Daisy Turnbull is a teacher and director of wellbeing.

She has taught at St

Catherine’s School in Sydney for eight years, and before that taught across
school systems, including at a behavioural school working with students
with varying challenges. Before going into teaching, she worked in
interactive advertising as a producer and in strategy roles. Daisy is an
accredited Lifeline crisis support counsellor and regularly volunteers on the
crisis support line. She is the mother of two children, and holds a Combined
Bachelors degree in Arts/Commerce, a Graduate Diploma of Secondary
Teaching, and a Masters of Arts in Theological Studies. She is also an
obsessive crocheter and a terrible runner.
 Contents

Cover Page
Title Page
Foreword
Introduction
The first year (for parents)
On the move (1–4)
School days (5–10)
The final risk
Resources
Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
Foreword

The phrase ‘no risk, no reward’ is based on the idea that taking a chance
gives you the only opportunity of receiving the good consequence of a
venture. But when children face risks, they get the bonus of four rewards
for every challenge attempted:

1. a boost of confidence that their parents have faith in them;

2. discovering that the feeling of fear is often more about a sense of
anticipation and not something necessarily to avoid;
3. learning to cope when things don’t completely work out;
4. and increased confidence for their parents too, which may inspire the
parents to encourage the family to take on more challenges – and even
take more risks themselves.

As the cherry on top, children receive the potential joy and satisfaction of
completing each new activity.

Daisy has written an important and timely book that inspires parents to
support their children in taking essential risks – and in age groups where
parents can exponentially build children’s future confidence and
capabilities. With a down-to-earth, practical and humorous approach,
combined with nods to science, psychology and Bluey, Daisy gives parents
a crucial to-do list for their children to slowly face challenges, learn to cope
with varied outcomes, and gain more confidence with the accomplishment
of each experiment. Most importantly, taking these risks will enhance
family wellbeing in time together and time apart, and allow children to
discover the wonderful turn life takes when daily activity is not dominated
by screens … or fear of failure.
I’d strongly recommend you and your family take on the challenges (and
adventures!) contained within these pages. I’m sure all will enjoy the
journey, as well as the results.

DR JUDITH LOCKE
CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGIST
 It sounds counterintuitive to say that the longer
you let kids be kids, the better they will ‘adult’, but
it is true. Research suggests that the more kids are
allowed to play in mud, create games, and develop
their own solutions to problems, the more they will
thrive later in life.
A few years ago I was attending the baptism of a friend’s child and the
priest asked what kind of person the parents wanted their child to be. I often
think about this question and the answers it prompts. We want children to
be kind. We want them to have perspective and empathy and compassion:
empathy is feeling another person’s emotions; compassion has the added
element of wanting to help someone without their problems becoming
yours. We want our children to be resilient and self-aware. We want them to
be resourceful and respectful, and we want them ready to face the world as
responsible adults.

But amid all these desires we seem to have fallen into the trap of thinking
we are responsible for every single one of our child’s positive
characteristics, and even more so any negative ones. Millennial kids (like
me) and older generations almost certainly didn’t have our parents standing
next to us with a clipboard and pen checking that we were achieving KPIs.
‘Curiosity? Bucketloads. Resilience? Room for improvement.’ Instead, they
let us learn and develop these skills ourselves.

Parenting has changed in the past forty years. Our expectations of parents
have increased incrementally from the 1980s, with the rise of helicopter
parenting (overprotective ‘hovering’ that discourages a child’s
independence) and mother guilt, not to mention working-mother guilt and
stay-at-home-mother guilt. Parenting, especially mothering, has more guilt
associated with it than a confessional. And there seems to be a divide in
society: on the one side there is this Victorian-era ‘children must be seen
and not heard’ philosophy, where parents bring pre-emptive earbuds for
their fellow passengers when they are flying with a baby, and on the other a
view that kids should always be able to be kids, and that parents (and other
adults) should change their plans to accommodate that. I generally support
the latter, but we probably need to find a midpoint – and stop judging
parents. Then COVID-19 happened, and parents were shocked by those
who either had to or chose to keep sending their kids to day care or school.
Running a full day of learning with a child while also working a full-time
job became the final frontier of parenting.

Even before corona, parenting had become a lot more risk averse.
Helicopter parenting isn’t a brand-new concept. Those stories of kids being
told to go out and play and come home when the streetlights came on are
not the stories of twenty- or even thirty-somethings anymore; they are the
stories of their grandparents. We have generations that have been sheltered
from risks, and taught to see the world as an inherently risky place. This is
not to discount the very real risks the world can pose, especially for
children. But measured, limited and monitored risk-taking for children is
one pathway to them becoming resilient, confident adults.

‘I HAD TO WALK TEN MILES TO SCHOOL, IN THE

SNOW!’
We love to remind the next generation of kids how good they have it. I
struggle to consider what the equivalent to the above statement is for
someone who grew up in the 1980s – we had to wait for our favourite song
to come on the radio so we could record it onto a cassette? And it is even
harder to think what kids growing up today will have to humble-brag about
in their adult years – perhaps only having twenty streaming services to
choose from? Clearly, the removal of some childhood risks has been a very
welcome and necessary thing – the greater scrutiny around child safety in
schools, for example, and more creative and safer play equipment so there
are fewer broken bones. But ultimately, society has removed many of the
natural risks and opportunities for resilience that previously existed in
childhood, so we need to create them.

I am a high school teacher and run the wellbeing program at an independent

girls’ school in Sydney. I am also the mother to two young kids, Jack and
Alice. I often felt like I was learning everything about childhood
development, positive psychology and resilience in double time: what I read
about or learned in professional development at school could be applied to
my home life, and what I practised at home with the kids was often the test
run for implementing activities at school. Being a parent gave me more
compassion for the difficulties parents experience when dealing with
schools, and being a teacher gave me a lot more gratitude for the amazing
work Jack’s teachers and school community do. (Being both a teacher and a
parent also means I get judged no matter which job I’m doing, whether it’s
telling my kid it’s ‘their toy, their responsibility’ in the playground, or being
told by people that ‘it must be so great to have all those holidays’.) There
has not been a professional development session that I have attended
without sending notes to my mum friends.

It was in one of those professional development sessions that I started

joking with a friend that what we need is a checklist of risks kids should
take before they get to high school, or before they can officially be
considered an adult. And that friend thought it was a good idea for a book.
I’m not a child psychologist or resilience guru, but I am a mother and a
teacher with a strong understanding of wellbeing and positive psychology.
I’ve drawn on my hands-on experience of parenting to write this book,
along with my professional experience of teaching teens who come through
childhood with radically varying levels of resilience and self-efficacy.

I am not a perfect mother. My children are far from perfect children, and
they are still growing up, so I can’t tell you what they will be like when
they’re adults. But I do believe in developing autonomy in the kids and
raising them to be kind, curious, and critical thinkers. We want our kids to
develop the skills to pick themselves up when they fall, to know when to
ask for help and who to ask, but also to be confident that they can solve a
lot of their problems themselves. The growing prevalence of mental illness
and anxiety among children and teens today tells us just how badly these
skills are needed, and the only way to develop them is to let our kids be
kids. Let them try, and fall, and fail. Love them and support them, but trust
in their resilience, too. They’re far more equipped for this journey than we
realise.
Risks

This book is titled 50 Risks to Take With Your Kids, but I want to focus on
the three most important words in there, so the next three sections are going
to talk about ‘risks’, ‘with’ and ‘kids’.

Risks and kids generally sound like a rather bad mix. A child’s prefrontal
cortex, which helps with decision-making and acts as a control centre for our
emotions, doesn’t fully develop until they’re in their twenties (recent
research indicates it takes men until they are thirty!). This means that
children aren’t able to assess risk, control emotions or make decisions in the
same way as an adult. I am not a neuroscientist – I can’t even draw a brain
properly – but my amazing illustrator has attempted one here.
There are two parts of your brain that affect your risk tolerance: your
amygdala and your prefrontal cortex. Your amygdala is where you
emotionally process everything, and as anyone who has been near a two-(or
ten)-year-old knows, it can very easily go into overdrive when you’re
stressed or upset. If you’re emotional and your amygdala is in overdrive,
your prefrontal cortex actually shuts down, and you are probably not going
to make great decisions.

The relationship between these two parts is important. You might think this
means that it’s best to limit risks with kids because they are not able to make
complex decisions. But careful risk-taking (which sounds like a
contradiction in terms, I know) actually allows children to practise managing
their emotions and stress when making decisions and acting independently,
and gives them the opportunity to build resilience.

Resilience is ‘so hot right now’. And so it should be; we are too eager to
protect children from life’s difficulties, and as a result we ignore their need
to develop resilience. Our ability to respond to adversity is like doing push-
ups – you will only improve if you practise.

Essayist and statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes that he’d rather be
‘dumb and antifragile than smart and fragile’. Taleb considers three
categories: fragility, resilience and antifragility. Fragile things break, like a
glass when it hits the floor. Resilient things return to their previous state, like
a sippy cup when it hits the floor (over and over again). Antifragile things
actually become stronger as a result of experience – like a person should.
The random events that happen to us and how we respond to those events all
help instil antifragility. (To be clear, we are talking about everyday, run-of-
the-mill life events, not serious trauma.)

But parents – smart and antifragile parents – are misguidedly using their
smarts and antifragility to protect their children from the opportunity to
make dumb decisions that they can learn from. This means that when those
children individuate at around fourteen (when they form a clear sense of self
that is separate to their parents and others, which in fact starts from the
toddler years but gets more obvious in the teenage ones), they haven’t had
the chance to develop these skills. And so, we are in this era of people in
their twenties and thirties talking about how hard ‘adulting’ is.
If children are not adequately stimulated in their environment, and are not
given the opportunity to take risks, their fear of risk will increase, which can
lead to anxiety about exposure to risk. Psychologist Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi (it’s pronounced ‘chick-sent-me-high’) created the theory
of flow, which depicts this idea perfectly. Flow is the state you enter when
you’re slightly challenged by a task that isn’t monotonous, and your ability
is increasing as you do it. You become focused entirely: think of a one-year-
old opening and closing a lift-the-flap book, a two-year-old banging on a
drum, a three-year-old looking for rocks in a garden. The state above flow is
when the difficulty far outweighs confidence, which can cause anxiety.
Conversely, when skill is greater than the difficulty of the task, you get
bored. Flow does not end with childhood, it develops throughout our lives.
Adults experience flow in their work, in their home lives, and when they’re
working towards a goal. For children, achieving a state of flow may involve
a little bit of risk – like balancing on a wall.

