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How can parents relax when our children’s safety is left in our hands? Remembering our brushes with danger over the years does not help a parent’s anxiety levels. In my case, when I was seventeen, I nearly fell into a mine shaft. Just the thought of that moment still gives me shivers over thirty years later. I’m scared of heights now, and I am pretty sure it all started that day. As I peered into the depths of the mine shaft quietly hidden in the long grass that warm afternoon, the finality of gravity caught my attention, but more about that later. We will also look at the adventures of a heroic pig and a dangerous dog curry to learn a few lessons about the importance of risk in our children’s lives and ways that we can help them to manage it.

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Worse than our fears for our safety are our fears for our children. Working in schools, teachers also experience a sense of this with students, although the school environment is far more heavily controlled than the home environment and believe it or not is more predictable. At school, we know that each day will see a little madness and we expect it, but we always know that the school day will end soon after three o’clock.  The chaos is predictable and is generally confined to a set time. The school day always ends. A parents’ day never does. 

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We are always worried about our children. It is a constant state of being for a parent. How we handle that worry has an impact on our children so it is worth giving it some thought. The anxiety is difficult to navigate with parents’ dual responsibilities of keeping children safe while simultaneously preparing them for the uncertain future they will need to face one day as independent adults. 

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To prepare a child for this changing world they are about to enter, we need to imagine what type of person we want them to become. We need to consider how they are going to face risks in their lives one day and we, as parents, need to model that for them. It may well be the biggest challenge we face as parents. We can use conversations with children to help them develop the independence they will need when they are no longer children, a time that arrives sooner than we think.

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To help us approach these conversations with our children, we can take a closer look at one of ten attributes from the International Baccalaureate’s (IB) learner profile which were explored in the first book in this Conversations for a Global Child series. This attribute is risk-taker; becoming a risk-taking learner. 

There are many attributes that children need to develop as they grow up and these attributes are all connected.  Risk-taker is just one of these attributes but they are all connected in various ways. Like everything else in life, it is hard to know where one thing starts and another ends. The other nine attributes all have interesting connections to risk-taking; inquirer, thinker, knowledgeable, open-minded, reflective, communicator, principled, caring, and balanced. Being globally-minded is about knowing yourself and how you connect to the layers of community that you belong to from your personal, local context through to the global community. The first step is getting to know ourselves so our conversations about designing risk with our children can help them to get to know themselves better in this important area of development.

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The IB defines a risk-taker as a learner who approaches uncertainty with forethought and determination; who works independently and cooperatively to explore new ideas and innovative strategies, and who is resourceful and resilient in the face of challenges and change. It is the first part of this definition that will form the focus of this discussion as if our children can approach uncertainty with forethought and determination, independence and resilience will follow. 

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When we think of risk, physical risk is often the first thing that comes to mind. However, the nature of risk is varied and this book examines several different types of risk. Physical risk, however, is a good starting point. Physical risks for children often involve the most fun things that they do. I can remember many burns at the campfire, cuts and bruises from surfing near rocky points, and severe sunburns from long hours in the sun. The cause and consequences are often very clearly linked so the conversation is easy to navigate. The connection is also easy to recognize for both children and parents so a conversation about forethought and the potential for planning is simpler to manage. These easier conversations can help us approach the more difficult conversations about emotional risks, for example, which are more abstract and involve potentially uncomfortable topics. With our children, we need to get used to certain types of conversations. We need to practice. 

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The idea of identifying risk and preparing for it is a perfect topic of conversation and one that is essential to help our children grow up into independent adults. First, we need to give some thought to the types of risk that await us and our children as well as the potential benefit for growth and learning. Thoughts of risk always lurk in the dark regions of our minds where fear and anxiety reside. We will start our journey with a look at Napoleon, the heroic feral pig, and the unexpected learnings he brought with him.  

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Chapter 1: The Pepperoni Tree

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Uncomfortable questions emerge from beyond our comfort zones.

• What if my rational brain and emotional brain are at odds?

• What opportunities open up when we take risks?

• What do my children learn from how I approach risks?

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Starting a new adventure always involves uncertainty and risk which often leads to us examining alternate perspectives as you never know where an adventure will lead. You also never know what questions you will have to face along the way. This brings me to some fond memories of a pepperoni tree. I don't know if you have ever seen a pepperoni tree? I have only heard of them growing on the Windward side of the island of Oahu, Hawaii. 

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The story of the pepperoni tree starts in the bushland behind my old school in Hawaii clinging to the Koolau mountain range that divides Oahu. If you have ever seen the opening scenes of Jurassic Park with the pterodactyl flying against the backdrop of those magnificent cliffs, you know the ones. Despite the apparent pterodactyl problem in the area, there are still many wild boars roaming the foothills. When their numbers increase, they start coming onto the school grounds looking for food which can always be found with a good nose, and the nose of a wild boar is one of the best. 

