Table of Contents
Introduction
Fear Caused by Mortality Rate Statistics Online
The World Is Such a Dangerous Place…
Who Is Responsible for a Child’s Safety?
Where Has Your Imagination Gone?
Brain Boosters?
Motor Skills and Obesity
Manual Competence and Dexterity
Protection against Potential Body Harm
Conclusion
Author Bio
Publisher
Introduction
A friend of mine wanted to know why I was writing a book on how not to be an overprotective parent, because according to her, the first priority of a parent, especially if he is the responsible person is to make sure that the child is protected, cherished, taken care of, physically, mentally, and emotionally, by the adults around it. A lot of times, the parents do not know when to let go, even when they are in their 60s and 70s, because for them, the children who are in the 40s and 50s are still fledglings in need of their parents' guidance!
This book is for all of those parents, who are really afraid of letting their children grow up on their own. Protect and cherish and coddle them, from the harsh, cruel, cruel world outside, and in some ways give them everything, which they never had as children. For them, this is the expression of love and this is the way they can consider themselves to be good parents.
A couple of days ago, I saw a youngster, of a really good, well educated, highly placed, financially very secure family being arrested by the police, because he had decided to do something illegal, just for the fun of it. His father happened to tell me, “how could my son do this to me, I never expected it of him, I have given him everything, he is a brilliant boy, his mother and I made sure that he never wanted for anything, since he was a baby, and gave in to all his demands. We protected him throughout his life against the realities of our own harsh childhoods.”
This feeling of hurt and betrayal is natural in any parent, who is shocked at the idea of a supposedly well brought up child doing something unconventional, and unacceptable in the eyes of society. When the child was asked by the lawyer, the reason why he decided to try his hand at a little blatant holding up of a jewelry store, he said, that he had never had any excitement in his life. So he wanted to see what it felt like, living on the wild side, instead of living like a mini prototype carbon copy of his so good, so sober, so law-abiding, so traditional, so conventional, so everything parents, hidebound and constricted with their ideas of how a child should be brought up.
A friend of mine told me that the law and order situation in her particular city was such, that she was always afraid of her kids being kidnapped. Do you know the statistics against that happening, anywhere in the world today? 0.01%. That is true. The same way as your kid dying in a road accident can be about 1 in 280,000. That is because, even though there are very frightening statistics all over the Internet, talking about road accidents and statistics and kidnapping and all that jazz, most of them are not based on real data.
