A generation of “battery-farmed children” is being raised in Britain by overanxious parents who refuse to let them play outside, the Families Minister said yesterday.
Kevin Brennan called for an end to the “cotton-wool culture”, saying children would never learn how to assess risk for themselves if they were prevented from going to the park, walking to school on their own or hanging out on the streets with their friends.
Speaking at the launch in London of the Government’s child safety action plan, the minister said parents “get a little bit focused on wrapping our children in cotton wool and it’s not good for them to do that all the time. We have to educate people about the real risks they face”.
One way of keeping children safe from the dangers of, say, road traffic dangers, was never to allow them out, but “that will produce a generation of battery-farmed children if we all follow that approach”, he said.
Mr Brennan’s comments foreshadow a claim to be issued by the Scout Association tomorrow that eight million young people have become “prisoners in their own homes” because they are spending so little time outdoors.
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The Scouts are starting a campaign to promote outdoor activities for young people, which comes after government research suggesting that one third of children aged 7 to 12 are never allowed to play outside because parents are concerned about their safety.
Mr Brennan said that it was not the Government’s role to tell parents at what age it was safe to let their children go out on their own. However, he hoped that a big public awareness campaign on the real risks of stranger danger, fires and other potential threats would make parents more confident.
The campaign will be aimed at socially deprived families.Children of long-term unemployed parents, for example, are 13 times more likely to die from accidental injury and 37 times more likely to die from fires than those from middle-class homes.
Mr Brennan also promised to make school trips easier to organise. One teacher in Camden, North London, was told recently to include a risk assessment of the chances of a terrorist attack on a trip to the British Museum in London.
Teaching unions welcomed this move, but Michael Gove, the Shadow Children’s Secretary, said that much of the blame for the “safety first” obsession lay with the Government, which had presided over the growth of the compensation culture and a massive expansion in red tape.