This book is designed to give you some practical suggestions for taking
measured risks with your children – risks that have both lived experience
and evidence-based research behind them – to develop children who will
hopefully turn into good humans and great ‘adulters’. There are plenty of
brilliant words out there on resilience and child psychology, but I felt we
were missing a ‘how to’, a proactive approach rather than a curative one.
And I kept coming back to the idea of taking risks.

These risks are all suggested with the baseline assumption that children are
loved, fed and cared for. Some of these risks may not even seem that risky to
you, while others may seem totally nuts. These risks are for all parents, but
especially the ‘overparenter’, and can be tailored to suit your child, your
family and your circumstances.

A lot of these risks may already occur in many children’s lives, so if you are
a fairly hands-off parent you may find you are encouraging your children to
take some of these steps already. This book will hopefully encourage you to
keep pushing yourself and your kids safely out of your comfort zones.

For those parents who struggle a bit more with letting go, this book will help
you to help your children find their own autonomy safely. Lenore Skenazy,
the author of Free-range Kids, refers to a ‘worst-first’ principle: people think
of the worst possible outcome first, especially when it comes to kids. Often
you’ll think – or people will ask you – ‘But what if something terrible
happens?’ Clearly, that would be terrible. But should one parent based solely
on that principle? We don’t let tiny probabilities guide our entire lives –
otherwise we’d probably never get on a plane or into a car – and we don’t
want that level of caution to be normalised for our kids either. Without risks,
how will kids learn how to live? As that overused Instagram post says, ‘Your
comfort zone is a beautiful place, but nothing grows there.’

The risks in this book are all designed to develop certain skills, and for that
reason they fall into three main categories: physical risks, social risks and
character risks. You’ll be able to see which particular category each one
focuses on by looking for the three key symbols on each page.
PHYSICAL RISKS

Kids are designed to take physical risks, because that is how they learn.
Parents are designed to protect their children from physical risks, because
that is how kids survive. The trick is getting this balance right.

Exposure reduces fear, and being exposed to physical risks is one of the
ways children stop being afraid of everything. Walking for the first time is
scary, but the more a child does it, the more competent they become, and the
less scary it is. As competence increases, so too does the potential risk
involved, but that is a good thing. By keeping your child’s risks at a healthy
distance above their competency, you will ensure they become more
confident and capable.

A 2011 journal article in Evolutionary Psychology by two Swedish

academics looked at the benefits of ‘risky play as a fear reducing behaviour
where the child naturally performs exposure behaviour’. One of the issues
their research identified is that whenever risk is mentioned in relation to
children’s play, it doesn’t differentiate between minor or severe injuries.
Your minor injuries are the ones that can be dealt with at home – bandaids,
ice packs, Dettol. Severe injuries require hospitals. But because there are
studies that show that 94 per cent of children get injured while climbing a
tree, parents assume that climbing trees = serious danger, when actually only
around 3 per cent of those injuries were greater than a scrape.
We are currently in a stage where the risks of childhood activity have all
been grouped together as equal, and the assumed potential outcome is
always severe injury. The physical risks in this book may result in minor
injuries. So pack the bandaids, and relax.
SOCIAL RISKS

This second category consists of risks that help children develop the skills
that will make them a better friend, family member and colleague. As our
lives are being lived online more and more, it can be easy to think that the
way we behave in one context doesn’t define us in another. But by having a
clear set of values, you’ll ensure those values are practised across all
mediums of your child’s life. This could include any of the following
characteristics.

SELF-AWARENESS

Self-awareness is at once incredibly simple and very complex to teach. It is

partly about being aware of how you are behaving in a conscious way, as
opposed to being on autopilot. But it also relates to being aware of who you
are in relation to other people.

PERSPECTIVE AND EMPATHY

Everyone will have worked with someone or known someone who can’t see
a situation from anyone else’s point of view. Perspective is a skill that is
learned. Social risks can be opportunities for your child to learn how to
consider other people’s perspectives, and through that feel empathy for them.
RESPECT AND KINDNESS

Some risks will involve children talking to people they may not know. At the
least we want them to be respectful in those interactions, but even more than
that, we want them to be kind – as a habit, as part of their character.
CHARACTER RISKS

The third category are those character-building risks that help your child
develop their internal skills and their ability to deal with life. A lot of this
leans on the work of Professor Lea Waters and her theories of strength-based
parenting. These risks are about using your child’s inner strengths to help
them develop identity and character.

RESILIENCE AND REGULATION

You might wonder why resilience is so far down this list given that it’s been
mentioned approximately seventeen times before now. While all of these
risks will build some form of resilience, some are specifically going to focus
on it as a character trait. Resilience isn’t ‘sucking it up’ or ‘getting over it’.
Resilience is about learning and growing from experience. Humans,
especially children, can be what Nassim Nicholas Taleb refers to as
‘antifragile’: not only can we not break, but we can get stronger when faced
with difficult situations. The building of strength only happens if we don’t
let ourselves get too caught up in those difficult situations, which can cause
anxiety. This means when we learn about resilience, we are also learning
how to regulate ourselves. It is, in fact, a two for one.

RESOURCEFULNESS
Psychologist and author Dr Judith Locke once said that you want your kid to
occasionally lie to you, because it shows early problem-solving and
resourcefulness skills. The most resourceful kid is the one who, when
stealing cookies from a cookie jar, turned the interrogation into a catchy
song that passes the blame around the room. There are whole books and
articles that discuss the psychological impacts of children lying, but
resourcefulness in this book is the ability to recognise a problem, think
creatively, and come up with solutions. Spoiler alert – boredom is really
good for resourcefulness.

RESPONSIBILITY

What responsibilities should a child have? This is a big question that

flummoxes some parents.

Giving kids too much responsibility might make you seem like ‘the worst
parent ever’, while too little will not allow them to develop an understanding
of their responsibilities as a human. At its heart, teaching children about
responsibilities is about consequences. If you are responsible for something
and that thing doesn’t happen, or doesn’t work, there is a consequence. So
some of these risks will teach children about how to develop responsibility
in an age-appropriate way.
Whether you are reading this as a mother, father, guardian, step-parent, a
grandparent wishing your kids would raise your grandchildren the way you
raised them, whatever – there are also some specific risks for you. They are
still focused on developing skills and strengths in your child, but they’re a
bit more specific to your actions and decisions, rather than to your child’s.
This book may also provide the opportunity for parents to rethink their
relationship with risk at a stage where risk-aversion can always seem like the
more ‘responsible’ choice.
With

These risks are designed to be done with your child. It is not fifty things
parents have to do, or fifty risks kids should take while their parents are
doing other things. These are opportunities to connect and develop your
relationship with your child. The activities in the book should hopefully be
fun for both you and your kids, and an opportunity for you to bond.

Sure, some of these risks involve letting your kid do something on their
own, but you’re still the one making that decision. They also give you the
chance to talk to your kids about risk, and why some risk is good and too
much is bad. Having a child who considers the risks before they hurl
themselves down a staircase on a boogie board (hypothetically) is a win.

Hopefully this book will spark a broader conversation between you and
your child about risks, how to approach them, and how important our
decisions are, so that when the time comes, they can make those decisions
and take those calculated risks without you. As your child grows more
independent, finding things you can still do together is fundamental to
maintaining your connection. This is a great way to pursue those
opportunities.
Kids

Seems a bit weird to write a book about kids and not actually talk about
kids. What is a kid? A kid is a child, but every child is different, and every
year of childhood is wildly different from the last. In the first year it can
seem like your baby changes every single day. Then you have to rouse your
six-year-old from their slumber one morning and you realise they are
basically a teenager. How did that happen?

Childhood is not eighteen years, or ten years, or five. It is a series of

developmental stages that are approximately linked to your child’s age –
although from a parent’s perspective some children seem to change
overnight.

When my firstborn, Jack, was two and we had moved beyond the Wonder
Weeks app (which charts the developmental leaps babies experience in their
first twenty months of life), I read about Erik Erikson’s life cycle theory.
Erikson was a developmental psychologist who coined the phrase ‘identity
crisis’, so we actually quote him all the time. He outlined eight key stages
of psychosocial development and saw each stage as having a conflict – one
concept against another, which we navigate as we develop. Here I’m going
to focus on the first four, as they take in the age range that this book focuses
on.

THE FIRST FOUR STAGES OF ERIK ERIKSON’S LIFE

CYCLE THEORY

BIRTH–18 MONTHS OLD:

TRUST VERSUS MISTRUST
This trust is built on predictability of care: having trust in those around you
because they look after you. A lot of this is seen in secure attachment and
physical connections with parents and caregivers. If developed properly, it
will lead to hope, while an absence of trust can lead to anxiety and fear.

18 MONTHS–3 YEARS OLD:

AUTONOMY VERSUS SHAME
This is when a child develops their sense of will, and for this reason, many
of the risks in this book will be focused on this area. When a child is not
given the opportunity to practise autonomy, not only will they doubt their
own abilities, but they may feel shame about not being able to do things.

3–5 YEARS OLD:

INITIATIVE VERSUS GUILT
Before they start at school, preschoolers need to develop purpose through
creating, planning and controlling interactions with other people. This could
occur when they invent a simple game of make-believe with friends at
preschool. By controlling children during this stage with overly prescriptive
activities, they do not develop this initiative and may feel a sense of guilt
because they in turn try to be too forceful (overusing the sense of will they
developed in the previous stage), which will then lead to punishment. And
if you don’t treat your child’s growing curiosity with respect, they will feel
guilty about asking questions.

