Submerged rocks or safety warnings: where's the real danger for coddled iGen?
As a young Thor braves the bus stop, safetyism lies in wait.
On my morning walk I often see a boy/man get out of his mother's SUV and walk 20 metres to where he leans on a pole and puts his face in his phone and waits for his school bus. I guess he's in year 12. Anyway he's as big and blond as a Hemsworth, and more muscular than any Australian soldier who shipped off to either world war.
His mother sits waiting in her car, 10 minutes, 15, until the bus arrives and he's safely boarded and on his way to school. Because, you know, given a quarter hour alone on a bayside street, the Wehrmacht might get up an ad hoc blitzkrieg against this Thor that would need to be repulsed by a good ticking off from a shrink-wrapped hausfrau.
Daily I fight the urge to kick him in the arse and tell him to lose his mum. Given his immortality and invulnerability is it, legally speaking, assault for a baby-boomer to kick a Nordic god in the bum?
Instead I walk on to the beach, dutifully reading the many warning signs that keep me alive. Submerged Rocks, Variable Depth, No Flags = No Swim, Dangerous Currents, Slippery Area, Strong Tides, Swooping Birds, Ivan Milats, Marine Creatures, Gravity, Lightning, Existential Dilemmas. Yes, my council warns me that depths vary in a bay.
On a recent morning there was a school surf carnival, and fluttering on the beach were Life Saving Victoria flags that said NEVER SWIM ALONE. Never partake in the valuable experience of aloneness, spontaneity, risk, autonomy? What gross timidity. There is not a law prohibiting the lone dip yet. I checked. But tick-bloody-tock is my guess on that. The culture of Safetyism is here.
Are kids ever alone now? Outside and away alone, I mean? Proper alone. The Thor whose mum sits bodyguard while he waits for his school's bus? Has he ever been allowed to catch a train to Seymour?
Let me tell you of an extraordinary machine I owned when I was a kid. It was called a bike. Mine was a second-hand, low-tech Tardis. I'd get on it and after 20 pumps of the pedals I'd cross a border into another country, adult-free and exotic because of that. The river bush, the empty blocks, the alleys and sporting fields, places where Fly Lords ruled briefly before being usurped by other aspire-ants.
It was a wholly different reality, and it made you adult by default. You had to make your own rules. And making your own rules is a powerful education in risk, politics, fairness, empathy, error and forgiveness. Whereas never being alone makes you helpless, it flips your default setting from "I have to work out how to solve this problem" to "I need a third party authority, someone in loco parentis".
By any measurable standard Australia has been getting safer for children for decades, but the tyranny of safetyism has captured the parents and the parents have captured the kids, keeping them close-by, surveilled in a supermax of safety.
In their new book The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff cite Peter Gray, a leading researcher of play, who notes the "tendency of kids to introduce risk and danger into free play ... they seem to be dosing themselves with moderate degrees of fear, as if deliberately learning how to deal with both the physical and emotional challenges ..." He notes that iGen are being systematically deprived of opportunities to dose themselves with risk.
Haidt and Lukianoff take the observation further, noting that safety used to mean from physical harm. But the concept has crept outward until people now talk about being kept safe from ideas. There is now a notion at universities that students are traumatised by ideas.
"A culture that allows the concept of 'safety' to creep so far that it equates emotional discomfort with physical danger is a culture that encourages people to systematically protect one another from the very experiences embedded in daily life that they need in order to become strong and healthy."
Daily I fight the urge to kick him in the arse and tell him to lose his mum.
Yes. A person who has never heard contrary or objectionable ideas is a person who is unprepared for them and more likely to catastrophise them when he or she does hear them. Is more prone to call words violence. And anyone who can categorise words as violence can rebuff words with violence while calling it an act of self-defence. But ideas are slippery areas with strong tides and submerged rocks. Variable Depths might be safely assumed.