Let kids take risks — it’s good for them

ThE climbing frame in my primary school was a formidable and exhilarating structure, all cold, grey steel bars, and I remember vividly as an eight-year-old looking up at its dizzying heights and wondering if I’d ever be able to climb to the top.

And when I did, it was a thrill like nothing else I’d experienced. Balancing on the steel bar while holding on for dear life looking out over all the playground, I felt like a king.

When I fell — the bars were wet and slippy — my fall was broken not by bark chippings or foam matting, but by the rather less forgiving tarmac. This, after all, was the Eighties and health and safety had yet to be invented. And yes, my schoolmates and I were all on firstname terms with the receptionist at the local A&E; and yes, I still have the scars.

While I wouldn’t wish concussion or a broken arm on anyone, when I heard years later that they’d taken the climbing frame away, my heart sank, although I wasn’t at all surprised.

Part of the thrill of climbing the frame was knowing there was a risk of hurting yourself if you fell. Part of the thrill was the feeling you had to take responsibility for your own welfare.

But today, children exist in a cocooned, controlled and sanitised world where risk is removed and fun is limited to a virtual experience, staring at a screen because it’s ‘safe’. But what an anaemic, impoverished world that is.

A few years ago, a report found that one in six teachers claimed their school had banned children from playing conkers because of safety fears. That’s bonkers! A wayward conker crashing onto your bonce is hardly going to damage a child for life, is it?

BYTrYING to remove all vestige of risk, we are doing our children a great disservice. It means they grow up without the adequate skills to assess risk for themselves.

So cheers for the head of Ofsted, Amanda Spielman, who this week warned that nurseries should avoid ‘stifling’ children with over-zealous health and safety rules. She argued that schools could be harming children by removing play equipment such as climbing frames.

The fact is, life is inherently risky. Even something as apparently benign as a biscuit can land you in hospital if you choke on it.

Yet despite the evident risks of biscuits, we still eat them. We weigh up the risks and accept that the joys of a Garibaldi outweigh the potential harm. A life lived without risks is a dull life indeed.

Of course, sometimes things do go wrong — and with tragic consequences. But you can’t abolish all dangers from life.

The key to all this is to teach children how to develop skills in evaluating risk — because, when they grow up, the world is full of risks that can’t be dodged.

My heart sinks at the thought of health and safety crawling all over our youngsters’ childhoods. It doesn’t really remove risk and it wasn’t intended to; it was intended to minimise risk.

Yet it’s morphed into something that is often counter-productive — taking away our choices, rather than informing them.

It’s led to the situation where a surgeon friend was forced to wheel patients down to the imaging department for scans because none of the porters on duty had done the course in how to push someone in a wheelchair.

This was, of course, ridiculous. Surely it is more of a risk to health and safety to have a surgeon leave a ward of sick people to push someone down to X-ray than to have someone else push the wheelchair, even though they haven’t done a course in it.

It’s the same with children. Surely it’s far better that children learn about risk in the rough and tumble of the playground, that they fall and scrape a knee, bang their head and get cold and wet when they’re young and resilient and when there are adults on hand to step in, than when they are older and in the big bad world on their own.

I’d much rather a child learned about the importance of slowing round a corner when they were in a go- cart than a few years later when they were in a car with me as a passenger.

What’s interesting is that while we as a society have become increasingly risk averse, some people are realising how rewarding it can be for children when they’re allowed to take calculated risks.

For example, there is an adventure playground for deprived children in North Wales where they are allowed to play totally freely — as this has been found to boost their self-esteem.

Children need to learn how to evaluate situations for themselves. We do them no favours by wrapping them in cotton wool.