It’s common knowledge to sociologists and history students that childhood is a recent invention. While there have always been children they were, throughout much of history and in many cultures, considered reasonably expendable. If one child didn’t make it through the rigors of disease and deprivation, then a couple could always have another. It was a simple process to sire progeny, albeit the ‘bearing’ part had its risks for the mother. But, as in the case of children, there were always other women available for that capacity, too. It wasn’t that anybody wished their offspring ill, it was just that the odds against attaining adulthood at an earlier time were remote by modern standards. Read some Victorian literature, and you’ll find that kids were forever wasting away from some hideous affliction. That was when they weren’t being beaten, sent up chimney flues, only to get stuck and perish in the most miserable manner, or transported to the Antipodes for stealing a sticky-bun at Covent Garden Market.

A similar mortality rate for children persists today in much of the so-called Third World, and it renders us in the spoiled and affluent ‘West’ aghast, guilt-racked, and definitely wanting to change the channel when one of those starving kids ads comes on. How can a body enjoy the antics of the bratty yet cherubic youngsters on an inane sitcom when faced with a hollow-eyed urchin whose skeletal structure is so starkly delineated he could be used for an anatomy lesson in a medical school? Better to just not watch, and resolve to send ten bucks to Save the Children at the end of the tax year. How obscene it is that a major stress in our society is that the kids are eating too much bad stuff and are becoming little lard-asses.

In the third world -- much as in our own in times past -- it’s recognized that life is harsh and cheap, and there isn’t much that can be done to protect society’s frailest citizens. It’s Darwinian and it means only the fittest survive. It’s an indulgence only in affluent nations to protect society’s weaker members. In impoverished societies the attitude is, why waste the grub on somebody who’s going to go out before the age of 10. Let him or her die in the first year, and be done with it. We see that attitude as cruel. They see it as practical and even benevolent.

In North America, it wasn’t really until the end of World War Two that we truly began, at all social levels, to embrace childhood as something that must be cherished, cosseted and protected. Prior to that, while early 20th century kids weren’t as overtly abused and neglected as they had been in Victorian times, they still fell victim to childhood plagues, were too often physically and sexually abused, and were generally seen, once they reached a certain age, as cogs in the bread-winning machinery of the family. “Times are tough so, son, once you’ve finished eighth grade this year, get your ass down to the factory or the mine. If you can’t get a job there, then hit the road and keep going until you find one.” During the Depression of the 1930s, the result was hoboes, a few time-honored folk songs, and a goodly supply of cannon-fodder once World War II came about. Life for many, including the kids, was unremittingly awful. If you think ‘The Waltons’ conveyed a realistic portrait of West Virginia rural life in the Dirty Thirties, then you’re incurably naive, to say the least. The Walton clan lived better than many in West Virginia today. Read some James Agee, Erskine Caldwell or John Steinbeck for a more realistic overview of Depression-era rural poverty. The children in ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ were loved, but they were still expected to toil in the fields alongside the adults.

While the Depression-era ethic still exists in a few deprived enclaves of current society, such abject poverty and its consequent toll on children is alien to most of us. Kids we now believe must be protected and indulged, educated and prepared to take a respectable and honorable role in the new millennium. Nothing wrong with that per se. But, we seem also to have come to believe that in the name of protecting our kids, they must be perpetually interfered with. They cannot ever be left to their own-devices or kid-engineered sociology. Here’s an example of what I mean.

A few years ago my wife an I took an enchanting trip to the Cook Islands in the Polynesian South Pacific. While there we spent many hours of each day snorkeling in Muri Lagoon, a bit of liquid azure paradise that surrounds the island of Rarotonga. We’d spend hours each day down among the wrasses, butterfly fish, surgeon fish, big voracious jacks, coral and anemones.

While snorkeling one day, a thought struck me that of all of God’s creatures, those in the sea are probably the least interfered with by humans. Oh yes, we pollute the waters, and we have apprehended enough of some species that we’ve virtually or literally (in some cases) wiped them out, but what I’m suggesting is, the environment remains alien and hostile to us, except for periodic visits when we have diving or snorkeling equipment. Most of the time, however, the creatures of the coral reef are on their own. Not only are they on their own, they manage just fine without us being there. If between now and the end of time no human were to ever again venture under the water, it would make no difference whatsoever to the reef creatures. We humans are irrelevant to them. They do what they do, and we do what we do, and rarely do the twain meet.

