We wrap our children in cotton wool, but it’s no protection against reality

I RECENTLY was lent a baby overnight. This baby was distinguished by a sunny disposition and a willingness to give everybody and everything the benefit of the doubt.

This baby arrived with enough equipment to keep the Red Army going for several days. It had a Moses basket, a bouncy soft seat that played tunes or made womb noises or produced bird-song (we opted for womb noises because the bird song drove the cats nuts).

It had a bottle steriliser. It had nappies and wipes. It had a buggy that converted to other functions — so many other functions, you got the impression that if you read the instructions fully, you could turn it into a Sherman tank or a helicopter.

Even though it was complicated, it kept you within the law, that car seat.

It had its own passport and visa, demanding that every EU state recognise it fulfilled Directive Whatsit and Regulation Thingummy and was fit for purpose until (it seemed to me) the child grew to half a ton in weight and six feet in height.

Restraining children in cars makes sense, albeit costly sense. You don’t want your offspring getting airborne if your car collides with something, turning into unguided missiles and killing themselves or you.

That said, and conscious that I take my life in my hands, there is a case for suggesting that we have turned childhood into a bureaucratic, overscheduled, overprotected state, policed by parents in SUVs.

Kids are growing up with the belief that the only way to survive to adulthood is never to climb a tree, swing too high on a swing or use a toy that doesn’t sit between your two hands and show imitation people having a great time climbing, falling and laying about them with ferocious firepower. It’s called vicarious living.

People in their 30s, 40s and older carry the scars of unprotected childhood. Some of those scars are grievous. One of my best friends describes as ‘a constant bloody nuisance’ the blindness that descended on him when he was five or six, courtesy of an accident with a toy sword.

But not all the wounds are grievous and most of them deliver multiple benefits.

An accident involving me, a hill, a trike and a lamppost may have left scars on the inside of my mouth, but it taught me never to go downhill in a vehicle without learning about the brakes first. It taught me the kindness of strangers. It taught me a deep fear of the medical profession, whose ability to explain painful procedures to a small child can be limited. It gave me a respect for lampposts. It even gave me the beginning of a novel which sold remarkably well.

We learn a hell of a lot more from accidents than from instructions. Until we’ve experienced the consequences of disobeying our parents, their rules are often little more than the generalised well-meaning warble children expect their parents to make.

Middle class parenting, these days, is more about prevention than permission.

As a result, many children are unfit, unable to cope with the huge demands of a bicycle, less physically adroit and less fit for the real world than they should be once they move out of the safety of the sandpit.

Inevitably, the minute they escape the parental police, their urge to experiment is so florid, they engage in much worse pursuits than they would have, if a little risk had featured in their day-to-day life.

I wouldn’t know this except that my son recently served as best man at the wedding of a life-long friend, and bits of his speech have seeped back to me.

The things he revealed about what the two of them got up to would put the heart crossways in any protective mother, even at 20 years’ distance. Arson was only the start of it.

Of course children should not be exposed to needless risk. But does that justify the local authority in Britain — Newcastle City Council — which recently spent a fortune putting lads up in cherry-pickers to strip all the chestnut trees in the area of nuts, lest children, eager to play conkers, climb those trees and put themselves in danger of falling? Given that most children have no clue how to play conkers and less interest in abandoning their PlayStations to learn this abstruse skill, it does seem something of an over-commitment.

It could also be argued that the killjoyism implicit in the over-regulation of childhood derives more from fear of being sued than from any real desire to protect children. Playgrounds are becoming more and more boring, as the devices that used to provide fun and risk get removed.

A NEW report from a commission in Britain suggests we may be going too far in the wrong direction. The Better Regulations Commission isn’t a state body. It isn’t made up of vested interests, just experts who give their time for free, because they’re concerned that many of the regulations affecting all of us, adults and children alike, may not be delivering what we want them to, but providing pointless restrictions unrelated to the actual risk of what is regulated.

The problem with over-regulation is two-fold. It tends to mush all risks and regulations together so, for example, commentators whinge when the EU brings in complicated but valid requirements about restraining children in cars. It also makes us believe that, since regulations exist, then someone must be responsible for their implementation, ergo we’re all in some way properly protected.

Not this time of the year, we’re not. Not coming up to Hallowe’en, we’re not.

The casualty departments are already bracing themselves for the horrors they’ll see as a result of the use of unlicensed fireworks. The pictures of horribly mutilated children appear, as day follows night, every November, as do the stories of pets, terrorised and turned nasty by the random explosions of fireworks being ‘tested’ in advance of the big night.

This is the one season of the year where age-related deafness is an advantage to our older citizens. They’d be scared witless if they could hear what’s going on.

Just as important is what cannot be photographed or heard. All over this country, this week, kids are rolling tyres towards locations where the community bonfire will be lit on Hallowe’en. Those bonfires will, on one exciting night, deliver more dioxins into the atmosphere than all the incinerators in the country deliver throughout the entire year. Those dioxins — cancer-carriers, every invisible one of them — will drop as the gentle rain from heaven on all of us the following day and we’ll know nothing about it. We’ll never connect happy Hallowe’en and the big car-tyre fuelled bonfires with the diseases that may bring us to the Oncology Department in the hospital 10 years down the line.

All we’ll do, in the next few days, is shrug when we see the bonfires growing higher and higher.

Sure isn’t it only one night’s fun in an otherwise safe, regulated world?