We have to give children freedom

Mar 7 2008 by Valerie Hill, Liverpool Daily Post

TELL me, am I being a molly-coddling middle- class mother, stifling the youthful flowering of my sons?

It’s just that I want to wrap my two boys in cotton wool; unfortunately, I can’t electronically tag them, so I emotionally tag them instead.

This, they see as a disadvantage. As teenagers, an outer coating of maternal cotton wool does not fit in with their self-image as embryonic heavy metal rock stars.

But I’m not alone. I’m suffering (and my sons would tell you they’re suffering even more) from the spreading curse of those mums who can’t stop meddling.

Yet, I’ve met much worse, one mother I know taxi-ing around teenagers older than mine. Practically young men, they’ve never been anywhere on their own. It’s as if we’ve become so inured in the health and safety culture, we’re trying to remove risk entirely from childhood.

We’re terrified of our youngsters being on collision course with anything from trees to traffic, from parks to paedophiles.

At the risk of sounding like Princess Fogeyana, somehow something has changed since my day. Brought up in the era when you could go out playing for six weeks in summer, I would be armed with only a bottle of Vimto, sugar butties and several thrupenny bits.

Providing you made a daily return to base for beans on toast at 5.30pm, your mum wasn’t bothered what you did in the woods and with whom. You could have been building a skateboard park – except they weren’t invented in my day.

It was more about making a go-kart out an old Silver Cross pram, interspersed with a few rounds of British Bulldog and Bungoff.

Today, it would be categorised under the heading of creative play and participants charged £5 a day at a Saturday club. (To which you’d have to drive the children, natch.)

I agonise about sending my children to school on the public bus, and at what age they should be allowed to wander off to town on their own, or even with friends.

They tell me their peer group has been using Merseyrail unaccompanied since the age of five and have been clubbing at the Carling Academy since the age of six and a half. Possibly.

A Two Ronnies repeat shown on TV recently had Ronnie Corbett doing his amusing chair-bound monologue about attending St Pansy’s Primary.

In it, he described how the school goalie let in 23 balls, but had been hampered as he could only use one hand. That was because his mum was holding his other one. And such were his injuries that he couldn’t compete in the school embroidery team later that week. How we all laughed. Except my youngest son, who looked accusingly at me and snapped: “That’s just what you’d do, Mum.”

The other week, he was picked to play hooker for the school rugby team. No problemo, except that he’d never attempted the game in his life.

He had enthusiasm, he had, in the current vernacular, the right “mindset” and tons of attitude. The fact that he possessed zilch talent seemed of no consequence.

Of course, his side lost. In fact, they got the wooden spoon. His view was that the team was full of “soft lads”.

My take on it was that their zealous mothers, who were spending a packet on private dental care, had warned them all not to plunge into the scrum willy-nilly, baring all, but particularly not their teeth.

My son, aka Conan the Barbarian, seizing his chance for freedom and having thrown caution to the wind, escaped his mother’s clutches and launched himself upon an unsuspecting flock of high school jessies.

He came back bruised, battered and bullish. Oh, calamity.

I want my boys to be in touch with their feminine side, not charging around like testosterone-fuelled Neanderthals.

I want them to do the full-Jamie Oliver, rustling up nutritious snacks for themselves and their mates while having a Mighty Boosh-type of ironic take on social mores, relationships and life in general.

All without their mother holding up queue cards on the side lines. Yes, I know I’m living on Fantasy Island. If only I had girls. Discussing Heat magazine and debating the merits of Fake Bake as opposed to St Tropez tanning fluid is low-level stuff in comparison.

But daughters see their mums as allies. Sons, in comparison, see us as the enemy.

That is until they need some money, then they’ll return like homing pigeons. My big worry is that, having weaned myself off them, they’ll turn into boomerang kids and want to move back in.

As Bill Cosby said: “Human beings are the only creatures on earth that allow their children to come back home.”