Childhood dangers: then and now

An increasing number of children are breaking their arms in the playground, according to a report issued in late July that calls for park equipment to be reduced to a safer size. Last week millions of toys had to be recalled because they contained lead that could poison children.

A report on accidents in New South Wales playgrounds found the rate that children were admitted to hospital jumped by 56 per cent between 1993 and 2004.

The review found there were almost 17,000 hospitalisations following playground falls in children under 15. This was a rate of 106 incidents for every 100,000 children. Children aged five to nine years had the highest rate of falls. Many were boys: there were almost 200 hospital visits for every 100,000 children.

What happened in earlier generations? When they weren’t asleep, in school, or playing sport, children did household tasks. There was a clear demarcation by gender, as I found when doing research for my book Fathers, Sons and Lovers. “Boys worked outside, girls worked inside” was the summary given by the men and women I spoke to about growing up in the era before 1970. Boys were simply junior workers on the family farm. They might do any of dozens of tasks: such as bring in the cows from across the swamp. Or prepare the sheep for shearing. Or act in dad’s place when he had to go away.

Fathers would generally show boys how to use hammers, saws, and chisels and often gave them some pointers for playing organised sport. But accidents did happen and it was clearly difficult getting kids to hospital, such as they were in those times. People had to know how to fix a sprained ankle or backache or even a broken limb - until medical assistance could be found, if at all.

Older brothers and sisters acted as parents. So did grand-dads and grand-mums. We are mostly living longer these days, but most of the grand-dads don’t last terribly long and the older grand-mums are in nursing homes. (Go and see for yourself!)

Girls helped in the kitchen, did the laundry, and would help out in the fields at harvest time. Here too, there were many chores and frequent accidents.

Even boys who grew up in the suburbs, as I did, did a range of tasks. I fed the chooks for many years. I helped in the garden and mowed lawns. My sisters cooked and cleaned. You came home from school and work started. I often had to do shopping - what my mother still calls, for some mysterious reason, “doing the messages”. Something could go wrong and often it did. I burnt myself one day putting the kettle on - without any water in it.

So much for chores - what about play? We played in the local park, and had many adventures. One day my sister came home chewing gum. “It’s OK, mum” she said “we found it in the park under the seat. But Peter Carpenter chewed it first.” My mother was horrified.

We walked to and from school, unless school was more than a couple of miles away. I often had interesting conversations with people and animals I met along the way. Several of us in the family roamed around the suburb: on one occasion I was dragged home by an irate brother after wandering three suburbs away. I walked along a fence and opened my legs as I fell on it. Ouch! Once I was brought home bleeding in a truck after I rode really fast down a hill on my bike, only to find that the street stopped dead at the bottom of the hill. So did I.

Sometimes we fought in the back of the car: five children in the back of a Holden were bound to argue about whose elbows were digging into whom. So my father (formerly a sergeant major) would make us all walk a mile or two up the road. We awful boys would amuse ourselves stirring up bull-ants and trying to lure each other onto the nest. Or teasing our sisters until they cried.

Maybe children were tougher in those days. We used to hear every day about bleeding Catholics: Saint Whatsit died because of a rain of arrows. Saint Thingammy was burned alive.  Lions chewed off the limbs of Christians, who sang hymns as they went bit by bit down the lion’s throat. Some crazy woman in France developed stigmata and her hands would bleed when the moon changed.

We said a bizarre prayer asking Our Lady to pray for us as we rolled around in pain, “mourning and weeping in this valley of tears”. Nuns and brothers would whack us with the cane for various imagined misdemeanours. We would compare our beaten hands and show our scars. Maybe we thought that was the way life was meant to be, martyred and copiously bleeding. Meanwhile in state schools children heard about explorers like Cook hacked to death by barbarous savages.

Today the streets are full of danger, as any decent parent knows. Every man is a suspected child molester. I said “Hi” to a child in the street next to mine and before he could reply his mother yelled “John! I told you NOT to speak to strange men!” And so we get the helicopter parents who hover around their little darlings. At private schools near me, parents queue up in their massive four-wheel drives to pick up their precious Samantha and Jared. On the weekend, parents take the children to football or netball matches halfway across our capital cities. They are big cities, and the drive can take an hour or more.

Some parents spend the afternoon in the pub or club. I spoke to one man whose father locked all the children out of the house when he went to work at 7am. He took better care of the greyhounds than he did of his own children. Some parents would make anyone wonder about humanity. Many dads are so busy driving to and from work or attending meetings that they don’t get around to showing boys how to use tools safely. And mums - are they busy balancing work, household chores, supervising the children, let alone keeping a partner happy? Don’t even ask!

And we hear of parents who want to keep the child indoors. The child returns from school, at which teachers are scared to touch any child for fear of accusation (I do not mean to make light of actual sexual abuse, which is a serious matter). The carer parent (possibly a mother) sets the child down with his or her afternoon tea and the child dawdles through some homework before looking at YouTube or Googling the name of the starlet they heard about at lunch.

And so Jamie or Melissa learn all about the latest doings of “love rat” Tattooed Mick, or the escapade of Billy Joe in yet another nightclub. The child may be technically safe while someone attends a late meeting or cooks up a gourmet meal, but children might be safer playing on the footpath than leering at some lurid photos taken in a love nest in the Caribbean; or talking to unsavoury people in another country who are pretending to be interested in their problems. There are some scary people out there preying on children.

And all the time we parents are tortured by guilt. We are not good mothers; or we are neglectful fathers.

It’s interesting that when I ask women what’s the worst thing I can call them, the answer is usually a bad mother or sometimes a slut. For men it’s “wuss” or “poofter”. The media always need new villains and victims. A “bad mother” will do nicely as a villain; or maybe a father who hit his child. We can’t seem to distinguish any more between a careful slap and wholesale beating. Will parents never again be able to give a child a considered physical punishment?

I recall my mum saying that when children were raised in houses which had fires, the well-tried remedy was to make sure that each child got a small burn so that it learnt very quickly what fire was. Imagine anyone even saying that today! Nobody is free from the pious accusations that the media bring against bad parents. As if they really cared!

So where do parents turn today to find out what their parents taught them - how to raise children safely? There are best-selling books on how to raise boys. A friend’s son found such a book and the boy said indignantly “What’s this doing in the house? Doesn’t she know how to raise children?” And we have Brat Camp TV shows and Nanny who knows best. Back to the media again.  Are we seriously going to raise our children by the crackpot ideas we find in  the media? Far better to lean on the wisdom of earlier generations, surely.

And you know, children grow up somehow. I’ve seen them playing much the same games in Brazil and France and Germany. Usually the boys run around and yell while the girls sit down and have in-depth conversations, but children come in all shapes and types. I’ve spoken to children in poorer countries like Peru who get about two hours of schooling a day and spend the rest of the day working. Some children are still exploited by parents for gain.

The miracle is that so many children manage to laugh, have fun and grow up. And then they can annoy the hell out of us poor old parents. “Oh God, dad, you’re not going to put THAT on!”

We can’t keep our children under glass. All we can do is try to protect them from some of the nasties. The rest is up to fate.