INTRODUCTION

Growing up on the outskirts of Bergen, in Norway, I was given a lot of freedom to roam outside from a very early age. Norwegians have a unique, maybe rather obsessive, love of outdoor pursuits and are therefore a lot more reluctant than in other countries to restrict children’s freedom to play outdoors. The local children, my siblings and I were always outdoors, whether in sunshine, rain (all too common in Bergen), sleet or snow, building dens, climbing trees, playing on building sites (against the express instruction of adults), as well as having all kinds of adventures in the woods or by the fjord. As long as we were back for our evening meal we could stay out as long as we wished. One of the reasons I decided to write this book was that I felt

children today were losing out on many childhood experiences that I took for granted. My experience as a primary school teacher and the research for my doctorate in developmental psychology drove home to me how important unsupervised play is for children’s social, emotional, cognitive and physical development. Children need to be given space away from adults’ watchful eyes – in order to play, experiment, take risks (within a sensible framework provided by adults), test boundaries, have arguments, fight, and learn how to resolve conflicts. This has been my firm belief since I started to study child development;

and watching the speed at which that free space is becoming eroded by a culture that prizes ‘safety’ above all else has weighed upon me as a grave concern. My worry about modern childhood has also been informed by my

position as managing editor of the radical web site spiked – a web site that my colleagues and I launched in 2001 with the mission of ‘raising the horizons of humanity by waging a culture war of words against misanthropy, priggishness, prejudice, luddism, illiberalism and irrationalism in all their ancient and modern forms’. The dehumanizing impact of a political and cultural world that seeks to lower people’s expectations of themselves and those around them was one of our main concerns when launching spiked. Adults are increasingly treated as emotionally illiterate beings: parents are constantly talked down to by the government, policymakers and the booming parenting industry, with prescriptive advice about how to parent; teachers are spoonfed about what to teach and given detailed guidance as to how to engage with their pupils; and strangers are treated, not as adults who can play a role in socializing and looking after children but as potential paedophiles. I noticed that the impact of our safety-obsessed culture, and low

expectations of fellow human beings, is particularly stark in relation to children, and was concerned about the impact upon their development. After all, as policymakers are so fond of saying, children are our future – so what kind of future is all this negativity creating? Since I first started working on Reclaiming Childhood a number of

books have been published warning that the modern world is damaging our children. Hardly a day has gone by without media exhortations about the harm children are coming to. Apparently just about everything we do is messing up children’s lives – whether it be giving them too much, too little, or just the wrong kind of love and attention, feeding them the wrong kind of food or letting them play with the wrong kinds of toys. We are living in a ‘junk’ world, we are told, and children are suffering as a result. But the more I looked into all these claims the clearer it became to

me that it is not children that are messed up but today’s attitude to

children. Most of the problems thrown into the pot when discussing childhood today are not, on closer scrutiny, issues about which we should be obsessing. My aim here is to challenge the dangerous myths about modern

childhood and children, and present a more honest, and positive, perspective. Many of the changes we have seen in children’s lives over the last centuries and decades are for the good. The key thing that could be holding children back is today’s safety-obsessed culture, and low expectations of what they are capable of. By challenging this culture, we can build a better future – and present – for our children and ourselves.