After a weekend of manically putting up fencing in the garden and guards on just about everything in the house, we had our health and safety assessment this morning. Bearing in mind this was first done many months ago, and we passed at panel on 11th July, it feels uncannily like we're going backwards now.
Everything was poked and prodded. We were advised to box up all the lower shelves of books and put them in the loft: "toddlers like pulling things off shelves". A further fire guard must be purchased - one that sticks out into the room, all windows and the French doors must be covered in a kind of sticky-back plastic "in case he hits a toy hard against the window". The pantry must be gated off, and the cats and dog are now to have their food behind a gate. The fencing we've put up everywhere in the garden must be another foot higher. And most ludicrously of all, the whole patio must be surrounded by a high fence - "advisable until he's at least 8 or 9".
I struggle with this kind of nanny-state-ism. Our parents or grandparents didn't grow up in these cotton wool kind of environments. Children learn through their environment, they have to be able to assess dangers and risks or they grow up fearful, unable to make decisions for their own safety. One of my favourite parenting books is 'The Continuum Concept' in which Liedloff describes how children in indigenous tribes in the jungle allow their children to be active decision makers and part of society. Yes, we must protect our children, but we can't keep them in a padded cell so that they have no experience of real life. If real-life environments were as dangerous as these social workers were making out, the human race would have died out a long long time ago.
It led me to reflect on some of the greatest adventures of my own childhood, free from parental 'guidance', in a lovely garden called The Chase that belonged to family friends. This vast kingdom was the most wonderful playground, filled with hidden dangers, banks to scramble up or down, different levels, little mildewed steps through overhanging trees, rope swings, and - best of all - an old beaten up truck half hidden by vegetation which my friends and I would delight in climbing all over. Think of some of our favourite children's literature - 'Swallows and Amazons', 'The Secret Seven', 'My Family and Other Animals' etc. etc. (there's so very many) - all of which involve adventuring and assessing risk. We are doing our children a disservice by creating safe, sanitised worlds with no opportunity to explore, to engage with the environment, to make choices. I know children who have been brought up in this kind of way and, without exception, they are all terrified of the natural world. They check over their shoulder to get confirmation from their parents before they try anything. They have no faith in themselves, in their own capabilities.
We discussed further what was going to happen from here. One of the SWs visiting is going to be away on 26th September, so the next matching panel date we might be able to get is 10th October. To be told 12 days before your matching panel date that it is going to be cancelled, and then told it won't be for another month makes the blood boil. Neither R or I want to kick up a stink as we want to keep them on our side but oh! how I wish our SW hadn't had to go on leave. By now we'd have just 11 days until we met our son. Instead, we had his SW telling us today just how much he'd changed - "every time I see him, he's changed so much! He's pushing himself up to crawl and we think he'll probably race through the crawling stage and go right on to walking soon." We want to witness these changes. We just want to bring our son home now or, at the very very least, meet him. Let's hope he gets to come back here before his 1st birthday, they said today. Yes, let's hope, we thought, but hey, the ball's in your court, you've got the power here.
Frustrated. Powerless. And living in a house that vaguely resembles Fort Knox.