I saw an analogous situation between the Rarotongan fish and the Rarotongan children, in that non-interference seemed to prevail in the raising of a group of what we saw as very happy kids. It was a common sight for us, as we travelled the one road that encircles the island, to be stuck behind a small motorbike, and on the motorbike would be Mom, and with Mom would be one or two kids -- some as young as three or four -- perilously hanging on while holding bags of groceries during the weaving journey. All were helmet-less, I might add.

In front of our condo there was a long jetty that thrust out into the waters of the lagoon. Regularly, after school was out, seven or eight kids, some very young, would come to dive from the jetty into the enticing waters of the lagoon. All very idyllic, except that at tide change, there was a fearsome current that ran through the canal and out through a nearby channel that flushed water into an open and tempestuous Pacific. The kids, unwatched by adults, were undaunted as they swam and dove.

We mentioned once to the charming Maori caretaker of the condo how treacherous the current seemed to be.

“Yes,” she said, showing absolute lack of concern, “You have to be careful.” That was it. No warning about not swimming at such times, or how lifejackets should be worn when plying the lagoon in the little kayaks that were available to guests. Indeed, I never saw a lifejacket there. All one needed to do to keep oneself safe was to “be careful.” It made a great deal of sense. It says, the call is yours, buddy.

Probably people drown on Rarotonga, and possibly the odd ufortunate falls off a motorbike onto his or her head, but we didn’t hear of any such incidents when we were there.

The sociology of kids during my childhood, and likely yours, was a bit like the Raroronga model. It was mainly about “be careful,” and then we were on our own. There was the adult world, and there was the kid world, and while both groups interacted at certain levels, when kids were left to their own devices, they carried on via their rules while, if they were sensible, heeding certain adult warnings. Otherwise, grown-ups were too busy to devote much time to interaction.

Today it distresses me to see how younger parents -- not to mention litigation-terrified society -- are no longer prepared to let the “be careful” dynamic run on its own.

If you look around, you’ll see cosseting of kids happening everywhere. Playgrounds are sterile and ‘safe’ places, and gone are the jungle-gyms and monkey-bars. It’s the ‘lawn-darts syndrome’ manifesting itself in the most bizarre ways. Remember lawn darts? Fun game for the family in the back-40 on a Sunday afternoon. Seems somebody thought somebody was going to put their eye out, or something equally ghastly, so the government outright banned them. Oddly enough, regular darts, with real sharp points, are still quite legal. Personally, I’d like to see that potentially-lethal croquet banned. Can you imagine what damage somebody could do with one of those mallets?

How about fireworks? What are the stats on fireworks deaths and injuries every year? Minuscule. Yet, many jurisdictions decided they were evil and dangerous and either restricted their use, or outright banned them. How sad that a generation of children will grow up never knowing the joy of blowing up cowflops like we once did.

So, there are rules and protections galore, despite the fact that our safety-obsession seems inconsistent. Masses of youngsters are killed and maimed on bicycles every year -- even with those dorky-looking helmets that are now mandatory -- and yet bikes aren’t outlawed. Kids are even permitted to play in traffic with them. Must be a powerful bicycle lobby out there.

Regardless, we work so hard to protect our youngsters from any pitfalls in life, both natural and unnatural, that we stand in jeopardy of making the coming generation suffer as a result of parental anality and wimpishness. We too will suffer as they go to make their way into a world for which they’re unprepared. How can they be prepared when we watch their every move, and redirect them to modes that more suit our whims of the day? Ultimately they’ll either rebel in a silly and dangerous manner, or they will be rendered too cowardly to be able to make any sensible decisions on their own.

Summer vacation when I was a kid played out this way: we took off in the morning and returned at bedtime. Sometimes we dropped around the homestead during the day for meals, or just to check in. Otherwise, my parents and other parents didn’t bother themselves excessively. Once we had proved we could swim, we would even head down to the lake on our own, to swim, play in the water and mess about on leaky old boats and rafts -- without a lifejacket in sight. I’m not suggesting it was right, I’m only reporting the tale as it was. And you know, not one kid in my neighborhood drowned.