6–12 YEARS OLD:

INDUSTRY VERSUS INFERIORITY
At this stage your child develops their skill of competence. This is when
you as a parent need to step back and let your child do the thing, so they
learn the skill, so they know they can do harder things. This is where you
become a coach rather than the boss, and recognise your child’s own ability
to develop and grow. This stage, if not practised, can have significant
effects on your child’s ability, confidence and self-esteem, which are all
really important when they start high school.
At all of these stages, encouraging your child to take risks is going to help
them to maintain that trust, that autonomy, that initiative and that industry.

These stages need to be recognised as your child experiences them, because

each is the foundation of the next, and it is so much harder to develop hope,
will, purpose or competence from scratch as a teenager. As a teacher, I have
seen many cohorts of students finish school, and the observation I’ve made
is that the students who thrive, who are leaders, who excel at sport or music
or debating, or who are just really kind humans, are those with parents who
have developed their own child’s competence, and done so steadily, since
they were young.

AN EDUCATIONAL APPROACH TO PARENTING:

BACKWARDS MAPPING
There’s a key strategy in teaching used by curriculum writers, departments
and individual teachers that’s known as backwards mapping. In other
words, you start with where you want the student to end. What do you want
a student who has studied history for thirteen years to be able to do? What
does that mean you want them to be able to do at the end of Year 10? Year
8? Year 7? Once you’ve identified the end goal, all learning can be designed
as steps to get the student closer to that point.

Parenting should be the same. We don’t know what our kids will be like –
their personalities come out on their own and in their own time – but by
having an idea of what skills we want them to have when they are
teenagers, or adults, we can start working towards that goal as they grow
up.

It can be very easy to get stuck on the hamster wheel of daily life. As a
friend of mine says, ‘The days are long but the weeks are short’ (okay, so it
turns out my friend stole it from Gretchen Rubin). I think even the weeks
can be long too, and in the midst of it all we can forget the kind of children
we hope to raise, and end up filling in the gaps later on, rather than building
up their strengths as our kids grow.
This book is focused on children up to the age of ten. That is because a lot
of the skills I’m talking about need to be developed before your child is a
teenager so that they have the ability to recognise the difference between a
‘good risk’ and a ‘risky risk’. Teenagers are aware of the potential negative
outcomes of a risk, but they will usually focus on the potential positive
outcomes instead, thanks to that pesky underdeveloped prefrontal cortex.
By bringing your child up with an understanding of and preparation for
risks in life, they will be more skilled in risk assessment and risk calculation
by the time they hit the crucial teenage years.

The fifty risks here are arranged into a general ascending order by age, with
the majority in the five-to-ten-year-old bracket, because that is when kids
are most likely to start doing things on their own, as their competency and
desire for independence grows. This book isn’t designed to be read cover to
cover (although you’re welcome to do that). Dip in and out of the relevant
risks for your child at their age, and revisit the book a month or a year or
two later, to explore new risks. You may find that some involve getting your
child to do things a bit earlier than you’d expected – go with it! You’ll
really find out what they’re capable of.

Remember, this is not something that you do as some kind of parenting

High Intensity Interval Training; it’s something that’s built on over years.
It’s also not something you need to constantly do, but you do need to
consciously do it, when you can. The more you do it, the more it will
become part of your everyday parenting.

These risks are part of the steps you could take to raise children who are
confident, autonomous, compassionate and responsible. I hope you walk
away from this book with sensible and practical strategies to help your kids
be the excellent humans you want them to be.
 The months before your baby can crawl and walk
are the cuddliest, but also the scariest, because
it feels like it is all on you. For this stage, I haven’t
suggested any risks for your child to take because
it’s already a very personal and varying time. Instead
I have included a number of parenting risks. These
offer some ways of thinking that could be different
to what you read online or in parenting books
(although I have also included the parenting books
that I loved when going through this stage with
Jack and Alice in my resources on pages 202–203).
1. Remember, they can’t fall off the
floor

When your child is a baby, before they are crawling or walking, it can be
hard to keep from watching them like a hawk. This is partly because they
are very cute and make amazing noises, and you just want to be near them
all the time. But the first ‘risk’ you can expose your child to is as much for
you as it is for them. Lay them on a blanket or towel on the floor,
somewhere they can’t fall off. Make sure there aren’t any dangerous things
around them, like pieces of LEGO or enriched uranium, and then step away.
Not for ages, but maybe a few minutes. A great place to practise this risk is
on a bath mat while you have a shower. (My friend did this once and her
baby had the best nap he’d had in weeks. )

Now this might seem like the lamest of risks, but it is doing two things.
One, it is giving you time to yourself, in short bursts, which is important for
avoiding parental burnout. Secondly, it is showing your child that they can
actually spend a few minutes on their own. If you want evidence that this
works, look at the experience between firstborns, who often get more
attention than they know what to do with, and subsequent children who are
often left to their own devices while their older siblings are demanding
something.

While I do love academic research, I am instead about to illustrate this

theory with a quote from Seth Meyers’ stand-up show Lobby Baby.
2. Add a baby to your routine (not
always the other way around)

I remember when I started going to mothers’ group, there was one mum
who always came with her make-up done. I was amazed. How did she
manage make-up when I was barely managing to wear pants? But what I
quickly realised is that in those first few crazy months, we all have one
thing we will not give up. Hers was make-up. Mine was coffee.

I have a friend who didn’t ever want to go to a cafe because her baby might
cry. Babies cry. Some babies cry a lot, and some babies don’t. But crying
babies are a part of the first year of parenting, and if you trap yourself at
home in the cycle of sofa–change table–bed–sofa–change table–bed, you
won’t develop your own skills to get out of the house with a baby, which
will make the next few years even harder. Because if a crying baby scares
you, just wait until they’re a rampaging toddler.

So if you have something you love to do, and you’re worried about doing it
with a baby, don’t be. Find a way to add your baby to that routine. Whether
it is getting out of the house for half an hour, cooking something that isn’t
pureed, going to the gym, whatever. Try to do it. It will be really hard the
first few times, but stick with it. The risk will pay off for your own sense of
achievement, autonomy and enjoyment of being a parent.
3. Leave the baby (with a
responsible adult)

Whether you are the mother, father, guardian or whatever, it can be very
scary to leave a baby with someone else. Especially when there are boobs
and breastfeeding involved. But I would suggest that doing this, even once,
even for an hour, in the first six months of being a parent, would be a risk
you can handle, and one that will help everyone involved grow.

At around the age of six to nine months, babies learn that in fact they are
not the same person as their primary parent. At this stage, leaving the baby
with a new person is difficult. If that person has been left with the baby
before, it is not nearly as difficult. The point is, you’re going to have to do it
at some point, so do it earlier.
When Jack was around three months old, we planned to go for dinner and
my parents offered to babysit. The milk was expressed, the breast pads were
in, the baby was handed over to my mum, and my dad finally thought he
had a chance of being able to hold Jack. We went to a restaurant
approximately five minutes away. We spent the whole dinner worrying
about the baby and returned about an hour later. But the baby was asleep.
The baby survived. We survived. The grandparents remain integral to our
kids’ lives.

To this end, I would also suggest leaving the baby with the other parent as
often as possible. Annabel Crabb talks about this as a societal issue in her
book The Wife Drought and the Quarterly Essay ‘Men at Work’. The reason
this is so important to do in the first year is that you can very easily get into
the situation Crabb describes as the ‘casual implied assumption that my
partner is a simpleton who cannot make a Vegemite sandwich
unsupervised’. That is a learned response of women (for the most part) who
have fallen into the habit of getting jobs done themselves because it is
easier than watching their (for the most part) male partner struggle with
figuring it out. The ‘mere male’ concept might have made sense forty years
ago, but it shouldn’t anymore. Also, couples who share chores more have
more sex, so that’s another good reason to make sure both parents are
actively looking after the kids.
4. Forget about all the judgement

I think if we were to consider the jobs that are most often and thoughtlessly
judged by society, they would be those of parents, especially mothers, and
teachers (trust me, I know). The latter are judged because almost everyone
has spent thirteen years in a classroom and is therefore an expert in
teaching. And parents are judged because everyone has had a parent, or is a
parent, or knows a parent.

Parenting has changed a lot between the generations, and will continue to
do so. Forty years ago there were no baby monitors, let alone heart rate
monitors built into cots, and there was no expectation that parental
involvement in children’s education would go beyond reading school report
cards. Every generation thinks they had it or did it best. Every couple
without kids knows exactly how they would parent – with no screens, no
sugar, and no sense of reality.
As a parent, you will be judged. You are going to be judged by people who
have never met you, by people who see you on the bus, who watch you at
the supermarket.

I am a brave person. I once had a man in his sixties give me a look when I
was breastfeeding Jack in a cafe. I said, ‘His taxes are going to pay for your
pension so you’d better hope he’s well nourished.’ The guy jumped out of
his skin so quickly that I worried my tax dollars were going to pay for his
trip to the cardiology ward.

That line did not come to me out of nowhere – he wasn’t the first person to
cast a disapproving look in my direction. It’s good to have a comeback.
Generally the comeback will lead to the judgy bear saying something lovely
like, ‘I was just admiring how well you were doing considering X,’ or, ‘I
don’t know how you guys do it these days, it wasn’t this complicated when
I was young.’ But beyond having comebacks, which are admittedly pretty
superficial, have the confidence in your own parenting to know that a judgy
look from a stranger isn’t going to make you doubt yourself. Backing
yourself is the greatest comeback you can have. And make sure, when
you’re not in the trenches of parenting, that you don’t judge those who are.
 There are moments of fog lifting as your baby
graduates to being a toddler. They happen slowly,
and don’t last very long. You look up and realise
that while you’ve been scrolling Instagram for
ten minutes, your nine-month-old was repeatedly
putting a toy through a toilet roll tunnel. You wake
up realising you haven’t been woken up (maybe
this happens in the first year, maybe it doesn’t).
But gradually, the fog really does start to lift. This
is when you can enjoy the fun of small people with
their own personalities. As they grow, this is a great
time to embrace some risks that encourage
more independence.
5. Roam free

When parents in the 50s or even the 90s had children, they would keep the
baby in a play pen because it was safe and contained. The rest of the house
was a grown-up fantasy of vases on shelves and cupboard doors that opened
with ease. Now, however, parents seem to be babyproofing the entire house
and letting kids colonise every nook and cranny with pieces of DUPLO and
sucked-on toast.

