It’s almost a decade since Sir Digby Jones, then head of the Confederation of British Industry, identified an emerging threat to capitalism.
“If we never took a risk our children would not learn to walk, climb stairs, ride a bicycle or swim. Business would not develop innovative new products, move into new markets and create wealth for all.”
Those remarks, made weeks after Sir Digby had been made “Skills’ Tsar” by Gordon Brown, have more than a whiff of the reductio ad absurdum about them, not least since Sir Digby is childless. It is a commonplace to lament the rise of ‘cotton wool kids’ and, more recently, Generation Snowflake. But linking that phenomenon to a curbing of the animal spirits of enterprise – really?
We can hypothesize that facing down danger in childhood predisposes a grown-up to a mindset apt to the calculated gambles business success in adulthood requires. But where’s the evidence?
Anyway, if you’re an accountant or an internet start-up geek making her first million, why did you need to have an air rifle, mad pony or dilapidated climbing frame held together with rusty nails as a youngster?
Well, maybe we’ll have to wait. The pin-up boys of enterprise exhort us to speculate to accumulate, to live by the mantra – no risk, no reward – but the truth is that times were tougher when many of today’s Titans were in short trousers.
A British study quoted in an article by the Independent suggests that in the 1970s, when Richard Branson was flunking out of school, 86 per cent of children between the ages of seven and 11 went to school without an adult. That proportion fell to a quarter in 2010.
And what about those Kings of Silicon Valley? What’s risky about coding? Nothing, except that there often seems more than a little grit in the oyster in the back-story of those who make it big. I’m not saying Elon Musk would not have co-founded PayPal were it not for the beatings he took and learned to dodge as a boy at school. But they didn’t hold him back, right?
So, if we accept that an occasional frisson of peril puts some iron in the soul, how can parents calibrate risk and reward? It’s one thing to talk about the necessity of hazard in the character formation of our little loved ones. But doing it – there’s the rub.
It might help us tilt the ledger towards risk if we knew that allowing for some potential mishaps was, in and of itself, a good thing. Here we turn to the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.
A recent study in it suggested that a child’s self-esteem rose, and their susceptibility to drug abuse in adolescence fell, if that child was allowed ‘risky play’. The authors defined such play as things like jumping from a height, cycling quickly down a hill, playing with knives or near water.
How are you when it comes to unfettered knife play? Thought so. Nice, slightly-controlling, middle class parents like us are all for Little Johnny and Jemima roaming wild near the cliff edge until we have to explain to A&E (and social services) what went wrong.
It might help if we consider this from the perspective of an insurance actuary. Two big cohorts of children in New Zealand showed how safe a lot of unstructured play actually now is. Over a two and a half year period there was not a single head or spine fracture among 31,000 Kiwi kids who used playgrounds.
So-called ‘stranger danger’ is another example of misplaced anxiety. The British sociologist Frank Furedi explores this in depth in his seminal bookParanoid Parenting. His contention, that we needlessly keep our children indoors, is supported by a recent Canadian report. It found that four-fifths of parents of 10- to 12-year-olds were worried about their child being abducted by a stranger. In reality, the odds of such a terrifying event are one in 14 million.
I explored some of these questions in a pamphlet I wrote for the think-tank, Civitas, published in 2013. Like all wonks who believe they have stumbled across the Holy Grail of an area of public policy ripe for illumination, I argued that business needed to take the influence of childhood more seriously. The experience of growing up was changing, and business culture – from boardroom to shop-floor – was not immune to the knock-on effect of those evolutions.
And what of my own brood? Within the laboratory of my own family home, how has the theory of free range parenting bumped up against the reality?
In a sense, my wife and I have ducked the choice. We have half a dozen children, ranging in age from 6 to 17. There have been kicks and falls from ponies, bruises from rugby tackles and cricket balls. We have encouraged risky pastimes.
But, most of all, our brood has learned to manage risk because – with so many of them – we cannot do it for them. I don’t know if any of them will flourish in business. I do know that helicopter parenting is not an option when you are outnumbered 3 to 1.