The only time I recall being forbidden to go to the public beach on the other side of the lake was in the early 1950’s, when the polio scare was at its height. That was understandable, since infantile paralysis was a real and tangible threat. Most of us went to school with somebody in a leg-brace or with a withered arm, so we knew the parental warnings about not mixing with hot and steamy crowds on a summer’s day were well-founded.

Meanwhile, on summer days if we weren’t swimming, we played ball -- scrub sandlot baseball, with no adult-organized Little League stuff. We also played cowboys and Indians (probably no longer politically-correct either in sentiment or nomenclature), we played hide-and-seek, mumblety-peg (with real knives), or we sneaked off to the woods and boys and girls took off their underpants in front of each other and compared anatomical notes. No, we weren’t little sickos, we were just normal. If we had been caught we would have been at the very least tonguelashed. But no doctor playing kid was hauled off to a shrink to deal with his or her unresolved sexual issues. Nor was it ever suggested that such carnal precocity had any connection with sexual abuse by an elder. It was mainly a matter of ‘cut that stuff out’. The end result was that we learned to be more surreptitious, and carried on with the doctors and nurses stuff until we got bored with it, which was generally quite quickly.

Other than the schoolyard, we had no actual playgrounds around the essentially rural neighborhood in which I grew up. But, we did play some playground games, boys and girls alike. We played marbles and, if no other boys were around (games were more gender-specific then), we would even play hopscotch, jacks or double-Dutch skipping with the girls. Do kids do any of those things today, or are their lives so full with ballet, choir-practice, and Little League, that they are left no time? Do they even know how to do those things. Nobody taught us the rules for red-rover, we just knew them. The rules of play were an aspect of kid oral-tradition.

I don’t recall our lives being organized, other than Cubs, Boy Scouts, and music lessons. As for Cubs, the tiny-tyke para-military organization and I weren’t a good fit. I think I decided at about eight-and-a-half that I really wasn’t a joiner. Cubs seemed too much like school to me, and it was also my first exposure to officially sanctioned bullying by older boys. This wasn’t the way I wanted to spend a perfectly good Tuesday evening. So, Baden-Powell’s legacy and I parted company early on. I and the Cubs were both better for my departure.

I did take music lessons for a little while. It wasn’t pushed on me. I decided I wanted to learn to play the violin. I have absolutely no idea why. I never did learn to play, except at the most painful, rudimentary level. Today that old violin gathers dust in my garage.

My parents saw no budding Jascha Heifetz in me, and didn’t try to force me to become one. When I decided to give their ears a rest from my agonizing practicing, nothing was said about disappointment with their lapsed prodigy.

As far as protection and safety in the outer world were concerned, we were mainly told to look both ways when crossing the street; otherwise we were on our own. No parents came to pick up their kids after school, unless the kid had a dentist’s appointment. Most of us would have died of mortification to have had our mothers pony up to the school at leaving time, as I see them do today.

Maybe they feel they have reason. In their paranoid minds the neighborhoods are crawling with perverts and serial killers. It’s true, there are creeps who will prey on children. It’s scary, and if it were my child who was molested, I would have a difficult time adhering to the commandment that holds killing another human being to be a sin. But, creeps are reality. They always were.

There was an old man who lived up the street who we knew we must not visit because the bugger would have his hands all over one. Our parents didn’t tell us not to go there. They didn’t even know about him and his proclivities, and were horrified when I told them a few years later.

“But, he’s a friend of Mr. Bolger’s,” my mother sputtered. “Surely if he was a pervert, Mr. Bolger (a well-respected neighbor) would know.” Maybe this said more about Mr. Bolger and the company he kept than my parents wished to countenance.

Anyway, we knew via the juvenile grapevine that the guy was a pervert. Later, when I was in high school a few delinquents worked him over pretty well one night. He moved shortly thereafter.

With all of the protectiveness afoot today, there is an anomaly. If the world our children have to enter is going to be tough -- and it will be -- how are we doing them a favor by both pampering, and overprotecting them? What we seem to be doing, in the guise of protecting them, is projecting our own worst fears onto them. They will enter adulthood as paranoid worriers who foresee doom about to befall them at every turn. There’s a difference between prudence and paranoia; an important one. Prudence is an intellectual process that suggests that actions have consequences, and if we exercise appropriate judgment, we will escape from a potentially dangerous situation unscathed. Prudence suggests that if we don’t exercise caution and skill on a sleet-slicked street in winter, we may end up impaled on the lethal end of a semi.