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When we would have a couple of sightings, we would call some local hunters who would come in to trap the pigs and take them away. The hunters were paid per pig for trapping but they could not be released back into the wild so the hunters had to do something with the pigs they caught. This was a problem as even though wild boar is popular for the Hawaiian luau, the meat could not be legally sold unless it was processed at either a Federal or State inspected processing facility. Unfortunately, the tree in the hunters’ backyard did not have this certification. Nevertheless, the wild boar would be taken away in their cages and mostly end up as someone’s dinner, oftentimes at one of Hawaii’s numerous and sadly overburdened homeless shelters. There was no law against eating the meat, just selling it. With more and more people falling into homelessness with constantly rising housing prices, the ongoing supply of meat was an act of kindness by the hunters who did their best to support the homeless community on the island. 

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One day, in the hills behind the school they trapped a large pig that had four piglets and had been a frequent visitor on campus. The hunters asked us if we wanted to keep the piglets as we were raising chickens at school already and the hunters did not raise pigs. Their business model was fairly specific; trap, collect fee, butcher, and donate meat. In a move I suspected that I would probably regret sooner or later having had no experience with pigs, let alone feral pigs, I agreed to take two piglets as the school had an annual luau. It seemed like a good idea at the time. 

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You name pets, not dinner, as a name is a personal connection and we need to protect ourselves from thoughts we would rather not entertain. Despite the firm decree that the new piglets would not be named, they were soon known as Snowball and Napoleon thanks to our Grade Eight students who were studying George Orwell’s Animal Farm at the time. I had to admit, the names seemed to suit the two pigs. We also found out that in France an old law still states that it is illegal to name a pig Napoleon. In Hawaii, though, it was perfectly fine, just difficult if Napoleon and Snowball were one day to be on the menu at the school luau. I should have sensed the direction all this was heading.

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The hunters told us that we could hold on to the four piglets for a couple of days to choose which ones we wanted. This was one of the first indications of how little I knew about pigs because I was thinking, ‘Why does it matter? Are not all feral pigs the same?’ Well, by the end of the pig selection period I knew exactly the criteria that I would use for choosing our new middle school piglets. I took the two that bit the least. All feral pigs are not the same, it seemed. Some are unbelievably out of control and others are more reasonably out of control. 

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The plan was simple. Early the following year, the school luau would be held where we roasted a pig. Using wild boar for these occasions was very much in line with local custom and the meat of the wild boar is just right for the occasion. Also, we were a school of about 700 students so we generated quite a lot of food waste at lunchtime. The chickens ate most of the middle school portion of the lunch waste and across the whole school, there was more than enough leftover food waste to raise the pigs in the lead-up to the luau. It all seemed to make sense, at least logically.

 

The other problem this arrangement solved was the leftover meat from school lunches. There was often quite a bit of meat available, and although the chickens eat meats of all varieties, they tend not to go for big chunks of meat and any leftovers become unpleasant very quickly in the Hawaiian sun. We also had the issue of leftover chicken which was on the menu quite a bit. Even though the chickens have no hesitation in sampling that particular variety of meat, our human sensibilities found this form of cannibalism a little bit too much to take, despite the obliviousness of the chickens to our discomfort. Now and then a mongoose would get into the enclosure and do what mongooses do. I won't go into details just yet but it is not very pleasant as you can imagine. Afterwards, the surviving chickens would generally peck away at the remains of their less fortunate friends, the ones that were a little too slow to get to a perch, maintaining very innocent expressions as they snacked on their former friends, I might add. Business as usual in the animal kingdom. 

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So we had solved our problem of the wasted lunch chicken. We could incorporate a larger amount of the school’s food waste into our garden program and also feed leftover chicken to the pigs and the leftover pork to the chickens to save us from observing one of our greatest taboos. However, by solving some of our food waste problems and starting a process that was going to end in something that the whole school community enjoyed, the annual luau, I had inadvertently created the beginnings of a political movement within the school that was powerful enough to defy human reasoning and the previously immutable laws of logic. This, however, was a really interesting experience in terms of the greatest risk of all - trying to see something from a different perspective.

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Before the arrival of the piglets, life in the garden had been, except for the odd mongoose attack, idyllic for our animal friends. It was spacious with lots of food, including centipedes galore which the hens loved above all else. The chickens in the middle school garden provided us with eggs so the hens were off the menu. We also had an agreement that once they stopped laying eggs as they do when they get a bit older they would be considered official retirees. They would be able to live out their lives in peace eating insects, grass and whatever else was leftover from lunch until they died from either natural causes or more likely in Hawaii, death by mongoose. The pigs, however, were destined for the dinner table by way of the luau pit, so this was our garden’s version of Paradise Lost.

