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A dangerous life
By ella | May 18, 2007
When my husband was two years old he fell off the top of a removal van while his parents were busy packing boxes and supervising the move rather than their son. He was, by sheer luck, perfectly fine after his fall but you’d have thought that this might have alerted his parents to his daredevil ways. Unfortunately when he was six he fell over the top of the banisters at the top of the stairs and was in a coma for a few days. Then as a teenager he fell out of a tree and broke his leg right up to the hip.
When my father was a boy he, among other dangerous things, broke his right arm twice, the legacy of which is that he can only bowl with his left arm. As a boy, learning the skills of cricket clearly took precendence over learning the skill of writing as his right-handedness seems otherwise unaffected.
My brother, among other dangerous things, fell down a manhole in the road. He escaped any broken bones because - as he now says in a rather supercilious tone of voice, as if this is what saved him - he had been enacting war scenes only a few hours before and had been practicing how to roll after hitting the ground when parachuting in behind enemy lines.
Before Matthew and I had children we used to joke how I was certain to have four boys (boys run throughout my father’s side of the family - so much so that I was the first girl for years) and how I would therefore be in and out of Accident and Emergency. Oh, how we laughed and laughed!
I now have three small boys. I’m thinking we’ll have another baby at some point so I will have, before long, those four boys. So far we have not had any major escapades resulting in trips to the emergency room, although I am careful to watch all of them when removal vans are around, mindful that they have their father’s genes. Okay, I admit it, I have been a little over-protective. When I tell you we have five safety gates up in our house you might realise just how over-protective. (Although sometimes the gate is to protect me from them.)
However, in my defence, I have actively encouraged a bit of danger as they have got older. We own two copies of The Dangerous Book for Boys and we thumb through the pages regularly. Not only does it provide everything they need to know to enjoy a typical boyhood - although I’m not certain every boy really needs to know how to skin a rabbit - but it also contains information that will hopefully encourage them to read for themselves. A bit like the Oh Yuck!: The Encyclopedia of Everything Nasty that I bought my sons recently.
Harry is now five and William almost four and although I don’t let them play out on the street - even though other local children do - I am happy for them to go out and get covered in mud, I am happy for them to play in the field behind our house, to make things, to be naughty and energetic. The decline in learning standards in this country has been directly linked to the time when active play was taken off the curriculum for five and six year olds. Children need to play. And in our over-protective world, children also need to play a little bit dangerously. I keep them away from traffic, I keep my eye on them (perhaps a little bit more after the abduction of Madeleine McCann), I don’t let them jump on trampolines without safety nets and I will not let them harm any living thing. But those are about my boundaries.
As they get older I will let them take more risks. It will be frightening as a mother to do so, but I know how necessary it is to let them experience more than our backyard. I have already started teaching them about stranger danger and who they should, or more importantly shouldn’t, approach if they are lost or on their own. I am doing my best to prepare them to have a little bit of danger in their lives that many children don’t have now because of fear of something terrible happening to them.
But I have put up a big board at the top of the stairs to stop them throwing themselves over the banisters. Because, despite their protestations to the opposite, that’s not the kind of danger I want them looking for.
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And if our next child is a girl? Well, she’ll probably be out there with her brothers, skinning rabbits and climbing taller trees than all her older brothers. The Dangerous Book for Boys is not exclusively for boys. The authors wrote it for boys because that’s what they know. I write about mothering because that’s what I know - it doesn’t mean fathers aren’t welcome here. Having said that I’m sure The Dangerous Book for Girls will be out before long if the publishers have any sense although I’m equally sure that much of the same information could be in it.
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This post was written as part of the MotherTalk Blog Bonanza for Dangerous Book for Boys.
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Hi, I really enjoyed this post and I will have to get a copy of the book to see what all the fuss is about. Everyone seems to be talking about it at the moment.
Oh yes, should you have a girl she will most certainly be following her big brothers about, getting into all kinds of mischief and mayhem. Just a few minutes ago I was watching Sofia and David “ninja” kicking one another. Luckily her big brother has a good sense of restraint when it comes to his little sister!
What is it, yes, that makes boys take those risks? Your trip sounds wonderful to Italy… and homeschooling is a challenge. It seems like children today are protected from everything more so than when we were young… at least in the US.
You think they can “learn by doing” but then you have the latest brain studies showing that they can’t extrapolate the effects of their actions until mid-20s. So how do you teach how to think about consequences….
Risks. Raising children is a risky thing, I think.