Some children are obsessed with getting into locked cupboards, but if your
child isn’t, then you don’t need to lock every cupboard. Giving children the
opportunity to explore without constraint will teach them more about their
own safety and awareness than making sure they never get into that
cupboard. Obviously electricity and power points are dangerous, but don’t
keep safety locks on for longer than you need to. I would suggest a defensive
protection of your house rather than offensive – protect as needed, rather
than preemptively. The only people telling you that you must have every
single thing babyproofed are the makers of babyproofing products. I say this
as someone who still has safety locks on the kitchen drawers that her six-
year-old knows how to open, and that I don’t know how to remove.

Also, remember to let your baby have some free-range fun, where they can
explore and discover without being unsafe, perhaps in the backyard or a
playground.
6. Eat sand, sniff dirt, get sick

Kids eat dirt. My daughter can make herself a three-course meal out of sand.
As parents, we worry about germs, especially when our children are coming
out of the newborn stage and entering the ‘if I can pick it up, it’s going in my
mouth’ stage.

I am not going to tell you when you can stop sterilising bottles and dummies
because I am not a doctor, but the ‘hygiene hypothesis’ argues that some
exposure to microbes helps develop a child’s immune system. Luckily,
finding these germs isn’t hard – they are in playgrounds, parks, beaches and
the garden. Germs, for the most part, live outside.
In the book Dirt Is Good, doctors Jack Gilbert, Rob Knight and Sandra
Blakeslee showed that in our desire to protect our children from disease in
the short term (fewer colds and gut issues), we have weakened their
immunity to other diseases like asthma and eczema. A Swedish study even
showed that children whose parents ‘suck’ their child’s dummy to make it
clean (which of course, it doesn’t), had fewer rates of asthma as they grew
up. Other research shows that owning a dog (see risk 39) during pregnancy
also increases your child’s immunity and decreases their risk of obesity –
and not just because they want to chase the dog around the place!

There is another reason for embracing germ exposure. I went back to work
when Jack was eight months old, and Jack went to day care. During that time
I had to take heaps of sick days because Jack constantly got sick, but a
girlfriend reassured me that kids who go to day care before school have far
fewer sick days once they do start school. My wonderful friend wasn’t just
trying to make me feel better – actual evidence backs her up. The more colds
and tummy bugs and sniffles your child gets before they are two and a half,
the fewer they should get as they get older. So more sick days in day care
means fewer sick days at school. Jack is a testament to that: he only had one
day off in his whole first year of school.

Washing hands and safe food preparation are important, of course, but don’t
freak out about the germs that your kids could encounter outside or at day
care. Instead, remember that they are developing their immune systems by
doing kid things.
7. Help-not-help

There is nothing quite as unhelpful as a helpful toddler. Hours of

productivity have been wasted allowing toddlers to help-not-help cut
vegetables, or fold laundry. A two-year-old is not going to be able to put
their laundry away. A three-year-old is probably not going to put it away
properly. A four-year-old might, and a five-year-old absolutely should be
able to. But, as with many things in life, we can only put our laundry away
properly if we’ve had the opportunity to do it badly multiple times
previously.

It is tempting to distract your kids with TV so you can have a moment to put
away the laundry, or pack away the shopping, but sometimes it is better to let
your child help-not-help, even when you just want to get the job done. A
child who is helping-not-helping is learning how to actually help, and they
will eventually get better at it. They are seeing the jobs their parents do
around the house, and letting them get involved means they won’t feel as
though they are entitled to not do those jobs.

Start with small tasks, and focus on consistency over perfectionism.

Eventually, give them their own list of jobs. Mix it up between individual
jobs (cleaning their lunch box) and family jobs (tidying the living room), so
it’s clear that they are not only responsible for themselves, they are also a
part of a family unit. Sure, each job might take twice as long to do at first,
but eventually, you may not have to do the job at all. And bonus – you have
raised a child who understands the importance of people helping each other.
8. Consciously sit on LEGO

It’s natural to want to leave kids who are playing to their own devices, or on
their own devices. But it is important to take opportunities to consciously
connect with your kids when you can, even if it is just for a quarter of an
hour. The decision to put your phone away or leave the dishes in the sink in
order to play a game of UNO or do some drawing is a risk, because it is
counter to how we live our lives – in a flurry of multitasking.

This probably sounds like it is in conflict with many of the risks in this book,
which focus on getting your children to be more independent. But
independence starts with connection. Jennifer Kolari, a family therapist who
founded Connected Parenting, writes about the importance of having
consciously connected time with your kids. Kolari’s research has shown that
fifteen minutes of one-on-one time with your kid of an evening, doing what
they want – whether that’s playing with soft toys or having a dance off or
reading the same book for the eleventy billionth time – can make bedtime
easier. This is because some kids, especially when they are young and in day
care, can feel that going to bed is another big separation from their parents.
That can seem scary. Dedicating that time to your child can give them a
release of oxytocin that will develop their emotional security and their
ability to develop healthy connections with others.

We can’t always be 100 per cent focused on our kids – and frankly, doing so
would be disastrous – but making time to consciously sit on LEGO or get
covered in glitter with your child will give them the secure attachment they
need to become more independent when they’re older.
9. Play with sticks

Playgrounds are wonderful at developing certain skills – how to go down a

slide, scramble up a rope and take turns – but there is also something to be
said for less structured play, either in nature or at home, that involves
building the space as much as playing in it. The creation of an imaginary
world through arranging sticks or rocks or even lines in sand develops
imagination as well as physical strength.

While there has been a shift to more open-minded play spaces, most
playgrounds are still very prescriptive (it is a pirate ship, that is all it can be),
and the thought of heaving large sticks and rocks around the play area would
send most municipal council workers into cardiac arrest. But children can
build forts in spaces that aren’t official play areas – parks with bush areas
will have sticks, bark and leaves to build with.
Building a fort is basically the kid version of being a management
consultant. They see a problem (the lack of a fort) and have to find a way to
fix the problem (build a fort) with whatever they have around them
(resources), which is a bit like having a budget to deal with. They have to
manage their team (you and any other kids who are around) as well as other
stakeholders (ensure smaller kids who want to destroy the fort are out of the
way).

Forts – or cubbies or rafts or rockets – can also be built at home, and require
a huge amount of mess, as well as patience from parents. Leave the fort up
for the whole weekend – so long as that doesn’t mean you have to sleep
without a pillow. Let your kid enjoy their achievement.

Building a fort can also be about being present for your kid. Let them lead
the activity, and even if you can see that the pillow or stick clearly needs to
go behind the wall to keep it structurally sound, don’t say so. Let your child
figure it out. Ask questions like, ‘What do you think we should do with this
sheet?’ or, ‘I wonder where this could go to keep the flux capacitor secure?’
Once you see your child entering that state of ‘flow’, try to step away and let
them work on their own, until they ask for help. You might be needed
actively, or they may want you to be less involved but still supporting them.
10. Climb a tree

Tree climbing is a bit of a lost art. Many people don’t have a big tree in their
backyard, and most playgrounds are focused on equipment rather than
nature. However, tree climbing has been shown to have both physical and
cognitive benefits, helping children develop coordination and strength as
well as confidence and problem-solving skills.

So take your kids to a park that has some big trees (with accessible first
branches) and let them try climbing. Try not to help them – let them figure it
out themselves. The process of working out which branches they can and
can’t reach is a chance for them to learn about their own limitations and their
risk profile. You might feel the need to hover around like a clown with a
trampoline the first few times, but just remember, we are descended from
apes, and they’re pretty good in trees.

Climbing trees is also about being in nature. Bugs can be watched; leaves
and flowers can be collected. Spending time in nature gives your children a
greater understanding of their world, and the effects we have on it. Nature
play also improves fitness and motor skills, and provides greater open-ended
ways for children to develop their imaginations. There are nature-based
kindergartens opening all over the world, recreating what used to be a
standard in many childhoods. You don’t need to enrol your kid in a nature-
based play activity though, you just need to get them comfortable being
outside – and perhaps up a tree.
11. Be bored

Okay, this isn’t so much a risk to your child as it is a risk to the state of your
home and your sanity. We need to let children be bored. The ability to
entertain oneself is learned, and needs to be practised. Technology, weekend
sports, birthday parties and generally overbooked schedules mean that this
skill is practised less and less frequently. But boredom is important.

Many people believe that ‘boredom is for the bored’, and that being in a
state of boredom demonstrates a lack of creativity or initiative, but in fact
boredom is for creative people. Creativity doesn’t grow in the over-
occupied, it grows in those who have time to let ideas develop, argues
Professor Lea Waters, author of The Strength Switch. Boredom also develops
resourcefulness. Giving your kids a few hours to entertain themselves will
develop their ability to find things they want to do with their spare time.
So don’t feel guilty if there are some afternoons where you have no plans.
Having no plans can be the very thing your kid needs to come up with the
best ideas. When you notice your child playing on their own, leave them. If
they ask to watch TV, try to delay it. I find that asking Jack to put his shoes
away when he comes home generally leads to 20 minutes or so of him
playing happily on his own. Set up some toys with your child, then tell them
you need to go and do something else. In the short term you might hear ‘I’m
bored’ ad nauseam, and your home will get really messy, but eventually,
you’ll think your child has run away and you’ll freak out, only to discover
they’re in their room playing LEGO silently and didn’t hear you call their
name five times. Hypothetically.
12. Make friends with adults

When your child is no longer an attached infant, it can still feel risky to
‘hand them over’ to another adult, even when that adult is someone you
know well. Without considering any actual dangers, what if your kid blurts
out something embarrassing about your own life? Kids have no filter – Alice
once shared with everyone at day care that I ‘got in trouble at work for
knitting’ (I didn’t).