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Despite this subtle shadow that had passed over our peaceful garden, we were fully prepared. We had staff at school with experience hunting and preparing animals so that part was all taken care of and there was an element in school that was very excited about the new items on the menu, particularly because the pigs would have been having such a healthy diet in the lead up to the luau. Napoleon and Snowball were living in splendid conditions within a spacious enclosure and lots of nutritious food available to them every day. They grew and grew, ate incredible amounts of food, rolled in the mud and befriended the hens who would investigate their new, muddy, noisy neighbours. All happy, for the moment.

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During this time, I observed the formation of three distinct groups in the school and each constructed a collective opinion on the subject of the pigs and the luau. One group was the vegetarians who just thought that the meat-eaters among us were doing what meat-eaters do and did not make any comment on the whole situation. Business as usual. Then there were the meat-eaters, the connoisseurs, as I would come to think of them, who were looking forward to some delicious school-lunch-fed pork. The last group, however, proved to be somewhat problematic. They were the other meat-eaters who had decided that the pigs should not be eaten, even though these meat-eaters still clung doggedly to their omnivorous ways. In this sense, the political movement by the dogged omnivores to save the pigs defied any logic that I could find and this led to some really interesting conversations in school. One of those conversations was about the mysterious pepperoni trees of Oahu. 

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We had a seating area where middle school students ate lunch which surrounded a tree that dominated the middle school and was referred to, not especially creatively, as the middle school tree. From one of these tables, a student asked me as I was walking by one day if we were planning on eating the pigs. I told them that we were planning to eat the pigs when they were big enough and that it was the luau that we were considering for the occasion. After all, a luau without pork would not have been a luau and the pork had to come from somewhere. 

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The group of students were horrified because they had been down to the middle school garden regularly looking after the chickens and had come to know the pigs. The students were generally outraged that we would even consider killing these animals. The word ‘murder’ was used including other quite emotive words. At the time, I noticed that the students were eating a pizza, and not just any pizza, but a pepperoni pizza. I asked the students where they thought the pepperoni came from. They had never given it any thought. I asked them if they had ever heard of a pepperoni tree and they were seriously considering my question. It was a perfect time and place for this conversation.

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To make the general outrage at the eating of our pigs even more difficult to understand, the students would often talk about bacon for some strange reason, including boasting about who loved bacon the most. It was a short-lived fad in middle school, and inexplicable like much that happens in the middle years, but we were actually in the middle of this fascination with bacon during the free-the-pig movement. After confirming that bacon and pepperoni both came from a once, living, breathing pig that had to be killed by someone for the students to have that particular breakfast or lunch, I asked about the difference. The big question was, ‘Why is a pig’s life more valuable if the students have seen it a few times?’ This led to the pepperoni and bacon question, ‘Was not the nameless pig in the factory also worth saving?’ The vegetarians already had their answer to this question. 

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Apart from the tenacity and grim persistence by which students clung to their argument about saving the pigs while happily eating pepperoni pizza, what struck me was their complete disconnect between the meat that was being bought in the supermarket and the animal of origin. Of course, something like this would never be experienced by anyone who grew up on a farm and none of our students fell into this category, however a disconnect this complete was unexpected. 

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It should not have been such a great surprise, however, as when we first brought our chickens into the middle school garden and started eating the eggs at lunchtime, there were quite a few students and parents who refused to eat the eggs from those chickens. These were all people who ate eggs regularly if they had been bought at the supermarket, packaged in material that would one day find its way into landfills. There was something about eating an egg ‘straight from the chicken’ that they found subtly disturbing. In this way, even if we know in the logical part of our minds that the eggs originate in the same place, the disconnect between the packaged product we buy and the animal that provided it, seemed to be extremely strong and suggested a real need to make that connection, even if it was not comfortable.  

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They were experiencing a type of dissonance where you feel uncomfortable when you sense that the world is not as it should be. It is the uncomfortableness of a way of seeing the world being challenged. Our minds rebel even if the rational parts of our brains do not know exactly why. As the egg-direct-from-the-chicken aversion did not even result in the death of the hen, I should have guessed that the pig situation would be even more acute. The underlying disconnect seemed to be very similar in both cases.

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Now, here I need to diverge and tell you about a couple of events that shaped my relationship with Napoleon. I did not get to know Snowball so well due to a daring escape. Snowball ran away and never came back. Both pigs were let out one night by persons unknown, although as with most things in middle school, as principal, I had a pretty good idea. Middle school students generally do not excel at keeping secrets. One of the students, with the aid of their parents, came to school and opened the gate one night. Seizing the opportunity to regain her freedom, Snowball fled back to her mountain home, never to eat middle school lunch again, probably destined for a homeless shelter barbeque one day. Yet, despite the daring escape and those brief moments of freedom, Napoleon came back to our garden when he got hungry. I found him waiting patiently at the gate at lunchtime the next day. He was never one to miss a good meal.

