Overprotected kids: How to let kids take risks

Good intentions gone bad
Ironically, the bogeyman isn't under nearly as many beds as he used to be. Thanks to public education and awareness, fewer Canadian kids die in accidents – 9.7 per 100,000 in the 1990s compared to 24.8 in the 1970s – and abductions by strangers dropped to a relatively rare 35 in 2002. "This is a safe world," comments Dr. Peter Marshall, a family counsellor in Barrie, Ont., and author of the international bestseller Now I Know Why Tigers Eat Their Young: Surviving a New Generation of Teenagers (Whitecap, 2007). "Of course there are tragedies, but Canada is remarkably safe."

So much for the good news. There is another set of statistics that has experts plenty worried. They reflect kids who are so hemmed in by efforts to protect them that they either rebel with risky behaviour or become overburdened by fear, and bounce from one incomplete educational or employment experience to the next. "We see the results all around us," says Ungar. "Children who don't leave home until their late 20s, but who don't contribute financially or emotionally to their families, either. A whole swath of our youth is feeling lost amid the sanitized, prescribed, regimented order of their too-safe upbringings."

Our kids aren't happy despite all we've done to keep them safe and close. Depression and anxiety now occur in nearly 14 per cent of children, according to the federal government's 2002 Well-Being of Canada’s Young Children Report. "I've been working with kids in jails, and I began to notice kids from great families, nice communities," says Ungar. "When you talked to them, they told stories about their own adventures that had deteriorated into delinquent acts. First, there was the risk-taking kind – 'I can risk my body with drinking or drugs. I can risk my life by driving underage.' As strange as these behaviours look to us, most of the young people I meet inside our institutions tell me stories of their risk-taking as behaviour that solved problems. It made them feel older."

Some responsibility
What they are craving, he adds, is a sense of responsibility. "I meet children who find delinquent means to feel responsible for themselves or others. These are kids who run away from home to try a night or two at a friend's house because they never get to be by themselves. I got a sense that the treatment options for these kids should include things like getting them a job, or giving them a chance to use a chainsaw, or going to a concert by themselves. What they're looking for is a rite of passage."

Getting a job? Going to a concert alone? Hardly earth-shattering to anyone born pre-1980, like Mike Canaday, a tough-minded Grade 8 teacher in Saskatoon who was raised by his widowed mother. "As a teacher, I see more and more social misfits because their parents do too much for them. My own kids make responsible decisions because we give them the leeway to do so. And if they make a bad decision, they lose a freedom," the 45-year-old says of the action-consequence approach he and wife Bernie take with their four boys, aged 11 to 17. Mike's oldest son knows, for example, that if he gets a speeding ticket, he pays the fine and loses his car privileges. The result is that the Canaday kids have a surprisingly long leash, and are happy with more responsibility than their peers.

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