For all the talk we have about it taking a ‘village’ to raise a child, we don’t
seem to rely on others as often as we should. Whether it is a grandparent, an
aunty, a godparent, a nanny or a day care educator, it is incredibly important
for children to develop strong emotional relationships with charismatic
adults who are not their parents, who they can talk to openly and frankly
about anything, including when they think you are being unfair. Parenting
author Maggie Dent refers to these people as ‘lighthouses’, and family
psychologist Dr Michael Carr-Gregg argues that having another adult in a
child’s life is a key factor in them growing up to be a resilient adult.

These days it’s rare to find multiple generations living under the same roof,
or even in the same city, and there is a tendency to socialise with other
families so the kids can hang out with other kids. That means these
relationships often need to be sought out rather than stumbled upon. So,
when you notice that your child has a favourite aunty, or clicks with a family
friend who you trust, nurture that relationship by inviting them around, or
asking them to take your child to the park. Encourage phone conversations
and FaceTime with them. Later on, especially in the teenage years, that adult
will be a great source of wisdom and perspective.
13. Get out of routine (sometimes)

Apparently Barack Obama wore the same white shirt every day in the White
House so he didn’t have to make any more decisions before, you know,
running the country. Routines keep us from having to reinvent the wheel
every day, and are hugely important for young kids, especially around things
like bath and bedtimes. However, there is something to be said for
occasionally stepping out of our routines and seeing what happens.

The time this happens most naturally is during holidays, whether it be a

staycation over a long weekend or going on a family trip. Holidays, no
matter how near or far, how budget or glamorous, provide great
opportunities for kids of any age (and adults) to learn. Travel can expose us
to risks that we wouldn’t otherwise get a chance to take. Plus, they are times
for families to bond. Holidays create memories, and positive family
memories are important in helping protect a child’s resilience and sense of
self as they become adults.

We went on a holiday with our kids when they were almost four and almost
one, and I was amazed at how much Jack in particular grew up during our
two weeks away. Working-mother guilt swept over me: did that mean he’d
be a higher functioning human if I was at home with him all the time? But in
fact, it was from a change in the day-to-day routine that the growth occurred.

Holidays aren’t just about spending more time together. They’re also about
doing less each day, unless you’re on an Amazing Race–style adventure.
They give you space and time to practise risks with your kids that you may
not have the capacity to during your normal routines. Let your children make
their own fun while you take some quiet time to nap or read a book (it’s your
holiday too). Let them scramble up and down rocks at a beach. Watch them,
but don’t shadow them. Give them opportunities to try doing things on their
own, without the pressures of getting to school and work: putting on their
own sunscreen and packing their own snacks. These are skills they can use
when they get home as well.

But that is not to say that you can’t find the opportunity to experience
‘holidays’ in the everyday by mixing things up a little bit. Professor Ian
Hickie talks about the importance of new experiences on a child’s brain
development – he says ‘every new sight, every new sound, every new smell
causes the brain to rapidly develop synaptic connections, that is connections
between the brain cells, to capture that experience’. Board games, bike rides
and little family adventures are all ways to encounter those new experiences
and create new memories together. Take the time to slow down.
14. Raid the fridge

You may not consider making a cheese sandwich to be one of the riskiest
things you can do, but trust me, when it’s a child making that sandwich, the
mess is real – at least the first few times. As with all things, the better your
child gets at it, the less mess there is, and the less you have to do. Eventually,
if you have more than one child, the first child will make snacks for ALL
YOUR CHILDREN and you can go and have a nice lie-down.

In case you haven’t already figured this out, kids need to snack – a lot.
Letting them get their own snacks will make their constant hunger easier for
both you and for them. Firstly, have healthy snacks available. (If your house
is full of potato chips and chocolate bars then your kid will eat potato chips
and chocolate bars.) Have snacks that your child can open and easily reach; a
fruit bowl is great. Cereal is an easy one as well – getting them to make their
own breakfast is a huge win. Drinks can be tricky for young kids, but
practise pouring with water outside on a hot day: it’s fun and won’t cause
any dramas. And remember, spills are all part of the learning process.
Make sure your child checks that they can have a snack before they get one.
A six-year-old who eats a sandwich twenty minutes before dinner isn’t likely
to eat much dinner, and they need to learn that mealtimes aren’t just about
eating whenever they want. Fortunately, there’s usually someone in our
kitchen half an hour or so before dinner, so there’s little chance of the kids
sneaking a predinner snack. If they do manage this, I’ll be calling the early
recruitment line for spy agencies.

Making snacks can easily transition into making kindergarten or school

lunches too. It is very hard for a child to complain about their lunch when
they made it themselves. From the first term of school, Jack started packing
his own lunch, with a bit of quality control from us. Every morning he
makes a sandwich, gets a muffin that we made a few weeks ago from the
freezer, grabs a yoghurt pack, and I try to chuck in an homage to vegetables
– cucumber, corn or carrot. Done. But this wouldn’t be the case if he hadn’t
started getting his own snacks when he was younger, so for the love of
autonomy and giving yourself a break, start now!
15. Order their own babycino

My family and I regularly go to a cafe just around the corner from my house.
When Jack was around two we started telling him that if he wanted a
babycino or something, he had to ask the staff politely for it. We are now
almost at the point of letting him go up the road to get coffees – we just need
to figure out how to balance KeepCups on his bike!

The skill of talking to a stranger who also has an inbuilt level of societal
trust is one that can be nurtured from very early on. Start when the cafe isn’t
super busy, and accompany your child to the counter if needed. Remind
them of the importance of using their manners and speaking clearly when
ordering.

Cafes and restaurants also allow opportunities for children to develop their
ability to identify people who make them feel uncomfortable. I have seen
parents take their ten-year-olds into the bathroom at a cafe even though it is
right near their table. Hovering around children all the time outsources that
skill to the hoverer, and can have two dangerous potential results – the child
not learning to recognise when they feel unsafe, and the child becoming
fearful of everyone. This is particularly important given the current
disconnect between online and offline safety with the rise of things like
social media–connected gaming. Teaching your child to understand their
own safety before they’re online will make it a lot easier to grasp in a cyber
safety context.
So talk to your child about stranger danger and trusted adults, and let them
go to the bathroom on their own. And while your child is in the bathroom,
steal some of their food, because there’s no way they’ll share if you ask.
16. Go hungry

My son hates chocolate. It seems that at almost every birthday party there is
a chocolate cake. When he was two, I would bring a vanilla cupcake to each
party just in case (and eat it on the way home if the birthday cake wasn’t
chocolate). As he grew up, I realised that I was indulging his own food jag.
It is normal to go to another person’s party and not like something they have
served, and it is weird to bring your own version of that meal. So we had a
conversation explaining that if the birthday cake is chocolate, he can just
have extra sweets or chips. The only birthday cake he can control is his own.

Some kids do have very specific food jags, and will not eat anything unless
it is covered in tomato sauce or cut up into star shapes, for example. But the
more kids are faced with the experience of NOT having those jags met, the
more prepared they are to face difficulties. Accommodating their every quirk
doesn’t teach them to compromise, it teaches them that they’re entitled to
have everything their way, and the world just doesn’t work like that. If your
kid doesn’t like what you’ve cooked for dinner, resist the urge to get them
something else. Don’t perpetuate the idea that you’re running a restaurant.
As my mother always says, ‘No child has ever voluntarily starved to death.’
17. Fall off a bike, skateboard or
scooter

Sometime before your child is three they get sick of being trapped in the
pram, but they’re still too small to walk meaningful distances. There is a
definite benefit to teaching your child to ride some form of transport –
whether it’s a bike, a scooter, a skateboard or a hovercraft – before they hit
the point where they refuse to go in the pram. You may think that your
eighteen-month-old or two-year-old is too young to learn to ride a scooter,
but younger siblings are proof that kids can figure this stuff out themselves –
usually about six months before you even imagined you’d want them to.
There are a lot of schools of thought on how to learn to ride a bike, including
an anti–training wheels theory where kids start on balance or ‘strider’ bikes,
which have no pedals, and learn to balance while moving before graduating
to a normal bike. Or there is the way every kid until 2010 learned to ride a
bike, with training wheels. Whatever works for your family is the way to go.

Your kid will fall off. Probably several times. The key is to make sure they
get back on. Any damage they do to themselves is likely to be minimal, and
will be far outweighed by the confidence they’ll gain (and the increased
mobility you’ll both enjoy because you won’t have to carry them
everywhere).

Be aware of the laws and regulations regarding where kids are allowed to
ride, and who with. And make sure your children learn about road safety
way before they are old enough to ride anywhere on their own. If you have
two or more children, for example, you will inevitably encounter a situation
where the eldest has scootered up ahead, and the younger one has a tantrum
because her shoes are on the right feet, when she wanted them on the wrong
feet, even though she put them on the right feet. And you want that older
child to stop at the corner, to wait, and to know what it means to be careful.
18. Come last (or at least second)

Dr Michael Carr-Gregg talks about ‘resilience deficit disorder’ in kids.

Many children are either not playing games at home or at schools because
we don’t want them to be upset by losing, or they are playing games in such
a way that ‘everyone wins’.

The greatest opportunity for developing skills at any game is by losing.

Humans learn from bad experiences, so play games with your children and
allow them to lose sometimes. Maybe not every game – you don’t want your
child to be perpetually smashed, but you don’t want them to win every single
game, either. If they are upset about losing, let them calm down and then talk
to them gently about it being a game. You may even want to tell them you
will sometimes let them win, and other times you win, so their expectation
isn’t just that adults are terrible at board games. Until one day, your kid will
actually beat you at a board game and you will have to harness your own
resilience.

