How Safe Is *Your* Neighbourhood? (Keeping Your Child Safe from the Outside World)

Member Name: karenuk

Product:	Keeping Your Child Safe from the Outside World
Date:	04/02/01 (19 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: teaches our children responsibility and useful skills

Disadvantages: worry, danger, fears

For the first few years of parenthood, keeping your child safe means watching for household hazards - ensuring hot cups of tea are out of your child's reach, that they can't find little things to swallow and that the medicines are stored safely out of reach of a climbing toddler.

Those things are difficult enough. I remember my eldest daughter falling off the bed as a baby, and my youngest cutting her leg open on the sharp side of a tea-chest. I shall probably feel guilty forever, but that was easy compared to the problems you find as they get older.

When my eldest daughter reached the age of eight and a half or so, we began encountering the most difficult issue so far - how to give your child a degree of independence, but still protect them from danger.

Of course, children need to experience the big bad world on their own, they can't always be sheltered and protected in an unreal cocoon kind of world.

There is no hard and fast rule on this. You have to decide for yourself, when your child is ready for their first taste of freedom, what form it will take and how your child will react to certain situations.

There is a huge difference between nipping to the shop for a pint of milk, if you live in the middle of nowhere to living in a quiet village. As parents, you need to be able to assess this logically. How far is the shop or friend's house? How many roads are there to cross? Does your child know what to do if the shop is closed, the friend is out or a stranger approaches in a car?

Luckily, my eldest is very sensible, calm and responsible. She has always been the sort to be trusted. The way my youngest is, I cannot see her being ready for that kind of independent excursion until she is older.
As always with kids, it is an individual thing.

My daughter was probably close to nine when we first let her out without us. Initially, some boys she knew would come round and a few of them woul
d walk round the streets nearby, calling at each one's house for drinks or to compare collections of Pokemon cards.

This developed over a period of six months or so, until my daughter was eventually allowed to go to the nearby shop to run errands - a couple of minutes away, only one road to cross and there is a zebra crossing and traffic lights to stop the cars.

She began to be allowed to pop round her friends' houses, if they were close enough and it was light out, not too late and so on. She was bought a mobile phone last year, so she could ring us if she was going to be late home for some reason or we could ring her, to check she was okay. People may criticise us for buying our daughter a mobile phone, but it is a sensible move, she is not allowed to chat to her friends for hours on it.

Children enjoy being given a bit of responsibility and being trusted to do something on their own. That is not to say I don't worry, because I always do, but hopefully it will ease in time. But then again, I can see myself being the sort of mother who stays up til 2am, waiting for her twenty year old daughter to get home safely from a nightclub!

Of course, the main worry we have for our children is what is called "stranger danger". Now we all know, deep down, the statistics prove road accidents are more likely and all good parents will remind their kids about road safety. We all have read shocking reports about child abuse being more likely to occur within families or with people we know.

So this fear of strangers is probably irrational, but it is also a worry and as long as we are not stupid about it, it is a good idea to teach your children about these dangers. It is no good to scare the wits out of them, so they don't want to leave your house.

We all know the names of Sarah Payne and Jamie Bulger and their horrific fates. No-one wants their children to be put in that kind of danger, but Sarah's
parents must have thought she was safe, out playing with her siblings near to home - and Jamie was out with his Mum, who just turned her back on him for a second in a shopping centre.

For the memories of these children, we must think, we must teach our kids some basic rules in safety, to protect them, but not turn out a generation of children who daren't walk out alone, who can't play in their own gardens, who lose the courtesy of saying "Good morning" to neighbours just in case...

Once again, it is a case of getting the balance right. Who ever said parenting was an easy job?

These days, we do not only have to worry about safety in the home, in the family and in the street, we also have to worry about safety in the school and in the World Wide Web.

I remember hearing about the shooting at the school in Dunblane. It is one of those events where I remember exactly where I was when I heard the news. I had to pick my daughter up from school afterwards and it was the first time I had ever felt scared for my child, while she was at school.

Perhaps it was simply naivete on my part, but until that day, I had assumed school was a safe place, where the worst problem might be playground bullying. Never did I contemplate the possibility that a man would walk into a school and shoot children, kill them in cold blood. Especially not in Britain.

It sounds over-dramatic, but it isn't - being a parent of a school-age child changed from that day. Not just emotionally either. If you look around you, you will notice the physical appearance of schools have changed. Barbed wire, intercoms, padlocks, CCTV, security measures stretch the already stretched school budget.

It is sad, but sensible. I feel happier knowing these measures might, hopefully, make my children safer. But what an awful development, schools taking on the characteristics of prisons, to protect our children - the most innocent strata o
f society.

Since the increase in home computers, the idea of "stranger danger" has also become a wider issue. If you ever let your children use the Internet, you need to be aware of this.

It is so easy for children to be trusting, to believe that "Tina, aged 8" who is emailing them or talking to them in a chat room, is REALLY an eight year old girl. They think she is, because she has told them she is - but they don't really know, it could be a forty year old male. You don't know, you can't see them, you are trusting them at their word.

You have to teach kids not to give out their address, phone number, school name or other individual information out over the Internet.

It is useful to screen any emails they may get. I opened a hotmail account for my eldest daughter and within days, she was receiving emails advertising sexual webpages. Read your child's emails or at least look through the headings in their inbox.

Personally, I do not let my children use chat rooms at all. You may think I am being over-cautious, but as the old cliche says, it's better to be safe than sorry.

Overall, it is difficult as a parent not to worry. We empathise with every parent of a missing child, we really feel for them. We must work together to protect our children, to take sensible precautions to keep them as safe as we can.

But, they must grow up, develop, learn to do things for themselves for the day they will leave home and make their own way in the world. We can only advise and lead the way.

The culture of fear exacerbated by the tabloid scaremongering is worrying, but it has to be taken in context. There are only a handful of children murdered every year in this country, which is why it makes the headlines.

Of course, each life is precious and should be protected. But the real danger will be when we become used to these tragedies, when we cease to feel each los
s in our hearts. The day - if it ever comes - when we do NOT become upset over an abduction or child murder, is the day when the reason for humanity's existence is thrown into question.

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