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As Napoleon grew, his shoulders thickened, he developed modest tusks and a large ridge of coarse hair ran down his back, a classic wild boar look. He appeared to the casual observer to be quite ferocious. However, he and I had a special relationship as I was the bringer of lunch. It is like working as a bartender. Everyone is your friend. I would bring the lunch scraps to Napoleon in a white bucket. On occasion, when he would escape the enclosure that was just built for chickens rather than a fast-growing adult boar, he would roam the school and I knew this because panicked cries of ‘Mr Rentoule’ would ring out around the campus. I would drop what I was doing, grab the bucket and follow the shouts. As long as I held the bucket, Napoleon would follow me anywhere. One day he decided to join the rest of the school in the pick-up zone after classes had finished. It was the busiest time of the school day. It was a major pandemonium. As you may imagine, this was near the end of his stay with us. But how could we keep a wild boar on campus that was causing so much havoc, even with the promise of the luau on the horizon?

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Well, Napoleon had become a bit of a hero in the school community so everyone was pretty patient with him. Firstly, even though he looked quite scary when I scratched him on the back of his neck through the tough bristles, he would immediately lie down and roll over so that he could get a scratch on the stomach. He looked just like a dog when he did this. A big dog with tusks, but apart from that, the movement was familiar to all of us dog owners out there. He was, however, still a bit on the wild side, and would bite now and then, but never so hard that he broke the skin, I always had to argue. A display of affection I needed to plead, and it was only a bruise after all. He was the pig who had saved the chicks. Much could be forgiven for this act of courage and determination. This is the story of our brave Napoleon. 

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In the period after the daring escape of Snowball and the pragmatic return of Napoleon, he became very friendly with some young, yet flightless chicks. His pen shared a fence-line with a little shed used to keep chicks who were not big enough to go into the big chicken coop yet. Adult hens can be murderously rough with the little ones without a mother present. The bottom of the enclosure was made of chicken wire and was reinforced so that our arch-enemy, the mongoose, could not get in. It was at the fence-line of this little shed that shared a portion of chicken wire with Napoleon where an unlikely inter-species friendship blossomed. However, before we proceed with our tale of Napoleon and his chicks, a few words about the sharp-toothed predator that was always on the lookout for some lunchtime chicken.

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The local mongoose population was a problem. Unfortunately, they were introduced to the Hawaiian islands to kill the rats, but as the two species seem to keep different office hours, now the Hawaiian islands have both of these animals existing in relative peace with each other, both causing havoc for the native Hawaiian ecosystems. One invasive species rules the day. Another rules the night. Even though mongooses don't kill the rats, they are very fond of the native birds and their eggs, including the Hawaiian stilt which used to nest in abundance in the wetlands near the school. These beautiful native birds have almost been wiped out by the ferocious little creatures that can take on a king cobra in their natural habitat so face little resistance from the birds on the peaceful Hawaiian islands. 

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One of the curious habits of the mongoose is that when they break into an area that has chickens contained, they will go on a rampage and kill everything that they can lay their little teeth into. Not one bird within reach will be left alive even though the mongoose can only eat a small portion of what they have killed. I'm not quite sure where this behaviour comes from but it does not endear the mongoose to chicken owners or wildlife enthusiasts.

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For this reason, we never fully clipped the chickens’ wings so that they were able to fly if they were in a tough spot. We kept enough perches available so that if a mongoose did get in, and it was tricky to make anything mongoose-proof, as I found out, the invading mongoose would usually only get one or two hens as during the initial carnage the remaining hens would fly to their roosts. Traumatised, they often stopped laying for a few days but would recover quite quickly, as long as they got off the ground in time. However, the little ones we had in the fortified shed had yet to grow their flying feathers and were completely vulnerable. If a mongoose ever did get to the chicks before they could fly, it was never going to end well. The faint-hearted may need to skip the next couple of pages. 

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We had a group of eight chicks who had not long moved into this shed after no longer needing the warmth of the lamp, which would otherwise have been provided by the mother hen. The mother hen would have also provided protection and taken on a mongoose without hesitation if chicks were threatened. The hen would defend the chicks until her last breath, which would not be far away if a mongoose was involved. In our shed though, there was no mother hen. Even though the chicks had enough feathers to maintain their body temperature, they still liked warm places. As this area shared a fence line with Napoleon he would always lie against this fence and allow the chicks to nestle against his warm skin through the chicken wire. 

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Napoleon constantly stayed at the fence line sniffing at the chicks and generally acting like he was on the lookout for potential danger. When I first saw this, I wasn't quite sure whether he was wanting to protect them or have them for dinner. With a wild boar, it is hard to tell sometimes. Regardless of his reasons, which only Napoleon knew at the time, he always lay next to this chicken wire fussing over the little group of what I started to consider as his chicks. This was such a beautiful sight that he became quite famous amongst the middle school students who tended the garden each lunchtime. He was like a big, tusked, mother hen to the chicks. 

