We need to let kids take more risks, says Australian author and educator John Marsden.
It's a philosophy he has had throughout his career and a motto at Candlebark, one of the two schools he's founded in his home state of Victoria.
Marsden last spoke to Nine to Noon two years ago about his book The Art of Growing Up, and he joins Kathryn Ryan again for his latest work, Take Risks: Raising Kids Who Love the Adventure of Life.
Photo: Annie Spratt/Unsplash
Throughout his career and in observing thousands of schools from around the world, Marsden says he has seen it all.
"I started noticing about 20 years ago that young people had no conversation anymore except that they would talk about what they'd seen on TV the night before or if they had any stories about real life experiences, it wouldn't be experiences that they had had, it'd be experiences that their parents or grandparents had had.
"But they didn't have any stories of their own. And I thought this is just not right. We shouldn't be living our lives via Bear Grylls or the Top Gear team on BBC Television we should be getting out there and doing things ourselves."
Children need their own first-hand experiences to build their foundations for adulthood, he says.
"If you don't have that kind of childhood and adolescence, I'm afraid there's a fair chance you'll be a very boring person, so it makes them more interesting, lively people. But it also gives them an understanding of the world."
Even the playground environment has become stringent on safety to a dramatic extent, he says.
"We have this fear of physical injury which has now become so much a pandemic in our society.
"If you cut out any risk of physical injury, there's a pretty good chance you'll be damaging people in other more abstract and less visible ways - they'll be suffering emotional damage and social damage and even cognitive damage and intellectual damage because they are so protected.
"The average child now has like three points in their life and it's the home, the school and the shopping mall, and not many of them go outside those three points."
Marsden lets his students go on canoe trips, camps, biking trips, visit galleries and museums, operas, concerts, and theatres. He has even taken some to a cemetery to show them the different cultural practices at funeral rites.
"Every day kids get bruises, they get grazes, they get scratches, but we haven't had any significant injuries in all that time. Because they learn to look after themselves and they develop a new set of skills which again will be enormously helpful to them in their adult lives," he says.
"There's a great saying that life is 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows and so people who raise their children with the idea that they just want them to be happy are completely missing the very important point that they won't be happy all the time.
"We need to give them the resilience and strength and the creativity ... to survive those periods of grief, and that won't happen if you were to protect them to an extreme extent as so many families are rather sadly doing at the moment."
Some adults also feel the need to correct every single thing a child says and does, which only serves to diminish the child's creative expression, he says.
"So if they see a helicopter and they've never seen a helicopter before and they don't know what the name of that thing is, they might say 'oh my goodness that's the biggest wasp I've ever seen and it's eating some people', and we laugh and laugh and tell everybody what the child said.
"The child hears us doing this and thinks 'oh okay, I've stuffed that up because I'm getting laughed at, I need to learn what the adult words are'.
"And so, they quickly become very stereotyped and very cliched and predictable in the use of language."
When Marsden opened his second school for secondary students, he says it was frightening to see teenagers break down and call their parents over the simplest of things.
"There were literally kids who couldn't find their books or couldn't find the right classroom for the next lesson who would cry and hide behind a tree and, of course, the mobile phone is like the helicopter that rescues you from the deepest jungle.
Photo: Supplied
"I'm thinking good grief, what on Earth is going on in our society that we have this generation who are unable to cope with the most trivial mishaps."
But teaching has become much more demanding over the years, he says.
"It's not just a matter now of teaching them ... It's a matter of being available to them for all kinds of needs across a wide range, and that includes obviously social and emotional and psychological.
"The failure of other agencies and institutions have meant that schools have become the sort of default setting for these problems.
"Sometimes I joke that this is a psychiatric day clinic not a school because we do have an increase in mental health problems among young people in the last generation, which has been quite extraordinary."
Teachers too need to have a couple of years of life experience outside the traditional pathway to understand what it means to be an adult, he says.
