It’s every dad’s DUTY to put their child in danger
ADvEntURER Bear Grylls has faced many agonies in his time — brutal interrogation during SAS training; breaking his back whil e freefall parachuting; nearly drowning in the Sumatran jungle.
I suspect, however, he’d happily endure them all again rather than face another maddening encounter with Britain’s elf ’n’ safety brigade.
two years ago he found himself in hot water after building an 80ft slide for his children on his private island in north Wales. He took it down after councillors warned that it breached planning regulations and could be dangerous.
now he’s in trouble again, this time after purposefully marooning his 12year-old son Jesse on a rock out at sea as part of a lifeboat training exercise. Grylls had intended to raise publicity for the local Welsh branch of the RnLI, of which he is an ambassador.
But Gareth Hughes-Jones, operations manager at the lifeboat station in Abersoch, declared that the exercise had given the RnLI ‘the wrong kind of publicity’ and had exposed Grylls’s boy to ‘an element of risk’. He added: ‘I certainly wouldn’t put my young son there — also, it could encourage people to do the same, which would be unfortunate.’
Unfortunate? Well, perhaps. But, at the risk of sounding frivolous when there are far too many stories about children in holiday accidents, I have to confess my sympathies are with Grylls rather than those pettifogging bureaucrats.
Surely if there’s one thing more hazardous to a child’s wellbeing than exposing them to risk, it’s surrounding them with so much cotton wool that they never grow up and experience what it truly means to be alive.
Last week, a report by the Policy Studies Institute at the University of Westminster revealed that British children are among the most overprotected in Europe, and that over-anxious ‘helicopter parents’ — so called because they constantly hover over their offspring — are stunting the development of their life skills.
Among those to deplore this modern trend is Springwatch presenter and mother- of- one Michaela Strachan, who believes that children now need to be taught how to enjoy themselves outdoors.
‘Re-wilding kids is something I think is really important,’ she says.
CERtAInLy the cocooned lives our children lead today are a far cry from those depicted in Enid Blyton’s Famous Five adventures or Arthur Ransome’s 1930 classic Swallows And Amazons.
the latter describes a now-unthinkable scenario in which a group of unsupervised children sail across a lake and camp alone on an island. In the 1974 Swallows And Amazons film, the children are depicted wantonly sailing without life jackets. today, ‘buoyancy aids’, as they’re pompously known, seem to be compulsory every time, everywhere, for everyone on water.
As for the father’s remarks in the book when his children ask permission for their adventure, they seem so remote as to belong to another universe: ‘ Better drowned than duffers, i f not duffers, won’t drown.’
By modern standards, his sentiments would be tantamount to child abuse and would probably involve a visit from social services, f ollowed by the compulsory adoption of his entire brood.
Back in the thirties, though, it would have seemed to many parents no more than plain common sense. What we now think of as intolerable risk, our forebears might have imagined to be basic life-training.
And I’ve always thought they had a point. As an ex-Scout from the era when every schoolboy was expected to carry a penknife as a matter of sacred honour, I deplore the fingerwagging joylessness of our modern health-and-safety tyranny.
that’s why, like Bear Grylls — only without the muscles, skills, or SAS training — I have made it one of my life missions to flout these tedious rules at any and every opportunity.
As my wife will testify, I’m a great fan of rapidly incoming tides — they lend such spice to an otherwise dull day exploring rock pools. I’ve lost count of the times we’ve been forced to wade back to safety.
I put bonfires in the same naughty but fun category: as a pyromaniac, it strikes me as quite wrong that my kids should be denied the pleasure of poking fires with red-hot sticks, writing their names in the air with sparklers, or letting loose the odd rocket. Better, surely, with ‘adult’ supervision than behind my back?
When I see a ‘no entry’ or ‘danger’ sign it’s a red rag to a bull. Obviously you have to draw the line somewhere — for me it’s a skull and the words ‘unexploded mines’ — but increasingly, and in Britain especially, these signs have less to do with protecting you from harm than they do with avoiding liability or stopping you having fun.
take our favourite swimming spot on the River Wye in Wales — it became immeasurably more exciting when the police blocked off the entry point and put up a sign which presumably (it was in Welsh) said: ‘Don’t swim here or you’ll die.’ the sign has been removed and none of us has yet drowned.
there’s a huge jump from a rock into a deep pool that continues to terrify, no matter how many times you do it. Every year, we use it to test the mettle of our children and their friends. the ones who chicken out generally don’t get invited back. Harsh, perhaps, but who wants their kids to hang out with wimps?
And I’m not the only one who thinks like this, clearly. Just the other day I had my first polo lesson: f our dads; f our 14- year- old daughters. It’s a fast, dangerous sport, but what delighted me was how little concern the fathers showed for the safety of their girls. All they cared about was winning.
But outsiders don’t seem to understand the importance of fatherly risk-taking. years ago, I was ticked off by a stranger in London because I’d encouraged my children to walk with me on a frozen pond. yes, in theory it was deadly dangerous. But I knew from boating there that the water was only knee-deep.
And this is one of the things our
mollycoddling culture wants us to forget: adults are generally capable of making informed risk assessments about what’s good for their own children. All blanket bans do is make us want to rebel.
For Bear Grylls — a man who has climbed Everest, served in special forces and run survival courses — having someone lecture you on what is and isn’t safe for your own children must be especially grating.
What worries me, too, is a nannyish trend that seeks to deny men one of their most important parenting roles. You see fathers following it instinctively: throwing fragile infants dangerously high in the air; swinging them in circles until it seems as if their arms will come off. Meanwhile, mothers look anxiously on, dying to intervene but usually resisting because they, too, recognise — consciously or unconsciously — that Dad’s job is to act the brainless idiot.
Without Mum, children might never be safe; but without Dad they’d be less exposed to the risk and adventure that help them explore boundaries. Or so I’ve always told my wife whenever I’ve committed some particularly heinous act of parental irresponsibility.
I’m sure for many fathers it’s just the same, which is why Bear Grylls has become our new patron saint.