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One day, though, tragedy struck. 

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I was walking down to the middle school garden at lunchtime carrying my white bucket heavy with scraps from lunch. It was going to be a nice treat for Napoleon and the chickens. It was always my favourite time of the day. As I approached the garden, I suddenly heard a familiar ruckus which made my heart start racing. There is a saying about letting the cat amongst the pigeons and I think that this could also be translated to letting the mongoose amongst the chickens. The sound of twenty hens in utter panic is quite unforgettable. There is nothing quite like it. The hens sensed that the mongoose was close and they were scrambling for their perches.

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I thought that the area the chicks were in was mongoose-proof so I was heading straight to the main chicken coop when I saw a mongoose scramble out of a very small gap in the wooden door of the chicks’ shed. The noise suddenly stopped. The predator had departed. It was over. This was going to be worse than I had thought. I wasn't even sure I wanted to look in the little shed. I had seen what a mongoose could do to a hen that was not fast enough to get off the ground and I was not keen to see the aftermath of what it would have done to these little chicks.

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When I opened the door, I was not quite sure for a few moments what I was looking at. Napoleon was lying in the very centre of the enclosure on his side with two of the chicks huddled against his stomach. The remaining six chicks were scattered around the enclosure in bits and pieces. It had been a complete bloodbath, but for two. 

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Napoleon’s head was sticking straight up in a way that reminded me of the pose my dog would adopt, a high state of alertness whenever my youngest daughter would be playing in the garden when she was just a toddler. He would never leave her side and he would always hold his head up in that way, looking around for any sign of danger. A constant state of high alert until she went back inside and he would follow her in and then collapse, exhausted. We loved our dog for many reasons, but especially for this. 

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In those early moments when I entered the enclosure, I wondered how Napoleon had gotten in there. This was not his space. They were separate enclosures. The mongoose is tough, but never a match for an angry wild boar which would explain the haste of the mongoose’s departure. I also noticed the blood dripping from Napoleon’s snout. The ground beneath was red. I briefly thought that he must have caught a mongoose, but then I noticed the chicken wire where he had laid so many times with the chicks snuggling next to him. The steel mesh had a rough, circular hole, now dripping blood, just big enough for an angry boar to slide through. Napoleon had chewed his way through the wire to save his little companions. The blood on his snout was his. He had done this fast to get there in time to rescue these last two of his chirping friends. Napoleon, lying there with his head up, bloodied, but ready for anything, protecting those chicks is a sight I will never forget.

It was pretty tense in the shed at that moment and I thought it better not to approach him and the chicks after what had just happened. I assumed that he was still in protective mode and you do not want to get in between a wild boar and its chicks. I went back up to the middle school to get some cracked corn, Napoleon’s favourite. It was the least I could do. He was a hero.

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This whole episode gave me occasion to think back to my conversation with the middle school students about the pepperoni tree. I had asked them whether knowing the pig or not knowing the pig made any difference to the decision about eating the pork whether it be bacon or pepperoni or any other food product we make from the life of an animal.

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At that time, when I asked the students this question, I did not know Napoleon very well. Yet, now I did and I did not feel like eating him anymore. Even though I was way too old to believe in the pepperoni tree, I still felt very uncomfortable about the thought of devouring Napoleon at the luau even though I had no hesitation eating the bacon that came from nameless pigs. It seemed like I was facing a bit of a crisis. I was confronting an uncomfortable truth and my hypocrisy was a bitter pill to swallow. 

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I had become the pepperoni-eating, save-the-pig activist. I was aware of the irreconcilable difference between these two parts of me that were conducting this battle within my mind, my reason and my emotion battling for supremacy. This situation caused us to ask ourselves some really important questions and confront some quite uncomfortable truths. During Napoleon’s stay at my school, there was much conflict and differing opinions and many of us, through the course of our conversations about our different and changing views, had our worldviews challenged in ways that we had not expected. I think the important part of this in terms of being a risk-taker is the fact that having your assumptions of the world challenged is one of the greatest risks we can take but also one of the most important.

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The Napoleon incident also illustrates the importance of taking risks as every new adventure will force us to see the world differently. The start of an adventure can be as simple as saying ‘yes’ to the piglets. Napoleon was a pig that brought with him a whole series of questions that I would never have asked had I not had that opportunity. I learned about the world and my place in it. Much was not easy or comfortable but it was necessary. This is the real benefit of risk. We get to know ourselves better when we push ourselves beyond our comfort zones.

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Now, I know that you may be interested in the luau and the fate of our heroic, tusked friend. I am very happy to say that karma intervened in the life of our brave Napoleon. The story of his heroic rescue of the two chicks spread through the community and one day the hunters visited and asked if they could take Napoleon away. Even though they did supply the homeless shelters with quite a bit of wild boar meat, this was not to be the fate of Napoleon. The hunters lived with a large extended family and although they had a pen where they kept the wild boars while waiting for an array of cooking pots around Oahu, they also liked to keep a semi-tame pig around the house so that the children would get used to them. As the wild pigs in the holding pens were quite aggressive, the hunters wanted the children to experience the gentler side of the pigs. To appreciate them as the social, intelligent, and beautiful animals they are.

