Occasionally an article comes our way that highlights very succinctly an emerging trend in modern life. Jane Cadzow published such an article in January 2004. We have been looking ourselves at the dynamics of control – how excessive control is an outworking of undealt-with fear. This article (without specifically focussing on that aspect) examines this principle in relation to child-rearing.

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And yeah, all the baby-boomers on our contact list will go glassy-eyed at some of the memories this article reawakens!

On their screens, they can vanquish invading hordes, but in the real world, today’s kids can’t even walk to school without Mum. Have we taken the idea of protecting our children too far? Jane Cadzow reports (Sydney Morning Herald, Jan 17,2004).

When Paul Tranter was a boy, he and his friends would disappear for hours at a time into the bushland abutting their homes on the western outskirts of Newcastle. “There were old mine shafts, blackberry bushes, swamps:’ he says, smiling at the memory. “It was just a fantastic place to be as a child.” Now 48, Tranter is a Canberra-based geographer investigating a dramatic but largely undiscussed change in Western society – the clampdown on children’s freedom of movement. His research supports overseas findings that adult control and supervision of children’s lives has increased significantly in just one or two generations. What’s more, Tranter has discovered that Australian children are more closely guarded than their counterparts in some comparable countries.

Swamps? Mine shafts? Don’t even think about it, kids. Australian parents have become so safety-conscious that we worry about the gradient of the slippery-slide at the local park. So reluctant are we to let our offspring out of our sight that we drive them to the playground and everywhere else rather than allow them to walk or ride their bikes. Strapped into the back seat of the family sedan, chauffeured to and from school, soccer practice and piano lessons, middle-class Australian boys and girls are like pampered prisoners – cosseted, constrained and constantly nagged.

Be careful on the swing. Don’t go on the road. Never talk to strangers. Put on more sunscreen… We don’t just cushion them against life’s blows – we bubble-wrap them! “We’re very concerned, rightly so, with protecting children from dangers:’ says Tranter. “But you’ve got to start to wonder, have we gone too far?”

A friend of mine lets her 10-year-old son cycle to and from school- but she creeps along behind him in the car. Another friend allows her two primary-school-age daughters to cycle up and down their suburban street – but she follows them on foot. “And what do I do?” she asks ruefully. “I call out as they go past each driveway, ‘Watch out for the driveway! Slow down!'”

The same woman and her partner have only recently permitted their girls, 10 and 8, to go into the front garden on their own. “Even when it came to collecting newspapers that were thrown onto our lawn, they couldn’t go out the front without one of us being there:’ she says. “They worked out pretty quickly that there must be something wrong with being outside without a parent watching you – and that you didn’t stay out there for long. So they would dash out and dash in.”

Paul Tranter attributes hothouse parenting at least partly to the dwindling size of families. The smaller your brood, the more tempting it is to treat each child like a rare and fragile flower. And if you have just one or two children, it’s physically possible to escort them wherever they go. “Our children are precious:’ says one Sydney mother of two. “I’m sure our parents thought we were precious, too – it’s just that they didn’t seem to watch our every move. That is the biggest difference. I’m so watchful.” Behavioural scientists tell us it’s good for kids to escape from grown-ups now and then. By middle childhood (from about 7 to 12 years), both boys and girls occasionally crave solitude and time for reflection. Urban planner Chris Cunningham says his research with Australian city children shows they yearn for “somewhere to get away from others and create their own world”. But parents on the whole seem unconvinced by the argument that leaving children to their own devices is important to their emotional and intellectual development. “We’re distrustful of the role of free and independent play in children’s lives,’ says Cunningham. “We feel that unless they’re at violin lessons or soccer or whatever it might be, they’re being idle. So we’re not giving them the opportunity to explore the world for themselves:’

Perhaps we are killing our kids with kindness. “Australia now has the dubious distinction of having the world’s fattest children;’ says Cunningham, linking the rising incidence of obesity to afternoons spent in front of television or computer screens rather than exploring the neighbourhood. He argues that the confinement of kids not only creates junior couch potatoes but robs them of their right to “indulge in the caprices of being a child”.