Games like draughts, go fish, UNO or chess are excellent for developing
resilience and empathy. There is also the opportunity to practise this with
peer-based games like pass the parcel or hide and seek. The more your child
is used to the risk of losing, the better they will handle disappointment as
they grow up.
19. Let them level up in their own
time

During this period between ages one to five, it can be very easy to see your
child do something for themselves, like climb up on their highchair, but still
continue lifting them into it afterwards. This will be for two main reasons.
Firstly, you are on autodrive because your mind is running like a web
browser with twenty-three tabs open, and you forget that they can actually
do it for themselves now. The second reason is that it is easier/faster/less
stressful to just keep doing the thing. But as Lenore Skenazy, founder of the
free-range kids movement, says, ‘The more you help them, the less you help
them.’
Imagine if you were given a promotion at work, and the person whose job
you are meant to now have just kept doing the job themselves, right in front
of you. It would be incredibly awkward, as well as making you feel a bit
useless. So if your small person is learning a new skill, like putting on their
shoes, keep giving them the opportunity to practise it. It may (okay, it will)
mean everything takes five times longer, and sometimes you just cannot
wait, but in general, try to nurture that process.

This all relates to the self-determination theory by professors Richard Ryan

and Edward Deci: you want the child to feel a bit challenged by a task while
being competent enough to achieve it, and you want them to have autonomy.
Autonomy relates to the idea of being independent and intrinsically
motivated – they want to learn how to do something for themselves, or for
the benefit of the activity itself. But don’t feel too much despair at your child
having outgrown your help, because the key third element of self-
determination theory is relatedness – children need to know they have a
loving parent who is there to help them if needed, and who will let them
learn at their own pace.
20. Get really exhausted

Have you ever looked at photos of families out on hikes and thought, there is
no way my child would do that? Think again. The experience of going on a
hike or ride is a new adventure for kids, and one that they will love. It’s got
bugs, it’s got sticks, it’s got dirt, it’s got a picnic at the end of it. What’s not
to love?

It can seem very daunting to take young kids out for anything longer than a
trip to the playground. The equipment, the nappy bag, the change of clothes,
water bottles – why bother? Especially given the extremely high chance that
you will only get 200 metres from your home before someone needs to go to
the toilet. But, despite the effort and the risk of forgetting something, it is
worth it.

A friend of mine had his kids riding motocross from age nine, because that’s
what he loves doing. Regardless of whether you’re BMX banditing or just
going for walks, there is a great benefit to being in nature. The Japanese call
it shinrin-yoku –forest bathing. This art of spending time in nature has been
known to increase life expectancy and mental wellbeing. So making a habit
of going out and spending time in nature as a child will mean this gets added
to the arsenal of ways your child can protect themselves against stressful
situations when they are adults.

Hikes and bike riding also make for a great family ‘thing’ to do together.
Having a family ‘thing’ before your kids are teenagers makes it easier to
continue it, and saves you scrambling for a ritual once they start to seriously
individuate at around thirteen or fifteen. Creating them after that point could
prompt a lot of eye rolls. We decided bike riding would be our thing, and so
we started with baby steps when the kids were very young – riding to the
local cafe, to the local park. It gets us out of the house on a weekend, and is
teaching the kids about road safety, directions and, of course, getting back on
your bike when you fall off. It is also not just child-centred. Going to
playgrounds is great, but that’s really for the kids. Getting into the habit of
doing activities that the whole family enjoys breaks the idea that every
weekend activity needs to be about the kids. Parents need weekends too.

Also – these adventures give you great opportunities for discussion.

Walking, riding or even driving, for that matter, are great times for
conversations. With a child, there is a power dynamic when you’re sitting
across the kitchen table talking to each other. This is minimised when you’re
moving in the same direction. Plus, there is not as much need for eye
contact, so the conversation can flow better. So get moving, scrape your
knee and have a chat along the way.
21. Clean up their own mess

Depending on how you introduce it, making your child tidy their own room
can either be in no way risky, or incredibly stressful. As with most risks, I
suggest starting this very early and very small. As soon as your child is
walking they can put things in places – toys in a toy box, shoes in a drawer.
Starting each day with a routine of pyjamas under the pillow or in the
laundry basket will create a habit of putting things away. This habit means
cleaning their space will become a much easier task each time.

Kay Wills Wyma wrote a book about her one-year journey getting her five
kids, aged three to sixteen, to clean the house. She wrote that picking up
socks and towels around the house was not just ‘solidifying my children’s
expectation that someone will always be around to do their work for them’
but also that it didn’t give them a chance ‘to organise their closets based on
their own logic’. By getting your kids to be more responsible for their own
belongings, you are helping develop both their independence and their sense
of organisation – and reducing the chances that they will lose stuff!

It is okay to whinge about having to do household chores. I whine about

doing laundry all the time. Doesn’t mean I don’t do it. It is unrealistic to
expect that kids won’t complain about having to do a job. Complaining is
fine – so long as they know that it won’t get them out of doing it.
22. Have the tantrum

I want you to remember a time when you got really annoyed by something
that was pretty innocuous. Mine was the printer. I had prepared a whole
bunch of past exam papers for students, I hit ‘print and delete’ on the
school’s printer system and then it jammed and I’m pretty certain those exam
papers flew off into the hyperverse, never to be seen again. I was so
annoyed. I growled. Like, actually growled – this visceral throat growl. I
tightened my fists, and if I had been any angrier I probably would have
smacked the printer. Then I fixed the jam, went back to my office and
reprinted the papers.
The fact is, we all have our moments. Big emotions are part of life. And in
small kids we call them tantrums. In response to these tantrums, we tend to
launch into problem-solving mode, frantic to get our child to calm down.
When we do this, we’re denying them the opportunity to feel their feelings.
This risk is about sometimes letting your child have that tantrum, hearing
them, and telling them that it will be okay. Often we can’t have the tantrum
we want to have – we have to go to that thing, we have to be polite to that
person. Explain that to them. But occasionally, let them experience big
emotions fully.

This is not about giving them what they want, or distracting them with
screen time or ice cream or a toy. In fact, it is really important that you don’t
let your child think a tantrum will be rewarded in any way. Just talk to them.
Tell them you love them, that you’re there for them when they need you, and
let them go.

Kids need to know they can be vulnerable. Professor Brené Brown talks
about the importance of avoiding shame when kids are experiencing big
emotions. Brown explains that what we are and what we do teaches children
far more than what we try to teach them – so ‘we must be what we want our
children to become’. If you want your child to be able to be honest about
their emotions, you need to model this by being honest about your own.

There is also something to be said for the language of emotions. ‘Sad’ can
refer to a multitude of emotions; so can ‘angry’. Teach your children the
emotions that fit within those umbrellas, so they can identify emotions
within themselves, as well as in others.
The middle of a blotchy-faced, tear-stained tantrum is not a teachable
moment, it’s a moment for connection. Once your child feels connected to
you, you can redirect behaviour. Daniel Siegel, in No Drama Discipline,
argues that by being proactive and letting your children connect with you
when they’re experiencing a tantrum, you may not even need to redirect
your child’s behaviour – they will do it themselves once they’ve calmed
down. Siegel uses the term ‘mindsight’: being aware of what is going on
below the surface in a situation. It’s about understanding behaviour rather
than justifying it, and dealing with the reason for the behaviour rather than
the behaviour itself.

All of this has to be done with boundaries. Families have rules. In relation to
tantrums in our house, the kids can punch pillows or scream, but there is no
hitting, no slamming doors and no throwing things. Jack does a ‘superchill’
where he hugs his body, although his tantrums are fewer and further between
these days. Alice is just starting to have those threenager tantrums, and she
growls – it is the best noise! I never want them to feel they can’t
communicate their frustrations, because it is a great strength to be able to
identify how you feel.

We learn to regulate as we get older, but we don’t learn this if we never get
to experience big emotions. So sometimes, let your child go through a big
emotion. And if you see another parent whose child is having a big emotion,
don’t roll your eyes, don’t look away. Smile, and if you can, tell them
they’re doing a good job.
23. Lose things forever

You know Peso, the little penguin from Octonauts? When Jack was two he
was OBSESSED with Peso. He had a little plastic toy Peso that would ride
along the floor. He wanted to take it into day care so badly. He begged. I said
no. He pleaded. I said no. He was really getting on my nerves, so I said,
‘Sure, but if you lose Peso, he is gone forever.’

‘Absolutely, I will not lose Peso.’

We all know how that story ended. And no, I didn’t wander around the day
care helping him look for Peso. I didn’t buy him another one. I’d told him
that was the deal, and that was it. This is Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s concept of
antifragility in action – it is upsetting when it happens, but it helps us to not
to make the same mistake again. We grow from the experience.
There are some genius hacks that parents have invented over the decades to
protect kids from losing toys – from buying multiples of comforters (Alice
has about seven of those bunnies with the blanket attached), attaching an
elastic to a teddy so it can be wrapped around your child’s wrist (this is
especially helpful when travelling), and of course, LABELLING
EVERYTHING. But let your child learn that if they take a toy somewhere
and there is a risk of losing it, that risk is real. It will teach them to
appreciate and look after their stuff.
24. Wash the car

I originally had this as a risk for older kids, but as with a lot of skills in life,
it really needs to start way before you expect your kids to be able to do it –
and before it’s going to earn them any pocket money.

Washing the car is not something I am good at, mainly because I am short.
Nor is it something I do regularly – I don’t mind my car being dirty. But boy,
kids add a lot of mess to cars, don’t they? I am still shocked that car
companies haven’t made a product that specifically gets hardened masticated
Milk Arrowroot biscuits out of car seats. So all the more reason to get kids
involved in cleaning up the mess they create. They will love getting sudsy
and wet (this is probably not one for the middle of winter). And it is also a
great opportunity to talk to kids about not wasting water.