Of course, it could happen that we’ll smack the semi anyway, regardless of what precautions we take. That suggests we should have exercised the judgment to not be on the street in the first place. It also makes us a victim of the cosmic crapshoot. Shit happens.

But, if we lie awake at nights agonizing over our worst fears over what ‘might’ happen, then we’re indulging paranoia. When we appear in a state of chronic worry around our children, we’re inculcating the same paranoid attitudes in them.

I live in an earthquake zone. Not as bad as San Francisco, but quakes and tremors do happen here with some regularity. I don’t give it much thought. If it happens, it happens, and I’ll worry about the damage -- if I’m still around to worry about the damage -- when the time comes.

A news item I happened upon told of a case of parents who had pulled their kids out of an older elementary school, because the school (which is about a century old), had not been seismically upgraded, so their youngsters were at peril -- so went the parental wisdom. OK, they had run the course of beseeching authorities to, at great expense, bring the school to standard. Fair enough. But pulling their children from the school because they believed them to be at risk, not fair enough. They are telling their kids that the sky is likely to fall, and they must agonize with fear about a remote possibility. They are also telling other parents that they are irresponsible because they’re leaving their children in the classrooms. They’re in effect telling the school authorities that they don’t give enough of a damn about their kids. And finally, they’re telling themselves they have done a fine job as parents by telling their children they must run away from all potential dangers.

OK. It was their choice. My only thought is, the school has been around for nearly a century. There have been many quakes and tremors over those years. The school is still standing quite nicely.

When you and I were growing up we were, in truth, more protected and pampered than our parents were in their upbringing (my father was beaten for talking at the dinner table), but generally we were left on our own, and encouraged to find out some of the grimmer facts of life the hard way. That, to me, was a good thing. It eased us into some of the more distasteful areas of life in stages.

I believe that there is only one area in which a parent must protect a kid. They must protect their offspring from the truth about what adult life is really like. Parents should keep some of the real facts of life to themselves, and let the kids find out naturally, and in their own time. It’s called protection of innocence. If you sit your 12 or 14-year-old down to tell it like it is, the kid won’t be able to handle it. My adult life hasn’t been singularly horrible. In fact, it has been blessed in a number of areas, but if somebody told me when I was young abut some of the situations I was going to have to face at different stages of my adulthood, I think I’d have jumped off a bridge.

My juvenile view of what my life was going to be like was linear and blandly pleasant, in a ‘Leave it to Beaver’ kind of way. I was going to finish my education and qualify for a good professional career. After university, I was going to settle down with a pretty little wife, have a fine job, get a fine house and big new car, raise a couple of kids who would cavort with an adorable golden retriever and my days would be serene and basically happy.

In my projected world there would be no divorces, no abandonment, no illnesses, no fights, no fears, no hospitals, no jail, no sexual philandering, no too-hungover-to-work Monday mornings, no wars, no terrorist attacks, and no sadness in the soul. It didn’t work out that way. In retrospect I’m glad it didn’t work out that way, despite the glitches along life’s road. You probably feel the same.

So, what are we doing with a society that is almost obsessive in its drive to protect our young from the big, bad whatever it is out there? Let them develop their own armor against adversity. They will have adversity. The world is not a place for sissies.

I don’t make light of the impulse to protect. It’s a parental imperative. During my brief stint as a parent, I wanted to wrap my adolescent stepdaughter in cotton batting and send her to her room until she was 30. I didn’t want anybody to hurt her, and I was prepared to sit outside the house with a shotgun just to make certain nobody did. I denied the fact that our marital distress was doing more to hurt her than most outsiders could. Indeed, it’s testament to her fortitude as an individual, a loving mother, and a lot of character, that she was able to surmount, and still get on with her life as a functional human being.

And it was indeed the weapons at her disposal and that helped her. If you want your kids to be as safe as possible as they venture into adulthood, then arm them “against a sea of troubles.”

What is the arsenal they need?

