As pointed out earlier, children are learning machines. They are designed to experience the physical world around them and learn from those experiences. But the adult instinct to protect them can produce deep worries in adults about catastrophes - children having terrible, life-scarring accidents. The result: a lot of over protection and a lot of forceful community advice-giving about how that protecting is to be done.
There are two important things to keep in mind about childhood:
In the Neolithic Village environment children experience lots of catastrophes. They and the community they are growing up in have no choice about this. One of the great blessings of the civilized environment is we have many more choices available to us, and one of those is to reduce in number and severity the risks that children face.
But along with this empowerment of the civilized world comes great responsibility: We now must make choices. And we need to do a lot of head-thinking in order to make good choices. Heart-thinking is well matched to the Neolithic environment, not the civilized one. If we use lots of heart-thinking while living in a civilized environment, we will make wasteful choices.
One of the places that needs good head-thinking concerns risk: How much and what kinds of risks are acceptable in child raising? The from-the-heart answer is: “That's easy! As little as possible!” But being from-the-heart that answer needs to be examined carefully. And I believe: It's not the right answer. We need to allow risk in child raising, and we need to be intelligent about it - we need to be thinking analytically about it.
An example is the evolution of seat belts and car seats for children. When I was a teenager in the 1960's seat belts were just being introduced. I didn't get into wearing those until I was doing the driving in the late 60's. Fast forward twenty years to when I was a parent with young children in the 1980's. We drove our family around in the “Snow Dragon”, a window van that had no seats in the back. Instead of seats we installed a carpet and put bean bag chairs in the back area. The entire family including the pets had lots of comfort and a variety of activities available on our hours-long vacation journeys around the Mountain West. If we tried to do this in the 2010's... Oh My!
Accompanied by statistics that claim seatbelts save children’s lives, what has happened here is an evolution in what the community considers to be safe for children, and no evolution in the feeling that what the community considers safe overrides what parents consider safe. This kind of forceful advice-giving dates to the Neolithic Village environment. And support for this feeling bolsters the long and forceful reach of state-level Child Protective Services organizations.
This is also an example of a circumstance dominated by from-the-heart-thinking, not analytic-thinking. And this means there is a lot of waste supported. One kind of waste is inconsistency. An example: These same communities that won't let children sit in a regular car seat still allow children to skateboard. It is ironic that the closest I have been to a much-feared catastrophe was a skateboard accident suffered in 2012 by the child of a friend. (Thanks to social media, I kept up on the child’s recovery, which was steady and good.) We force children into cocoons while in a car, but let them risk deep injury while skateboarding nearly unprotected down a hill. This is the kind of inconsistency from-the-heart-thinking supports. Head-thinking, on the other hand, would support either tolerance, and making both car seats and skateboarding a parental choice, or be uniformly prescriptive and prohibit skateboarding on long hills as well as enforce putting kids in cocoons in cars.
Part of the lesson plan that parents design for their children needs to be about exposing them to risks. If the exposure doesn't happen, then other kinds of lessons are learned in their place. As parents, and community members, those of us living in civilized environments have no choice: We have to decide how much and what kinds of risks we want our children exposed to. We have the power to say, “As little as possible.” And we can get dramatically close to that goal. But the child who experiences few risks will grow up to be a very different adult from the child who experiences many risks. They will think differently. They will have grown up in what is called a sheltered existence.
The alternative, and it is quite viable, is to schedule risk. Examples of these are sports, summer camping and Boy/Girl Scouts. I suggest that we need to expose our children to a lot more scheduled risk. When children don’t learn from exposure to risk, how do we teach them the lessons of life related to risk? How do we teach them to trust in themselves and find their places in the world around them? Kids need to learn their limits in the risk-taking areas, and we can use our analytical skills to improve this area of children’s lives as much as we do other areas.
The civilized world we live in has a dramatic effect on the risks we experience. It reduces them enormously. But risk is still a part of our lives. It must be experienced if we are to learn how to deal with it. As a result we as parents and teachers of children must accept and act on our responsibility to schedule risks into our children’s lives just as we schedule soccer and violin lessons. We need to be just as analytical about the kinds of risks and outcomes we are looking for. In other words, we need to let our heads be in charge of the scheduling, not our hearts. For that to happen, parents and community members must learn to break the panic-hold of catastrophe phobia - we need to recognize that some risk in our children’s lives is OK.
We also need to recognize that telling others how to raise their children is instinctive thinking. We need to apply tolerance, and apply a whole lot of head-thinking before we make prescriptive recommendations.