After all, walking to school or the local shops isn’t just a matter of getting from A to B: it’s a chance to kick stones, pat dogs, dawdle with friends and swap notes on the old lady (possibly a witch) who lives in the spooky house on the corner. As Melbourne mother Jill Anderson says, “They need that time to snicker and laugh and carry on together, without having you there going, ‘What did you say?'”

Anderson’s younger son, aged 10, walks home in the afternoons. Her older son, who attends a more distant school, has used public transport since he was nearly 12: she remembers her surprise and slight consternation when she realised that most of the other students in his year were driven door-to-door: “I thought, ‘Wow. Am I being reckless in allowing my child to get on a train?'”

When they play computer games, children can marshal armies, lay siege to castles and blow up enemy battleships, but in real life many of them can’t cross the road without Mum. As Melbourne clinical psychologist Andrew Fuller puts it, “‘I can win a war but I can’t ride my bike-to the-shops; No wonder they feel a bit out of kilter.”

Kids who spend all their time with adults have little scope to climb trees, dig holes, build cubbies or form secret clubs. The author of Raising Real People, Fuller believes many would benefit from a little more adventure in their lives. If their parents handle them like eggs, shielding them from even the smallest knocks, they don’t have the opportunity to build up resilience, he says. “Then when bad things do happen, they’re just thrown for six. They end up in my bloody therapy room, and I’m sick of it.” Coddled kid syndrome, you might call it. Though the prevalence of the condition is only now being recognised, alarm bells began ringing back in 1990, when British social scientist Mayer Hillman established that the freedom of English children aged 7 to 11 had shrunk markedly over two decades. Hillman’s study of boys and girls at five English primary schools found they were much less likely than students surveyed at the same schools in 1971 to have permission to cycle on roads, for instance, or travel unaccompanied to school. Half the children in the original survey were allowed to catch buses alone; by 1990, just one in seven could do so. In a 1999 paper, Hillman went so far as to conclude that we are producing the human equivalent of battery- reared chickens. Our plump 10-year-olds, forbidden to follow their instinct to roam, may lack the initiative and resourcefulness of the free-range kids of the past: he points to experiments that show primates deprived of rough and tumble in their youth tend to grow into incompetent adults. “Survival rises with the extent of experience of risk-taking:’ he writes.

When Tranter replicated Hillman’s study at 21 schools in Sydney, Canberra and Christchurch, he found that Australian and New Zealand children were more closely chaperoned than either English or German kids. Nearly half our nine-year-olds were driven to school, compared to a third of the English children and only an eighth of German students. Whereas 80 per cent of German 11-year-olds were trusted to use buses, as were 40 per cent of English children of the same age, only a quarter of the Australians and New Zealanders had the same licence.

Why do we keep our kids on such a tight rein? Tranter found that, in Australia, daughters are more restricted than sons – and the parents of girls say their main fear is assault or molestation. Parents of boys see traffic injury as the biggest threat but cite so-called “stranger-danger” as another compelling reason for keeping their sons off the streets. Yet as Brisbane social planner Wendy Sarkissian says, “When you really look at it, the dangerous ones are the ones you know.” The depressing truth is that more than 90 per cent of Australian child homicide victims are killed by their parents. The number of children aged under 15 murdered by strangers, as opposed to relatives or acquaintances, has averaged just one a year since 1999. That puts the odds at about one in four million – even lower than in the previous decade, when the average was two children a year. Statistically, they are at much greater risk of 1 being killed in a traffic accident, but the murder of children makes banner headlines, which may account for the perception that it happens frequently. “When the death of a child does occur, there’s just so much media coverage that it gets ingrained in our memory:’ says Australian Institute of Criminology researcher Jenny Mouzos. The three Beaumont children, who disappeared from an Adelaide beach in 1966; the two Mackay sisters, murdered on their way to school in Townsville in 1970… Decades later, we effortlessly recall their names and can almost see the faces that appeared in endlessly reproduced snapshots. In his book The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety, Peter Pierce contends that our preoccupation with vanishing youngsters dates from colonial times, when frontier families were haunted by tales of girls and boys who strayed into the bush and never returned. In the early years of white settlement, lost children were the subject of paintings, ballads and pantomimes. Pierce says parents in those days were less afraid of predators – human or otherwise – than of the strange, silent Australian landscape itself. Their nervousness about their offspring reflected their own unease at finding themselves stranded in an alien environment: “The lost children are in a sense the surrogates for the adults who don’t belong:’ The idea that the wilderness can swallow up kids retains a strong grip on the Australian imagination. Think of the schoolgirls in Picnic at Hanging Rock. Remember Azaria Chamberlain. But as Pierce says, the focus of our fear has shifted since the 19th century. The possibility that a child might wander away is no longer our prime concern. “The modern dread is, he didn’t wander off. He got taken.”

