How Do You Spell Freedom - Road to the Middle Class

BACK IN the old days childhood was different. Kids had more freedom, as Alice Thompson reports from Britain. She talked to her mother about life as a child during World War II.

Life as a child in those days was delightful. The adults were far too busy to pay any attention to children.

We broke into requisitioned houses and made camps; we spent our afternoons canoeing down the Cam without life-jackets, eating sausages out of tins and, when it rained, we slipped into the cinema to watch unsuitable love stories and horrifying images of the liberation of the concentration camps.

Of course, one time a man tried to force himself on her as she cycled to a friend’s house. But she never thought of telling anyone until she got home.

Thompson’s childhood was not much different. She took the London subway home from school with her younger sister from the age of five.

Today things are much different. According to a survey “Fewer than one in 10 eight-year-olds walk to school alone” in Britain today and there are signs in public playgrounds warning parents that is against the law to leave their children unsupervised.

And Alice Thompson is just as smothering a parent as everyone else:

I walk my three-, four- and six-year-old to school every day, clutching their hands.
Their every moment in London is supervised, with playdates and trips to museums.
I drive them to football and tennis. No wonder they love going to the country where they can spend all day making camps in the garden, pretending to be orphans.

In fact though, children have about the same risk of murder or kidnapping as a generation ago.

And though they have much less risk of being orphaned, they do have a pretty significant risk of being abandoned in divorce.

The difference is that government and media have learned that there is money and power and ratings in scaring mothers half to death.

There ought to be a law.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.