about in the rapidly-forming lagoons by the kerbside drain, no doubt crawling with some new, improved strain of typhus.

Then I spy two-year-old Daddy’s Little Girl heading out to join him in a t-shirt and sandals. Sweet Jeebus, why not tie her to the rail tracks or feed her to an unlicensed pit bull terrier altogether! But I bite hard on my tongue, only a strangulated squeal passing through grimly set lips. You see, we’re crossing things off our lists: Britain’s National Trust’s 50 Things a Child Should Do Before Turning 11¾; and a toddler’s ‘Potty List’ of 36 things to do before turning three.

While the toddler list is a marketing wheeze to flog baby formula, the NT list emanates from the wonderful British cultural and environmental heritage organisation, whittled down from 400 ideas submitted by NT staff sharing ‘childhood memories which gave them a love of nature’.

It’s a mix of activities, some easy, some harder, depending on age but all take place out of doors. “Research has shown it is important for children to have a love of nature before the age of 12,” says NT spokesperson Helen Meech.

Developing a love of nature at an early age ensures children grow into adults with an appreciation for environmental concerns. This is not hippy green-washing of young minds but an extremely pragmatic recognition of our species’ fundamental dependence on nature for survival.

Over 150 years ago, psychologist Herbert Spencer, in his ‘Principles of Psychology’, outlined his ‘surplus energy theory’, claiming it was the main reason for a child’s need to play. This theory has been largely discredited but it became the model for playground design which has continued to this day, more suited to the parent’s needs than the child: ease of surveillance, ease of maintenance and a guiltless break from the children. Even playground grass these days is more likely to be astroturf and the ever more popular private playcentres on anonymous industrial estates aren’t even outside.

‘Child’s play’, essential to their development, mentally as much as physically, is far more complex than a spell on the swings, roundabouts and slides and the great outdoors offers ideal, challenging play environments. But a modern ‘culture of fear’ and the concept of ‘stranger danger’ means most children’s activities — classes, groups, sports etc — are supervised and regimented. The parents ferrying their children to these organised activities most likely ran free in childhood, in housing estates — often dangerously unfinished and all the more exciting for it — urban wastelands, parks and countryside, easily accessible to most Irish kids, even city-dwellers. Put it this way — if you grew up during the ’70s or ’80s, how much of your playtime was spent in an actual playground under adult supervision?

There’s nothing like the birth of a child to trigger wholesale revisionism in one’s internal health and safety standards. Formerly irrational fears become inevitable horrors just waiting to happen to vulnerable progeny. Perhaps it’s the memories of all those potential near-misses in our own childhoods that have turned us into parenting neurotics.

A sister (8) and I (10) once crafted a vehicle from a pram base and a hoopla board and dispatched the two-year-old brother we were minding down the hill of a main road, clinging on for dear life. Sure enough, it crashed. And more surely still, one of the hooks on the board went clean through the flesh right into his mouth, a ten-stitch job leaving a jagged scar under his lower lip to this day.

Yet, we were the offspring of educated, middle-class parents, living in a middle-class neighbourhood. Pre-teens gadding about with infants was normal. Nowadays, there’s always an adult supervising my young ones on the street. Some of my nieces and nephews don’t even play on their streets (the same neighbourhood streets we roamed as children) but go on ‘playdates’ to other houses.

And the less children roam, the more they stay at home which means TV and computer games — two of my pet hates— but they’ve already enslaved my boys to varying degrees.

Have we really gone too far? Have we wrapped our kids up so much in cotton wool, they’re in danger of suffocation? (Metaphorical suffocation, of course — the modern parent is only too aware of the very real dangers of suffocation from seemingly benign objects: blankets, pillows, cushions, overlarge hoods, three-ply Kleenex and actual cotton wool).

I have an older boy and he will be 23 in a couple of months, surely testimony to some ability on my part to keep a living creature intact and breathing, even an actual human. Furthermore, we tick off the bulk of the NT list as having been completed before he was even 10. I recall watching him scale, freestyle, a 30-foot cliff-face with paternal pride, talking him through the part where he panicked and froze as my poor mother beside me endured multiple palpitations.