The turning point, he believes, was the 1960 abduction and murder of eight-year-old Sydney boy Graeme Thorne. Kidnapped for ransom, Thorne was targeted because his parents had just won the lottery; it was anything but an act of random violence. But the hugely publicised case planted the thought that kids could be stolen anywhere, any time. Thorne had been plucked from a Bondi street corner in broad daylight, while he was waiting to catch a bus to school. Since then, says Pierce, we have come to regard child-snatching as one of the perils of urban life – “an arbitrary terror that might be visited upon any dweller in a modern Australian city”. As many parents see it, the only defence is eternal vigilance. Better safe than sorry, we tell ourselves as we ignore our kids’ pleas to leave the house on their own. When I mention to the friend who drives behind her son’s bike that only one child a year is murdered by a stranger, she shrugs and says, “I don’t want it to be mine:’

In 1952, when Chris Cunningham was 10, he and his nine-year-old brother caught a train from their home in the Blue Mountains to Sydney, where they spent the day exploring the metropolis by rail and tram. “That’s probably where 1 got my passion for cities and city planning – from being able to experience a city independently as a child;’ says Cunningham, whose research confirms that much tighter boundaries are placed on kids today. Studying after-school play patterns in five Australian towns (Sydney, Adelaide, Ipswich, Armidale and Lismore), he and colleague Margaret Jones found that on nominated fine days in early summer, only 50 per cent of boys and 30 per cent of girls ventured out of their own yards. Of those who did go walking or cycling, the median range for boys was 500 metres, for girls just 200 metres. Yet, asked where they liked to go, the children were less likely to name playgrounds and football fields than bushland areas.

Kids of both sexes seem innately attracted to wild spaces, says Cunningham. In his study, more boys than girls ventured off the beaten track but “if anything, girls who used natural places focused more intently on the inherent qualities of those places than [did the] boys, for whom the landscape was a stage for adventure games’:

Creeks and caves scare the hell out of parents, who seem to Cunningham to underrate kids’ bushcraft. “Children’s environmental skills are well developed by the time they want to go and play in these places;’ he says. “Some environmental savvy may be instinctive.” In 1960, in a case so celebrated it became the subject of a popular song, four-year-old Steven Walls survived four days in rugged country near Guyra, on the New England tableland of NSW. According to Cunningham, the boy spent most of that time hiding from the thousands of adults who were searching for him: “He was frightened of the people, not frightened of the bush.”

It’s in traffic that kids are most vulnerable, partly because their peripheral vision isn’t as good as adults’. That the number killed or injured on Australian roads is falling is probably due to the increasing trend to keep kids off the streets, says Paul Tranter. As traffic volume and speed have risen in recent decades, the number of children walking and riding bikes has fallen. In 2001, about half of Sydney children were driven to school – up from 37 per cent in 1991. The number who caught buses or walked had dropped during the decade, while the proportion who cycled had halved – from 1.8 per cent to just 0.9 per cent.

Tranter says it’s a self-perpetuating phenomenon. The more parents drive their children, the more traffic builds up outside schools, “and the more the other parents think, ‘Well, it’s too dangerous to let my child walk: So they start driving as well.”