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When I heard their offer, I knew that fate had been smiling on both Napoleon and me. It was obvious that we could no longer keep Napoleon at school. As he continued to grow rapidly, his escapes were becoming more daring, frequent and terrifying for anyone who didn’t know his gentle side and were unlucky enough to bump into him around the school. We were thrilled that he would be in a new home and looked after as a friend for the hunters’ children. He would live for all the days of his life with the kindest of families who would come to know him as the gentlest and bravest pig on Oahu.

 

The Conversation 

​Uncomfortable questions emerge from beyond our comfort zones.

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What if my rational brain and emotional brain are at odds?

When it comes to approaching uncertainty and the risk that this involves it is most likely that the rational and emotional parts of your brain will be at odds just like in my experiences with Napoleon. It is also likely that depending on your stage of life and your past experiences, one of these parts of your brain may be more dominant than the other. When I decided to take Napoleon and Snowball from the hunters as wild piglets, I think I was letting the emotional part of my brain take over, without really considering the risk as carefully as I should have, in hindsight of course. For this reason, I took the risk but was ill-prepared. On the other hand, I think that if I had thought about the situation too much with the rational part of my brain, I may not have taken the risk. In this case, very valuable learning experiences would have been lost. We need a way to help us balance these two necessary parts of our brain to make sure we give forethought to the risks we take and also that we are determined enough to face new challenges. Designing risk can help us do this.

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What opportunities open up when we take risks?

Uncertainty by its very definition is unpredictable. However, we are all born with an imagination that lets us see things that have not yet happened. It is this power of imagination that both opens up an array of opportunities for us but may also prevent us from taking on challenges. It is helpful to approach uncertainty with a plan. We need to be able to imagine the types of risk we may face in a certain situation and use the rational parts of our brains to identify the risks that we need to be careful of and make plans for how we would face them. When we embark on a new adventure that is always filled with uncertainty, we invariably learn a range of new things that we could never have anticipated. This is always one of the benefits of risk. By approaching risk with forethought, we can approach a greater range of risks in our day-to-day lives and develop through these experiences in surprising ways. 

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What do my children learn from how I approach risks?

A child watches the adults in their life perhaps more closely than we think. They also don't listen to us very closely but rather learn from the things we do. This power of observation and mimicry is essential in the natural world, even when unconscious.  The way that parents deal with uncertainty will more than likely become the way that children deal with uncertainty. For example, parental overprotectiveness is associated with heightened anxiety in children and related anxiety disorders. A parent’s anxiety becomes the child’s anxiety. This of course is not just one instant but the cumulative result of years of observations of a parent’s reactions and assumptions about uncertainty and the associated risks. Through conversations between a parent and child about preparing for risk, we can shape the types of lives we lead and the people we become. By all means, take on risks, but risks of your design. Say ‘yes’ to the piglets by all means, but make sure you have a plan.

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Chapter 2: From Gatekeeper to Co-conspirator 

 

Every conversation that you have with your child is an investment in your relationship. It is also an investment in your child's growth and development. Make smart investments.

• Can we negotiate reasonable levels of safety with children?

• How can I deal with my anxiety as my child faces a risk?

• Will they even listen to me?

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Parents face the challenging task of trying to distinguish the need for safety now rather than safety in the future. Considering this question, I was reminded of a famous experiment in the 1970s where children were given a choice of either receiving one cookie immediately or two cookies if they waited for a certain time. Children were left alone with a cookie on a table in front of them. Some children ate the cookie, seeking immediate gratification, while others did not, delaying that gratification for the promise of a second cookie, a later reward. Their patience and restraint were an investment. 

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In many ways, a parent confronted with the uncertainty and risk for their child is faced with a similar problem as the child with the cookie. For a parent,  stepping in to protect the child is equivalent to eating the cookie straight away. It is the immediate gratification and the short term peace of mind that comes from avoiding the risk to the child. Alternatively, by delaying this immediate gratification and stepping back, allowing the child to experience risk, a more substantial reward awaits for that patient parent. The reward is the independence of the child, the equivalent of the second cookie.  

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The analogy with the children and the cookies is also relevant in terms of the importance of knowing the rewards and risks. We all realize in the rational part of our brains that over-protectiveness can lead to a child who remains too dependent on the parent. The adult child sitting on your couch is an extreme example, but becoming more and more familiar to parents around the world. Our rational selves may need to do battle with our emotional selves. Having a structured approach to designing risk can help us find some balance between these two necessary parts of our brain which sometimes do not get along. 