But I was younger then and either more stupid or less hidebound by fear. With this fresh lot, a simple pavement kerb calls for climbing ropes and crampons. However, the younger ones have ticked off most of the toddler list as well.

What’s left? Top of a double decker bus? Extinct. A first love? That’ll be the ongoing Oedipal thing between No 2 and my wife. Teddy Bears’ picnic? We chanced upon No 2 having one of those when he was three, the first time we’d ever seen him with a cuddly toy. Turns out he was feeding them a dark concoction he called blood. One monkey was drenched in the stuff. He’s already dead, said No 2.

So, it’s time to revisit the National Trust list. As we’re scouring it for something new and age-appropriate, No 3 quietly wanders off into the garden. Ten minutes later, I glance out and she’s conducting a psychotic version of the ploughing championships in one of my prized vegetable beds. My weeping is instantaneous as a grinning No 1 says, ‘there’s one we haven’t done – made mud pies’. He’s right, no mud pies. So, there and then we all troop out and I join in the final destruction of one whole section of my vegetable garden in the spirit of journalistic integrity. And sound parenting, of course.

British National Trust’s 50 Things a Child Should Do Before Turning 11¾

1. Climb a tree

2. Roll down a really big hill

3. Camp out in the wild

4. Build a den

5. Skim a stone

6. Run around in the rain

7. Fly a kite

8. Catch a fish with a net

9. Eat an apple straight from a tree

10. Play conkers

11. Throw some snow

12. Hunt for treasure on the beach

13. Make a mud pie

14. Dam a stream

15. Go sledging

16. Bury someone in the sand

17. Set up a snail race

18. Balance on a fallen tree

19. Swing on a rope swing

20. Make a mud slide

21. Eat blackberries growing in the wild

22. Take a look inside a tree

23. Visit an island

24. Feel like you’re flying in the wind

25. Make a grass trumpet

26. Hunt for fossils and bones

27. Watch the sun wake up

28. Climb a huge hill

29. Get behind a waterfall

30. Feed a bird from your hand

31. Hunt for bugs

32. Find some frogspawn

33. Catch a butterfly in a net

34. Track wild animals

35. Discover what’s in a pond

36. Call an owl

37. Check out the crazy creatures in a rock pool

38. Bring up a butterfly

39. Catch a crab

40. Go on a nature walk at night

41. Plant it, grow it, eat it

42. Go wild swimming

43. Go rafting

44. Light a fire without matches

45. Find your way with a map and compass

46. Try bouldering

47. Cook on a campfire

48. Try abseiling

49. Find a geocache

50. Canoe down a river

The 36 activities children should do by the time they turn three

1. Made a mud pie

2. Baked a cake

3. Finger painted

4. Sung loudly in public

5. Climbed a big hill

6. Picked fruit

7. Danced with no inhibitions

8. Made sandcastles on the beach, right

9. Been chased by a monster

10. Jumped in a puddle so hard the water went in mummy’s shoe too

11. Belly-flopped

12. Fed the ducks

13. Blown bubbles

14. Had a teddy bears’ picnic

15. Chosen a favourite book

16. Ridden on the top of double-decker bus

17. Visited a museum

18. Been on a train ride

19. Fed an animal

20. Grown cress in the shape of your name

21. Worn pants on your head

22. Ridden tea-cups at the fair

23. Flown a paper aeroplane

24. Pooed in the bath

25. Stayed the night away from home

26. Ridden on daddy’s shoulders

27. Scribbled somewhere you shouldn’t

28. Cleaned your own teeth

29. Answered the phone

30. Mastered a party piece

31. Had a “first love”

32. Bought something in a shop

33. Set your sights on a future career (pirate, fairy or builder, perhaps?)

34. Told a fib

35. Made up an inappropriate nickname for someone

36. Broken something valuable