Why children need the right to take risks

Australian author and educator John Marsden joins Nine to Noon again to talk about why he thinks kids need to take more risks. It's a philosophy he's had throughout his career as an educator and author, and has been a motto at Candlebark, one of the two schools he's founded in his home state of Victoria in Australia.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. Listen to the full interview with John Marsden here.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."…Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details