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Parents naturally want to protect their children but also need to understand that if they relax their protection now, they will be rewarded by growing independence in their children in the future. We need to keep our eye on something more that will come to be. In schools and universities, the increasing instances of parents taking on their children’s problems for them seem to be an indication that we may be losing this ancient wisdom - the connection between exposure to risk and the development of independence. I wonder if this is symptomatic of our growing alienation from the natural world as we saw in the first chapter with students having an inexplicable aversion to the eggs from the chickens in the garden whereas supermarket eggs were eaten without any concern. This connection is just a feeling, but one that is worth consideration. In these cases, parents may be blissfully unaware of the future rewards that may come from patience and restraint with their more immediate protective impulses. We may also be blissfully unaware of the risks of overprotection. 

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That not all risk is appropriate needs to be stressed. The big problem with the cookie analogy is that the cookie will not drown in the surf if you let it go to the beach alone, and it will not be killed in a car by a drunk driver if you allow it to go to that party, and it will not be cookie-napped by some monster with an interest in cookies the moment you divert your attention at the shopping centre. These are the nightmares that haunt a parent. To deal with the anxiety these very real scenarios create, parents need to examine their perceptions of what is, in fact, safe. What is this thing we call safety? 

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Safety is not a single state of existence. It exists on a continuum from most safe to least safe. Examining this continuum of safety and giving some thought to where you want to place your child on this continuum is a great first step to designing risk. Parenting is not about making a child perfectly safe because such a state does not exist. Rather, we ask, what is a reasonable level of safety?

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As parents, we have some degrees of control over the environment our children exist in. This environment is a physical space, an emotional space, an academic space, a social space, an intellectual space, and an identity-forming space. This is the second consideration that we need to make when we look at the safety of our children. We tend to think of risk in terms of physical risk whereas when designing risk we need to look at all these different spaces our children occupy. This point will be considered in more depth in the following chapter. 

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One implication of a parent not fully considering the different types of risk is that a parent may have more difficulty separating their own experiences of the world from that of their children’s experience. A risk to a child equals a risk to a parent. This is a neurological reality for us because our brains perceive all risks in the same way as physical risk. The amygdala, that ancient part of our brain in charge of keeping us alive, does not distinguish between the various types of risk. Our physiological response is the same whatever the perceived danger. 

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As parents, we are protective of our children which is natural and healthy, but unrestrained, this protectiveness can blur the distinction between what children should be dealing with themselves and what a parent deals with in place of their child. We can see instances of this at school, for example, when students disagree with a mark that the teacher has given them. In more and more cases, it is not the student who drives the conversation with the teacher but the parents. The student can be mysteriously absent from such conversations. This is not useful in terms of the development of the child as an independent learner. The child should be practising that sort of conversation. The parental intervention is detrimental to the child's independence. A parent taking on the problem for a child and solving it for them creates a world for the child in which somebody else deals with their problems for them. The child is missing a valuable opportunity to develop those skills needed to solve problems and in this case to be assertive and engage in discussions. Also, the conversation from a parent’s perspective is often that the mark was not good enough whereas the conversation really should be from the child’s perspective of what do I need to do to get a better mark. This has serious implications for the process of learning that a child is engaged in. 

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When driven by unrestrained anxiety, parents can take on more of an adversarial role with teachers, exercising a greater degree of control over a child’s academic life. We also see it in other areas of school life such as in sporting events when parents are vocal at children’s games with umpires and officials exercising a greater degree of control over a child’s sporting life. We see it in the formalization and exclusivity of the play-date with parents exercising a greater degree of control over a child’s social life. 

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Exercising control over a child's life can be like being a gatekeeper. The parent decides what risk gets in. The degree of control that many parents are comfortable exercising over their child’s life seems to be increasing. In many cases, the control is not exercised directly over the child. It is directed at other people. In school, the child does not need to talk about the low grade with the teacher. The parent will do that. At the soccer game, the child does not have to deal with an unpopular decision by a referee because the parent is modelling that badly from the sideline. On the weekend, the child does not need to organize someone to meet up with. The parent will organize not only the time and place but the selection of friends. The child just turns up. When things get rocky in a relationship, the parent intervenes telling the child that they are no longer allowed to play with the other child, insulating them from perceived harmful or hurtful influences. The child does not have a chance to work it out. There is no need. This is the child’s world. This is all they will know.

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An underlying problem here is that control is directed at people who are not the child and because of this, the parents can potentially lose a degree of control over their child. At this point, I need to say a word about control because it can often be seen as a purely negative aspect of a relationship, but this is not necessarily so. Control is the use of power which is merely the ability to influence decisions. As adults in the family, hopefully, we are in a better position to see the consequences of certain decisions that a child cannot, so for this reason parents need to teach their children to behave in certain ways. Having some degree of control is necessary. 