• education: too many educational theorists are left-wing poltroons bent on stifling competition in the classroom or on the playing field, offering the disingenuous assertion that competition is ‘exclusionary’ and cruel, while their real agenda is socialist railing against anything smacking of Darwinian libertarianism. It was in my senior history class that I learned from a teacher who philosophically sat to the left of Stalin that Ayn Rand was some sort of a cross between Hitler and Dracula, so evil were her thoughts. Frankly I think she’s a tedious and boring writer, but he was determined we weren’t to be gulled by her thoughts. Is this preparing kids for a brutally competitive world? That was, relatively speaking, 300 years ago. Think of the socialist palaver your kids are being inundated with today by a certain ilk of teacher.
  
  Despite the bias of the trade, education is essential, and so is excelling. If your child does not have an academic bent, then get him or her into a certified trade. This is a wonderful route to take. There is a significant North American shortage of skilled tradespeople, and that will become more pronounced as the elders in the trades retire. Remember, if you’re seeking to be looked after in your old age (which isn’t too far down the road, I’m sorry to suggest), most trades pay a hell of a lot better than a lot of professions. Whatever the case, don’t send your kids into the world without something marketable to fall back upon.
   
• street smarts: when they were very young they were possibly told that “cheaters never prosper.” Unfortunately, that’s a lie. If cheaters didn’t prosper, there wouldn’t be a crime industry. I’m not suggesting you teach little Wendel or Natasha to become a professional grifter, what I’m advising instead is that the weasels are out there and your kids, as honest citizens, should become well-versed as to how they operate, and learn how to thwart them by having some old-fashioned common-sense. If they never learn any other Latin phrase, lay ‘caveat emptor’ on them.
  
• tell them to choose friends wisely: that’s what Mom told you, right? Well, she was correct. So teach your kids the same thing. It’s a time-honored adage in the addictions recovery business to advise a client that he or she should choose new playmates and a new playground, otherwise the bastards will drag you right back to where you were when you got into trouble. If you hang out with winners, the likelihood of you becoming a winner multiplies amazingly.
   
• advise being judicious in substance use: according to statistics, young people are hitting the sauce and partying at a higher level than they did a decade ago. That’s unfortunate. Not because it’s evil to have a few snifters after completing a tough job, but because it can sometimes get ahead of the individual and leave him or her more vulnerable to being shoved aside. As far as cocaine is concerned, there is a reason why it’s illegal. It’s such a nasty drug for some poor souls that it makes heroin seem like a nice cup of hot tea. Pot? That’s up to the individual. Just advise them that the THC level now is intolerably high, and if they are going to continue vying for success, they’ll need most of the brain-cells at their disposal. Pot hardly enhances clear and logical thinking.
  
• teach them that love is a two-way street: if they’re looking for love in all the wrong places -- like maybe you did -- they might enjoy the trip for while, but eventually learning to give love as well as take makes up for a great deal of heartache along the way.
   
• exhort them to be honest: honesty breeds trust, and trust breeds success in virtually all areas of life. Watch a TV show or movie with them, and point out the number of times people get screwed just by being dishonest.
   
• Safe sex always: No sex is preferable to risky sex. Even if it means being wrapped up in cello-wrap, there are too many things out there that can kill a person. We were lucky. We could go at it like animals in heat, and the most we had to worry about was crabs or a dose of clap, which could be wiped out with penicillin. Now the pubic woods are crawling with unpleasantness. You can die young, or lead a life of misery. Hardly worth it for a bit of the strange stuff without precautions being taken.
   
• if they fuck up, tell them to take their lumps: If a kid runs afoul of the law, by his own doing, he should accept the responsibility. Too many parents buy into the game of trying to blame someone or something else for the inappropriate behavior of their kid. Even our legal system oozes with false mitigation for juvenile misbehavior.
   
  “We didn’t have a problem with juvenile delinquency when I started in the force,” an old cop once told me. “If a kid screwed up, we took him out back and ‘talked to him’, and that was the end of the problem. He may have walked with a limp for a week, but we didn’t get him back. If we didn’t do that, we took him home in the squad car. Marched him to the door. Then let his old man deal with him. Again, we didn’t see him come back through our door. It didn’t always work, but it worked a hell of a lot better than what we’re seeing today.”

There is so much more, but this isn’t an exercise in parental guidance. It’s more of a manifesto to liberate our children and let them be the best they can be in a sometimes brutal world. If you have been angered by a soft and overly-protective society, you can at least make sure you don’t have a role to play in perpetuating the madness.

Email Ian Lidster