Give them one job to do for the whole car wash at first. My daughter at age
three spent ten minutes cleaning one hubcap, and it was the shiniest hubcap
there ever has been. As your child gets older – and frankly, taller – they can
get more involved with the whole car-washing process, until it becomes a
job that they can do on their own.
 Whether your child has been attending day
care or preschool or not, starting ‘big school’ is
a huge jump. I remember Jack was exhausted by
Thursdays in his first term at school, and Fridays
were always collapse-in-a-heap-on-the-couch
nights. But school also opens up the world beyond
the family, and there are moments of insight into
who your child will be when they grow up. How
they navigate the intricacies of the playground
and the classroom, and the way they organise
themselves will help shape them for life. These risks
give you some ideas for how to nurture these
skills in a safe and unconditional environment,
promoting security and safety.
25. Be socially awkward

As a teacher, I have had a handful of parents ring me to get their child out of
detention because the student is sorry/is busy/didn’t do it, or – my personal
favourite – it was the parent’s fault. And I teach teenagers. If the parent is
stepping in to defend their child at age fifteen or seventeen, you can bet they
were doing it beforehand, too. This risks removing a child’s ability to
develop their own self-advocacy skills.

Socially awkward situations are learning and growing opportunities. When

your child is faced with a difficult situation at school, or a disagreement with
a friend, talk to them about it. Ask them what they want out of the situation
and what consequences they need to face with it. Role-play how they might
handle it. Remember that the best outcome of an uncomfortable social
situation is that your child learns from it. We need to learn how to deal with
all types of people. These sorts of interactions and events shape the person
we become.

This does not mean that you should ignore bullying or serious issues that
may be occurring. It does mean that when you do step in, it should be
because the issue is serious enough to justify you doing so, and because your
child has already tried to deal with it on their own.

The worst parenting decision would be to deal with your child’s issues in a
way that they find embarrassing, because then they won’t tell you about
them anymore. Instead, build a relationship focused on communication. It’s
about giving your child the tools they need to deal with these situations, and
trusting that they will, and them knowing that they can ask for advice when
they need it.
26. Suck at something

We all suck at one thing, at least. Me, I suck at handball. Sometimes when
students play it at school they ask me to join in, and honestly, it is
embarrassing. Yes yes, I know I should have a growth mindset, but honestly,
isn’t it okay to just suck at a few things? I’m not prepared to dedicate 10,000
hours to honing my handball skills just so I don’t feel like a numpty in front
of a bunch of teenagers.

The fact is, in order to develop competencies in students, we need to expose

them to activities they may not be competent at. Not all activities will suit all
children. That is not a reason to avoid trying them out. This is especially the
case if your child is really good at something.

Imagine for a second that your child is excellent at a particular sport and
plays it all through school, and then for some reason in Year 11 they don’t
get into *the team*. That would be shattering; it would be really hard for
your child, and for the whole family. I’ve seen this happen to many students.
Often people find the first rejection the hardest, simply because they’ve
never gone through it. They don’t have the resilience or the experience to
understand what is happening, let alone be able to respond to it.
Encouraging your child to try activities that they may not be brilliant at –
and encouraging them to persevere with those activities – allows for
conversations that also develop social emotional learning. It reminds them
that there are activities they won’t excel at and strengthens the confidence
they have in the activities they are competent in. It gives them the experience
of knowing what it’s like to not have that competence, and the empathy to
help mates who are going through moments of rejection. Remember, life is
hardest for those who have always had it easy.
27. Show weakness

As a parent, it is common to want to be an unbreakable superhero. And that

is understandable – you always want to be the best parent you can be. But it
is very difficult to raise children who believe that failure is a normal part of
life, if they never see us fail.

I have spoken to parents whose children are going through difficulties –

maybe academic, maybe social, it could be anything. The parents usually tell
me that they’ve been through all of these experiences themselves. But if
your kids aren’t seeing you experience the frustrations of life, they may not
believe you when you tell them that mistakes are part of learning, or start
espousing growth mindsets and grit.

Even more than that, parenting is hard, and it’s okay to admit that
sometimes, and to be tired. Parents are juggling more in their lives than ever
before – whether it’s full-time work, or being a single parent, staying on top
of communication from school and day care, or those extracurricular
activities that mean the school day never seems to end.

Your children should not be your sounding board after a bad day at home or
at work, but a bit of honesty now and then can be helpful. If your child tells
you they had a bad day at school, let them know you have bad days too, and
that’s okay. The first time my six-year-old told me I seemed stressed I was
both horrified and proud. I didn’t want him to know I was stressed, but I was
impressed that he could recognise and identify the emotion. If you give your
children the opportunity to see you experiencing your emotions honestly,
then they will feel safe in theirs.
28. Play with fire

Even the smallest risks can offer great opportunities to talk about bigger
issues. Using a match to light a candle can be a chance to talk about how fire
works and why it is dangerous. Our instinct as parents is often to protect kids
from these things until we’re sure they can handle them – but there’s only
one way for them to reach that point. Show them how it works.

I have friends who let their kids light candles on any cakes, not just birthday
cakes (and of course let the kids blow them out). This is a great way of
teaching their kids more about fire risks, and it’s also just super fun – plus, it
means you are more likely to know where your candles are because you’ll be
using them more regularly, which is always handy!
29. Wear ugg boots with swimmers

My son had this thing for a while where he liked to wear grey pants and a
grey top, or blue pants and a blue top. I have a friend who is a fashion editor,
and one day I was telling him how I thought it was really daggy. My friend
told me it is called tonal dressing, and it’s actually really cool. Who knew?
My kid is a fashion icon.

It is always important to give children options and choices. Choices give

children power and autonomy, and help them develop a stronger sense of
self. Let your children choose their own outfits when it’s appropriate, and
next time you need to shop for new clothes, let them choose their own. As
always, create boundaries around their choices – ‘you need a pair of warm
pants, you need a jumper, you can choose up to two T-shirts, it can only cost
a certain amount’. But let them have some say in the decisions. Giving your
child some choice in the matter will also lead to less arguments over what to
wear.
When we are talking about fashion, we also need to talk about gender norms
with kids. As the mother of a boy first and a girl second, it drove me insane
how the pants you would buy for little girls never had pockets for holding
treasures like sticks or leaves or pebbles the way boys’ pants do. Or that it
can be impossible to find pyjamas for girls that don’t have princesses on
them. I never thought I’d be having a philosophical debate with myself on
the subject of unicorns, but there I was at Kmart one day trying to decide
whether or not they were aligned with trying to raise a feminist. I should at
this point mention fashion writer and novelist Maggie Alderson’s excellent
argument on whether or not to dress young girls in pink. Her theory is that if
your child wants to wear five shades of pink, embrace it, lest they rebel by
wearing too much chiffon and tutus when they’re grown up like Baby Spice
or Anna Nicole Smith.

So let your kid choose their own outfits, whether that means leaning into the
pink and frilly or the camo and blue. This is where your child’s personality
comes out. So no, they can’t dress as Elsa for every event, but why have that
battle on a Saturday morning when you’re not going anywhere? And
ultimately, by giving your kids a say most of the time, they will hopefully be
more flexible when they have to wear the jumper Aunt Nora gave them, just
this once, okay?
30. Understand when something
goes wrong

Life has risks, plans get cancelled, things go wrong. It is how we deal with
these things that defines us – our resilience in really crappy times. It’s all
well and good to be resilient when everything is going well, it’s another
when everything turns upside down. In 2020 we saw the whole world stop as
everyone retreated into their homes to flatten the curve of the coronavirus.
Plans were upended, schools were shut, jobs and lives were lost. Alice, who
was only three at the time, did not mind having more time at home, but Jack
really felt the loss of his friends, and would often get frustrated with his little
sister.

As parents it’s natural to want to avoid disappointing your kids by changing

plans or by not letting them attend their friend’s birthday because you have
to go to Great-Aunt Beryl’s eightieth instead. But as adults, we often have to
do something we don’t want to do (go to a five-year-old’s birthday party, for
example) instead of what we want to do. Ultimately, we have to get kids
used to this at some point, right?

So how do you talk to your kids about things going wrong? What can you
do? You can keep it in perspective – remind them that there is still love and
gratitude in life. You can talk to them about option B: what will you do now
that you know you can’t go ahead with the original plan? How can you make
another plan, one that could be even more fun? When something goes
wrong, know that your child is learning how to handle it, and that is
preparing them for future experiences.

Life does not always go as planned in bigger ways as well. Parents separate,
relatives die, and we feel grief in a whole new sense. Death, like taxes, is a
part of life, but is dealt with vastly differently. How we talk about death with
children is a very personal choice, but in general the rule of honesty at an
age-appropriate level works for almost any difficult conversation.
31. Know that it’s okay to have the
kid without the thing

Beyblades, Battle Gongs, Pokémon: schoolyards are filled with kids

bragging about the stuff they have, and it can lead to your kid thinking that
their life is SO UNFAIR and why don’t they have the latest superblaster, etc.

It is very easy to think that spending the ten dollars on the toy or getting your
kid to earn enough pocket money to buy it is the best way to go, but what if
it isn’t? Ultimately, life is full of differences, and it can be incredibly unfair.
I’m not saying raise your child without any toys, just that you don’t have to
give in to every trend. Your kid gets other things, or does other stuff, or eats
other food. Your kid is loved. Your kid does not need the latest thing, and
maybe not having that thing will give them a bit more empathy for the kids
who don’t have the next thing that sweeps through the playground.
32. Shrink a few socks

I once dated a guy who had never done laundry. He was a fully grown adult.
This risk is to ensure you never have that child.

This risk can – and should – start way before age five. When Alice was two,
she would put her clothes in the laundry basket when she was getting ready
for a bath. Jack, who is not yet eight, carries the laundry basket downstairs
and sprays his clothes (and half the laundry) with stain remover. But in terms
of managing real risk, don’t trust kids with laundry detergent until they are
older.