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The reasons a parent will control certain decisions may be due to physical safety but they also may be tied to social expectations. For example, in Australia, we don't normally want our young children to play with those lovely little black spiders with the red stripe on their back. That spider, quiet and polite when left alone, will give you a nasty bite if disturbed and no parent likes to spend time with their child in hospital. There are some decisions, like this, that we want to influence. Don’t play with the spider! Likewise, we don't want our child saying mean things to another child, or anyone else, for that matter. We want them to develop strong social skills which will allow them to get along with a lot of people as they grow up. We also do not want to see another child hurt. Teaching children, in this sense, requires an element of control as we are trying to influence their decisions, a task that gets harder and harder as they grow up. 

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Balance is needed because as children grow up they require enough freedom to make their own decisions including their own mistakes unless it involves that little black spider or a long brown snake. This is a balance. There are many reasons why a parent would try and exercise control over the people interacting with their child rather than the child themselves, but regardless of the reasons, the outcome is that the parent will find that they are less and less able to influence their child. This is a very real risk for any parent who overprotects their child - losing influence on them because the control is always directed to the environment, not the child. Quite simply, the child will not be used to it. This is just an incidental observation, but one that is common enough to deserve some serious consideration. 

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One of the fundamental skills that a child needs to develop to become an independent adult one day is healthy self-reflection. With the parent running interference, this self-reflection is never going to happen. What could have been a positive learning experience turns into the construction of a barrier between the child and others. A dependence on the parent is created. I suspect that this is at least partly to blame for the rise of children who are not leaving their homes in adulthood. If you have never had to take responsibility for your actions, how could you possibly go out into the world and make your own life?

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If you are having difficulty separating your own experience from your child’s, and you feel that you are playing the role of gatekeeper too intensively, you may like to consider a different strategy and that is taking the role of a co-conspirator. As a co-conspirator, you are not trying to construct a barrier between your child and the outside world, you are trying to help them plan for the troubles they may encounter. You are not blocking all the risks, you are helping your child to approach them with forethought and determination. You are not doing it for them. You are helping them to face the risks and associated challenges. This is a balance. You are not leaving your child to be a victim of the world. You are merely trying to reposition yourself as someone who will support them with advice rather than enclose them within your protective parental bubble. You can do this by planning for risk with your child. The following chapter presents a four-step risk design process that will help you take on the supportive role of co-conspirator rather than the adversarial role of gatekeeper when your child faces uncertainty and its inherent risk. 

 

The Conversation

Every conversation that you have with your child is an investment in your relationship and it is also an investment in your child's growth and development. Make smart investments.

 

Can we negotiate reasonable levels of safety with children?

Negotiating reasonable levels of safety with a child is always going to need a conversation where everyone has their voice heard. It is the type of conversation that doesn't just happen. It requires practice and is an ongoing process that takes time and thought. This type of conversation needs to be a habit rather than an event. There are two reasons why it is a good idea for a parent to negotiate reasonable levels of risk with a child rather than just telling them what to do. Firstly, if the conversation is about risk, and if the purpose is to keep your child as safe as possible, then you want to gather as much information as you can. Your child knows their world better than you do so it is just a smart idea to involve them in the information gathering process. This is the short-term, pragmatic benefit. Secondly, and more importantly, you are trying to help your child develop the skills that will enable them to face the uncertainty and risk they will confront later in their lives when you are not around to shield them. In this way, the conversation is about the risk just around the corner but it is also about the risks a long way down the road. This is the investment a parent makes when they sit down and listen.

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How can I deal with my anxiety as my child faces risk?

Dealing with our anxieties is always a challenge for parents. To manage the fear that feeds our anxiety, we need to first accept that this fear is a natural and reasonable response for a parent. Fear is a necessary burden that we must carry and learn to accept. Secondly, we need to understand that fear and related anxiety may take over in the absence of a plan. With a plan, we feel like we have more control over a situation and although this does not eliminate our fear and anxiety, it helps to moderate it. To avoid the dangers of parental overprotectiveness, this is a good starting place. We learn to value our fear and anxiety as allies in our constant battle to keep our children safe, but we plan to help keep our emotional responses in check. 

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Will they even listen to me?

If there is no conversation in which your child is actively involved, the chances that they will listen to you are not great. You may achieve a degree of compliance by just telling them what to do, which is fine in the short term. However, the opportunity for relationship building and also for your child to develop independence is the longer-term benefits that they may miss out on. These benefits are cumulative so it is important to look ahead to the person you want your child to become. Your actions now, including these conversations about risk, are essential elements in your child’s development. As parents, we need to look at both the short-term and the long-term effects of our actions. We also need to be realistic. Thinking back to our childhood and adolescent days, how much did we listen to our parents? Many of the struggles we face as parents will be re-visited on our children if they one day become parents themselves, and so the cycle continues. I don't think it has ever been easy being a parent, but we do the best we can.

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