Have confidence and let children grow up

RESEARCH carried out at Mary Immaculate College in Limerick suggests that, when it comes to their children’s well-being and safety, Irish parents are among the most worried and concerned. This is reflected in the way that some people wrap their children in cotton wool and try to stand between them and the world around them.

The research suggests that this level of protection — over-protection, possibly — is stunting our children’s development and is undermining their self-confidence.

By denying our children a level of independence they could cope with better than we dare imagine, we are probably making them less able for the world than they might otherwise be. By overprotecting our children, we may be making them needlessly vulnerable and incapable.

Ireland came 12th in a survey that looked at how children are treated in 16 countries, hardly a ringing endorsement of our culture and surely a reason to review how we sometimes cosset our loved ones, possibly doing more harm than good.

After all, we can protect them from the world’s inevitable challenges for only so long.

Parents’ fears about road safety, the concern at the root of the statistic that shows only 13% of Irish secondary school children walk to school, may be justified in some instances and shows that we need to broaden our horizons when planning urban areas.

Simple things such as safe walkways or cycle routes to schools should be the norm rather than the exception.

This is especially important as these are the years when attitudes towards exercise and activity are shaped and often become life-long, life-defining habits.

Of course parents can encourage healthy lifestyles by walking or cycling to schools with their children, but then that most precious commodity — time — comes into play.

One of the curious things revealed by the report is that so many Irish schoolchildren are afraid of being abducted

. Why this might be so in a society where that crime of child kidnapping is all but unheard of suggests something closer to paranoia than reality.

It is as if children are living in the horror world of television and video games rather than the far safer world around them.

This reports suggests, too, that the sense of community that was such a force in child protection and child rearing is not what it once was.

If that is indeed the case, then our society has lost something that was one of its defining characteristics and something truly precious.

This report touches many important issues that shape a society: How children are reared and how their place in that society is imagined by their parents.

It touches too on the idea of communal responsibility and communal child protection. Those may seem quaint notions in a digital world where innocent images of children are hijacked on line to amuse sexual predators, but they are ideas worth championing.

This report paints a dour picture of uncertain people afraid to let their children face a world they want to embrace.

If it makes us all review our possibly over-intrusive attitudes towards child protection then it has achieved something very worthwhile.