Childhood

Subject: Childhood.

Surely on of the disadvantages of being picked up from school is the child's limited view from the back of the car and the relentless never ending questions flowing from a parent. "How was school today", "What did you learn". The insensibility of most parents when the child was only too glad to be released from the rigours of learning things which seemed to have no relevance to their immediate lives.
In the days when we were free to trudge home on our own or with a pal, each corner, each field and gate, each hayrick or barn, the dog at number 72, were all on ones radar checked  for changes, taken in as part of ones private world of experience. Today the child is rarely free to roam unattended, cosseted by mum of dad, the opportunities to chose are severely limited.  The experimentation which is so important to childhood is now given a grown ups perspective, the dangers highlighted, the substance monitored, it's no longer your own. 
Growing up in the countryside, off out of the house at weekend from dawn till dusk the panacea of our world was hedged in only by an unwillingness to roam. The hedges, the woods the fields and the animals in them were our playground and our laboratory. We tested ourselves by climbing trees or scaling the rocks in the disused quarry. We invented games and trusted each other not to tell when something went wrong. We learnt the craft of living by making ourselves available to mishap, we trudged home with a bruised knee or a cut hand to be repaired by our mother before rushing out again to take up where we had left off. 
Isolated and immunised from danger of any kind, today's child grows up with a whole range  of barely pronounceable psychiatric maladies, each recitable by overprotective and excitable parents, as if it's a badge of honour that your child has this or that disorder. 
Like the fruit and veg in the supermarket there's no room for the misshapen carrot or the knobbly potato, our children must be grown in the hot house of our homes until released and only then the fun really starts as the child begins to answer questions it should have learnt when it was five or under.