Remember when parents thought kids didn’t need seatbelts? Today’s mums and dads aren’t any smarter
When Carl Frampton from Belfast was seven years old, his mum thought he was a bit on the timid side – shy and short of confidence. So she took him along to a boxing gym, as you do. The coaches there spotted something unusual about him. Most seven-year-olds burst into tears when they get punched for the first time. But for reasons as much of a mystery to him now as to everyone else then, little Carl shed no tears. He could take the punches. Three decades and two world titles later, it looks like his mum made the right decision.
When I was in my early teens, I was also on the end of some bad stuff at school, so I told my mum I wanted to take up boxing. She said absolutely not and that was the end of that. Another good decision. My boxing journey wouldn’t have lasted beyond the first punch. Undoubtedly, I would have cried me a river and walked out, never to return.
Carl concedes that for all the success he enjoyed in his career, seven was too young to make a start. “I’ve got an eight-year-old son, and he will be going nowhere near a boxing ring yet.” This conversation took place on my radio show and got us thinking: what else did our parents let us do when we were kids that we wouldn’t dream of letting our kids do today?
A listener got in touch: “My father used to empty out his work van and put quilts and toys in it so we could play and sleep on the way to visit my grandparents.” This brought back memories of my parents making up a bed in the back of our estate car, tucking me and my brother up for the night, before jumping in before dawn to drive to our caravan in south Wales. Clunk clunk, went the doors, and the next thing we knew we would wake up on the Gower peninsula. How thrilling! How free we were.
More listeners joined in. Vince from Portsmouth said: “When I was about four years old in 1971, I used to get picked up for nursery school by a lady with a Mk 3 Ford Cortina estate which had the back seats folded down and a double mattress in the back for all us kids to jump around on.”
And this, my favourite, from Karen in Harrogate: “We got a transit van in the late 1970s and we would regularly drive from our home in Hertfordshire to my aunty’s in Dumfries. My dad decided it was safer for me to be in the back than the front. But there was no seating in the back, so he nailed a child’s deckchair into the middle of the floor and off we went – I was facing out the back window.”
In the end Andy from Cardross trumped everybody with his story about the time his father used him and his two brothers (aged six, 11 and 17) as counterweights on one hull of a storm-damaged catamaran. Hardcore that. Scarier than boxing, possibly. Although I suppose it doesn’t really count in this discussion as the dad presumably had no other options available to keep the thing from capsizing.
Lurking not far below the surface of this entertainment was a serious question or two. For a start, let’s not get into any “never did me any harm” nonsense. I am sure there are horror stories galore from the days before there were seatbelts in the front and back. Also, I wonder what we are allowing our kids to do now that, in 30 years’ time, will have those kids as grownups shaking their heads in wonder at the stupidity of their parents. What’s the 2023 equivalent of bouncing around or sleeping, unprotected by a seatbelt, in the back of a car or van?
It is difficult to come up with an answer, but I suspect mobile phones might come into it. It’s 2053 and a group of parents are gathered at the school gates. “Pff,” someone might say with a shake of the head. “Can you believe our parents used to call computers ‘mobile phones’ and they let us loose with them before we were into our teens?” Other mums and dads will chime in saying stuff like: “What were they thinking?”
And: “Blimey, the stuff we used to see on there.” Sooner or later someone will surely say: “Never did me any harm.”
Yes, I was freer as a kid then than I would be now. Except the opposite is also true. I was certainly less free to express, should I have felt the need, my sexuality, sex, gender and other stuff besides. The more I think about it, the more confused I am as to whether the norms and rules of life, formal or informal, are restricting or freeing us. When I was a kid, I had the freedom not to wear a seatbelt. This was a bad thing. But I was also free to roam around outside, playing, hiding, seeking, climbing trees and so on. These activities are hardly outlawed now, but kids are less likely to do them.
I was always too scared to climb trees anyway. It is plainly risky, so I wasn’t too concerned when I read that many kids have never done so. Better this stuff is left in the past. Fine. Except the risk of harm merely morphs and shifts elsewhere, not least to kids’ bedrooms and their computers. We often blame our children for this, but it’s partly our fault because, if we are honest, we can’t help being thankful that they are out of physical harm’s way, not falling out of trees or heaven knows what else. And despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, exposing them to all the digital harm in the world still feels like a lesser evil.
My working conclusion is that, in the end, it’s a zero-sum game. There will always be dangers that will need addressing, and quite rightly. But it’s just a big game of whack-a-mole and there will always be trouble somewhere. I would still rather be seven years old figuring it out than nearly 57 and no nearer to making sense of it.
Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist