Today's News

I have taken to watching the morning news (before I go to school) and noting down how much children are mentioned in the news for various reasons, just to see what the "publicity" surrounding children actually is. (“They” refers to the news program)

Monday 29th October:

Are children too "over protected"?

A debate on this morning’s news as to whether we, in society, are too protective of today’s children? It stated that maybe we just perceive the world as being more dangerous than the world used to be. That most of the fear has come from scaremongers, and that children are losing their freedom. For example abductions are no more common today than they were 30 years ago or even 60 years ago.

(They then follow this story by saying that a serious offence involving knives occurs every 24 minutes. That in the past three months there has been 5,500 incidents involving knives. This was shortly followed by a story on GAP clothing, where some of their lines have used child labour to produce the clothing…)

People were interviewed on the street, most agreed that we are too protective of our children, whilst one woman commented that although she agreed she would too, be over protective of her children. You only have to look at the Madeleine McCann or Jamie Bulger tragedies to realise that maybe we aren’t being protective enough, even if society hasn’t really changed.

They commented on the fact that we should be making society more accessible to children for example their freedom to use public transport (by emailing in…using ICT people could comment!!). But (for example in the Madeleine McCann instance) people are too quick to turn on the parents, to blame them, and maybe it isn’t always their fault, but can you ever really know? Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells had the freedom at age 10, they went out together during the day and that was the last day they saw… An expert on the news suggested that age 10 was approximately the appropriate age that children could be granted more freedom, but as many parents tell their children, “I trust you, but it is everyone else out there I don’t trust” and don’t you think Holly and Jessica’s parents wish they had been more protective?

They said that society/parents and schools should work together to be less protective over the children in today’s world, but can we really take that risk? If a school was more relaxed, maybe they weren’t as strict about checking who were picking the children up and making sure they knew the families, but in that case who would get the blame if anything happened? The school. And there would be distraught parents, quite rightly. But the most important thing is that there would be children with their lives in danger…for what? Just so a child could have the freedom to walk home from school? Is it really worth it? Should we risk the safety of our children?