Youngsters taking risks
You may not have caught this on BBC Breakfast today but there was a feature on :Tiger Cam - The latest instalment from the people who brought us dung-cam, snowball cam and salmon cam… trunk-cam; where elephants carry disguised cameras to bring us closer than ever before to tiger cubs in the Indian jungle.
The camera showed closeups of a growing family of young tiger cubs. The point here is that from the very first moments they could walk they explored and took risks in their investigations of all that life had to offer. Standing by to retrieve them when they became stuck and to watch over them was their mum. Always ready to help, she let them explore and investigate for themselves.
Isn't this what we are saying about e-Safety and young people growing up in an institutionally contrived 'risk-free' world? Will this fit in with the findings of the Byron Review?
posted by Doug @ 08:20
1 Comments
1 Comments:
I have come to the present conclusion (always on the move) that the most valuable learning takes place when we take the highest risk that we believe we can take.
Based on the result we re-assess ourselves, if we succeed our self-esteem goes up.
When we take great risks for us and we succeed then our self-esteem goes ski high.
Take a very 'safe' risk and it goes up very little.
Take no risk (do as we're told/watch tele) and it can go down and we become depressed and try to console ourselves that we are OK - Go out and buy something - eat something special, drink.
I'm beginning to understand why i hated the thought of safe social networking sites/clubs. They can present such a small challenge - we can play it safe with relationships that we can ditch if things go slightly unpleasant. Reading an educational magazine gives a warm feeling but unless we take the risk of trying of standing up to a boss, teach a difficult lesson and win the students over, put into practice what we read, then we loose out and loose esteem - our own and the people around us.
I realise I had a mother that had faith in me to go into risky situations - cross London on the tube at age 11 with one parent in Paris and the other in B'ham.
No wonder I've been a risk taker all my life.
What we really need are parents and teachers that know us well and are close enough to be able to set us challenges that match are present abilities. Rather the time spent cooking the parents a meal than spending an hour on a social networking site.
At present I'm all for supporting parents and encouraging them to take the well thought out risks their parents didn't allow them to take!
Risk facing up to their children and encouraging them to take real risks - that of a meal they prepared being a flop! (and being praised by their parents for daring to try)!
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