Risk-taking

David Frum writes in his book What's Right

Our children are soaked with the cult of safety the way they would once have imbibed religion or patriotism. At school, teachers ‘street-proof’ children—that is, they teach them that kidnappers and child molesters lurk in every playground. Television excites children with environmentalist fears that the air and water they breathe and drink teem with toxins, that the food they eat is saturated with deadly pesticides, and that the juice bottles they discard will soon cover the entire surface of the earth.

Mollie Hemingway adds,

When everything is a safety crisis, nothing is. So it should be little surprise that older children are less likely to heed warnings against smoking, drinking and having, in the parlance of modern educators, “unsafe” sex.

Letting your child take risks allows them to conquer fear and develop “a sense of mastery.” Irrationally shielding them from risk creates phobias and psychopaths.

When my brother and I got out of the house to do yard work, we were in what you’d call a trade-off situation. We risked our safety, however modestly. But we gained money, work ethic, communication skills, and knowledge. We also got to actually know and interact with our neighbors.