It started with the morning walk. As I’ve written here before, we are extremely lucky in that our house is about two minutes from the school gates. I usually leave Daughter Number Four down to it: hand in hand, chatting about whatever comes into our minds. But over the past year, a recurring theme has been for her to ask when she would be allowed to make this walk by herself. She is 8½, after all: and there seem to be plenty of other kids around the same size as her doing it already.
My answer is always a non-answer: we’ll see, or we’ll know when the time is right. Or I change the subject altogether, fearful that she’ll ask what age I was when my parents allowed me out by myself.
I have no idea when that happened, and I certainly don’t think there was any formality to the process, a point at which they sat me down, warned me about roads and taking sweets from strangers and then let me out to play. Such as it is, my memory is that it happened organically, mostly because all the other kids were outside already. But my best guess is that it was around the age my daughter is now. Perhaps even younger.
[ Seán Moncrieff: Things in Ireland have got better. So why doesn’t it feel better?Opens in new window ]
You may well have had a similar experience: you left the house to play with your friends, without a mobile phone or even a watch, yet you’d still have a dull sense of when was the right time to return home. More or less. I can remember getting “where have you been until this hour?”, but my sense is that it didn’t come out of worry. More like annoyance. They hadn’t assumed that I’d been hit by a car or kidnapped into one. They were annoyed because my dinner had gone cold.
Kids’ lives are being constrained by their parents’ fears
Why is everyone lugging huge water bottles about? Perhaps I’m gifted with an astonishing ability to resist thirst
Misogyny is not wired into our DNA – it is something to be overcome
Too often our emotions – anger, frustration, fear – propel us to search for ‘facts’ to fit how we are feeling
I’m not a huge fan of mythologising the past. Declaring that things used to be better is a statement usually tainted with highly selective nostalgia. Yet – here we go – in this specific sense, kids having the freedom to just go out to play is better than the driving-them-to-playdates model: and for a range of reasons too obvious (I would hope) to have to explain.
Obviously, individual circumstances are a factor. But not withstanding that, it’s arguable that many kids are constrained in their lives by parental fear.
Where we live is a warren of residential streets. Cars don’t speed and people say hello to each other. There’s a park five minutes’ walk away. And we’d all noticed how many kids there were on the pavements this summer: mostly making their way to or back from the park. Daughter Number Four had noticed it too. She has a friend who lives right beside that park.
It was like these circumstances were conspiring to ask us a question: one that we were reluctant to answer. What were we scared of? Take your pick: any one of a number of doomsday scenarios. That they were, for the most part, wildly unlikely didn’t matter. Our fear overwhelmed any logic.
[ Is 15 too young for independent travel?Opens in new window ]
Yet it also started to feel a little cruel, restricting her in this way. So, on a sunny Sunday, we dropped her at her friend’s house and said she could walk back by herself. The friend’s mother (who is under similar pressure from her daughter) texted when she left the house, and we clock-watched, calculating where she would be and at what time to panic and start searching. Eventually, I couldn’t stick it and went out on to the street to wait: and there she was, strolling along like all the other people. Completely comfortable in her neighbourhood.
She has been allowed do this one other time since then. But for the moment, that’s all our nerves can stand. She started back to school yesterday, but I was adamant about walking her to the gates. Not for her. For me.