The number of child fatalities from all causes in Australia has dropped sharply in the past three decades. This is partly because improved medicine saves more from illness and injury, but presumably parental determination to keep kids out of harm’s way is having an effect, too. The price we have paid is to change the way we live.

In We Told You So, published in 1968, Australian poet Nancy Keesing wrote:

Suburbs are known only to dogs and children.

They sniff, circle, explore, trespass, uncover

Unguessed, circuitous byways and acquire

Bizarre acquaintances. Children and dogs discover

All of a suburb.

Not any more, they don’t. The dogs are on leashes. The kids are inside. When Keiren McLeonard heard the tinkling music of an ice-cream van in her quiet Canberra neighbourhood, she decided to give her then six-year-old daughter a treat. “We went down the road and there were all these children;’ says McLeonard, who had lived in her street for more than a decade without realising it was home to any kids besides her own. “You don’t see evidence of children in any of the streets around here;’ she says. Tranter points out that in many residential areas, it’s not only children who have made themselves scarce. Adults, too, are rarely seen outdoors: thanks to sprinkler systems, it isn’t even necessary to stand in the yard with a hose. Adults, like children, are doing less walking. “The percentage of trips as pedestrians is falling as the percentage of car trips is rising;’ says Tranter. “They drive home, they press a button, the roller-door goes up, the car goes in; that’s it. You don’t see them until it comes up again the next morning and they drive out… As a consequence, the streets are perceived as being lonely, dangerous places:’

Tranter credits the independence of the German students in Mayer Hillman’s survey to the European tradition of strolling and meeting in public spaces. In German cities, the presence in the streets of lots of children – and adults gives other parents confidence to allow their kids to join them, he says. Similarly, the excellent public transport system’s heavy usage by people of all ages means parents have few qualms about letting their children climb aboard, too. “Adults in Germany think they have a greater collective responsibility for other people’s children;’ says Tranter. On buses and trams – anywhere, really – kids who behave badly are watched and corrected, adding to the general feeling of security. Hillman has noted that in England, where stranger-danger is as much an obsession as it is in Australia, “we, the strangers, are less inclined to engage in conversation with children we do not know – a perfectly healthy instinct – lest our motives be misconstrued. It has the insidious effect of relieving us of our societal responsibilities for keeping an eye on other people’s children and intervening when we judge it necessary:’

At the same time, our children grow up thinking the world is a perilous place in which anyone who smiles and says hello might be a prowling pedophile. Paranoid parents produce edgy kids. “We live in a society that seems to have an epidemic of depression in children;’ says psychologist Andrew Fuller. “There’s no doubt that kids these days are much more depressed than they were:’

Social planner Wendy Sarkissian believes the bubble-wrapping of children is partly symptomatic of “a generalised despair about the state of the world. There’s a strong cocooning desire because it’s too scary out there:’ She thinks it would help if parents got out more: “They drive to and from work, to and from the supermarket – they actually don’t know what’s out there. They haven’t directly experienced a lot of those areas that they’re advising

Sarkissian grew up in Vancouver, where she lived beside an Indian reservation. “It was completely forbidden and we were there every day;’ she says. “It was rainforest. We were sitting in hollow logs and swinging like Tarzan. It was magical.” From her observations in Australia, girls and boys outside the cities remain relatively free spirits – little affected, so far, by the lock-up-your-children movement. “This really is an urban phenomenon;’ she says. “Country kids are still swimming in the creek.” Sarkissian suggests we need to stop thinking of child-rearing as an exercise in risk minimisation. Rather than calling kids down from the tops of trees, we should be encouraging them to go out on a limb now and then. “It’s quite an interesting paradox;’ she says. “You have to care enough to let them go:’ Of course, over-protection isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a child. In many ways, our kids are extraordinarily lucky to have us at their beck and call, ferrying them to weekend sporting fixtures and cheering loyally from the sidelines. “But I’m wondering;’ says Tranter, “are our children any better off than when they went and played in the wild spaces and had their own informal cricket games with groups of friends?” He pauses. “I’m not sure that they are.”