This risk is a great opportunity for chats. Laundry starts together, sitting on
the floor sorting clothes. My daughter sits and watches the washing machine
spin when we wash her comforters, and then we hang them out together on
the line, like the beautiful Shirley Hughes book Dogger. You can get into the
big life discussion of whether you try to pair socks before hanging them out
or do this once they’re dry. You can talk about why hanging clothes to dry is
better for the environment. And then you can chat about anything and
everything as you fold.
Doing laundry is part of being a member of a family. Okay, yes, by leaving it
to the kids, you do risk your whites becoming pink, or a few rogue garments
taking some punishment (maybe make this one a calculated risk and set any
cashmere aside for the time being), but the gains your child will make in
terms of independence and responsibility will far outweigh any sacrificed
socks and jocks. It helps everyone, and it means that we can all do a bit less
laundry. And that is a win.
33. Negotiate what’s for dinner

Everyone does family dinners differently. Some parents work late, so they
can’t eat dinner with their kids. Others have dinner together every night.
Some sit and watch their kids eat bolognese or sausages and veggies, then
have their adult dinner together once the kids have gone to bed, perhaps
because they can’t face another plate of bolognese or sausages and veggies.

Where possible, sharing meals as a family a few times a week is very

important for developing connectedness and foundation. But it is also
important that not every dinner is about the kids. If you get stuck in the rut
of only ever serving what you think your kids will like, then for one thing,
you’ll get really sick of cooking – or eating – the same thing, and for
another, your kids will never develop their tastebuds. That’s where this risk
comes in.
Involve your kids in your family meal planning. I don’t mean giving them
full control and agreeing to cake for dinner, but make them part of the
discussion. Teach them to compromise and accommodate everyone’s
preferences, rather than having you constantly accommodate theirs. This
also sets the standard that no, you don’t have to like everything you eat, but
you do have to try it.

This risk is especially good if it involves takeaway food, because you don’t
actually have to cook and you can get a bit more adventurous with your
choices (no more pizza).
34. Disagree with them

As a teacher, I have given out a lot of consequences – for not wearing the
correct uniform, for not doing homework, for being rude. Almost every time,
and especially with girls, you hear them reflexively say, ‘That is so unfair, X
was doing it too.’ Dr Justin Coulson has a great TED talk on rebels: how we
love the idea of them but ‘hate the idea of them in our living rooms’. He
talks about the difference between the eye-rolling, contrary ‘reflexive rebels’
and thoughtful ‘reflective rebels’. A reflective rebel is one who thinks before
they rebel, or rebels with some consideration. This risk is about having
arguments with your kids during which you treat them with respect and
receptivity, and help turn them into reflective rebels.

Arguments, disagreements, debates and banter are part of life. Whether it be

in a marriage, at work or with friends, you will disagree with someone at
some point. But there are so many ways that disagreements can ‘go bad’.
You might be too aggressive, or too passive. You might hurl insults or ad
hominems at people, you might get too emotional, you might not see the
other person’s perspective, you might want to storm out.

As parents, we see our children develop from just crying when something
doesn’t go their way, to saying no, to getting angry, to storming off, to
starting to argue, calling names, and refusing to interact. We need to take the
risk of teaching them how to argue, and role-model disagreements in a
positive way. We need to teach them the art of compromise, and explain that
sometimes (okay, most of the time) you do just get to have your say because
you are the parent. But we also want to know that our children can question
authority respectfully. We never want them to stop asking why, but we also
don’t want to get a phone call from the principal about having ‘the problem
child’.

A child who doesn’t see any point in arguing because their parents are so
authoritarian will believe they have no power to stand up for themselves.
The alternative is the child whose parents have given in every time that child
has argued. That child is in for one hell of a reality check when they start
disagreeing with people who don’t love them unconditionally.

I put it to you that there are some things we do as parents that might not
nurture our children’s ability to argue. Words like ‘because I said so’ shut
down their ability to respond. Saying ‘no ifs or buts, just do it’ doesn’t give
them the opportunity to think about what might happen if the situation was
different. Now, sometimes it is a ‘no ifs or buts’ situation and you do just
have to ‘do as I say because I’m in charge’. But there are other times when
there is more time, when there is more space, when you might want to
explain to your child WHY you said so, and ask them HOW it could be
different. You might want to consider modelling ‘I hear you are saying X,
but I feel Y’. You could even teach them how to write out their argument
explaining how they think something should go. Help them to understand
constructive criticism and appreciate that everyone has different points of
view.

Learning to disagree and confront problems also helps children learn to

develop their own boundaries, and to respect others. At school, there are
clear boundaries written down – these are the school rules – but as we grow
up, sometimes external boundaries can be harder to recognise unless we
have learned how to notice and recognise our own. We want children to
know that when they say no it is respected, and that their point of view has
been heard, even if it is argued with. This ability to be a reflective rebel, as
Dr Coulson argues, means they will have the strength later in life to stand up
for their own boundaries when faced with peer pressure.

And if you worry that maybe your child is a little too argumentative, I
strongly recommend steering them towards school debating.
35. Forget to pack undies

Every day we pack what we need – our wallet and phone, snacks, the clothes
we will wear to work after we’ve been to the gym. We (mostly) get this right
because we’ve had years of practice. Whether it is for school, a sleepover or
a holiday, learning to pack is a skill you want your kid to get a handle on
sooner rather than later.

On the website Travel Without Tears, author Sally Webb argues that children
can be packing their own bags, or at least repacking them, from age three.
This risk can start at a very low level of importance – ask your child to
choose three toys or three books to take with them that fit into their bag.
Then it will be clothing for a trip. It might be good to set some parameters
around this, such as what the weather will be like, or whether you are taking
suitcases or just backpacks. Involve them in the packing of toiletries but
don’t depend on them to remember the asthma inhaler and Panadol.
As your child grows up this can become a literacy activity as well – get them
to write out a list of the things they want to pack. Talk to them about packing
items of clothing that go with other items, or about what shoes you need at
the beach.

You can’t pack everything on a holiday. This risk teaches children that they
need to make choices in life, and every choice has an opportunity cost.
Packing ten Beanie Boos means they will, yes, have all their Beanie Boos,
but it will also mean they don’t have any games or books. And of course
sometimes we forget something important, like undies, but it just makes for
a good problem-solving opportunity – and they probably won’t forget again!
36. Start conversations with people

Teaching kids how to start conversations is really important for their social
development, their resilience (because conversations don’t always go as
planned), and also for their empathy. You learn to be a nicer person by
interacting with others.

Journalist and author Dr Julia Baird once wrote an article about parenting
and I clearly remember her saying, ‘The rule at our dinner table is that every
child must ask every visiting adult two questions, so they learn to think
about people around them instead of just batting away cliched questions like:
“How is school?”’ I have tried to adopt this in our family, and to be honest,
the risk is what the heck our children are going to ask. For example, ‘Why
don’t you have any hair?’ Or, ‘How come your boyfriend doesn’t come
round anymore?’ to a friend who just went through a break-up. Like I said,
it’s a great opportunity to teach the kids to develop empathy.

Psychologist Dr Judith Locke has a three-question rule: if you have asked

your child three questions and they haven’t asked you one, stop talking.
Allow gaps for them to think about a question they might ask you back, and
remind them about two-way conversations.

Teach your child the difference between closed and open-ended questions,
and remind them when they’ve used a closed one by curtly saying yes or no
in response. A brilliant junior teacher once told us about the idea of ‘ice
cream instead of popcorn’ in a professional learning session: in a
conversation, your comments should be like ice cream, scooped on top of the
other person’s scoop of conversation, instead of popcorn that randomly pops
around the room with no links. I think adults can still struggle with this, and
I know sometimes my brain connects totally random ideas and the link is
known only to me. But that idea of a multi-scooped ice cream is a great
visual for kids to understand.

Make sure your child has things to talk about. It is very hard to have a
conversation with someone if they have no content. Encourage their interests
wherever you can, share interesting stories and talk to them about things you
both like. I have learned about Minecraft so I can talk about that with my
kids. There are daily kids’ news podcasts, like Squiz Kids, that deliver
current affairs in an age-appropriate way so you can listen and discuss them
afterwards.

And leave your kids to talk among themselves (or with cousins or friends) as
well. If you have ever been at a party with a group of friends and you notice
there is one person who is just brilliant at small talk, chances are that person
has a lot of siblings.
37. Learn to use a knife without
losing a finger

Some skills sound terrifying – the ability to wield sharp instruments is one a
lot of parents get caught up over. But using a knife is an important fine
motor skill, and how else are you going to get them to do all your kitchen
prep? There’s really only one way for your kid to learn how to use a knife,
and that’s … to use a knife. As with so many things, the earlier you start, the
more proficient they’ll become. A great way to introduce knife skills is
through soap carving. Carving soap with a dinner knife is incredibly cheap,
fun, creative, messy (yet squeaky clean) and, yes, a bit risky.

Wait until bulk packs of soap are on sale at the supermarket, and then buy a
lot of soap (don’t worry, it will all get used). Then, choose a normal knife.
Not a plastic kid’s one, because that won’t do anything, and not a sharpened
Japanese sashimi knife, because that would be a waste of a perfectly good
knife and a few fingers. Talk to your child about knife safety: show them
how to hold a knife, and make sure they know to never cut towards their
body.

Next, outline a shape on the soap, and demonstrate to your child how to
shave the soap into that shape – again, go away from your body. Then let
them try. If your child is one who can focus and wants to make something
really pretty, this activity can last for hours.
When your child’s excellent fish, shark, vampire, letter, monster, bike or
map of Australia is done, collect all the scraps and either make them into
nice-smelling soaps for gifts (another skill we have probably all forgotten) or
just use them in the bath.
38. Prep them to go solo

This is a bit like doomsday prepping: on one hand, you hope the day will
never come, and on the other, you want to be prepared for when it does. For
that reason, this is a risk for parents rather than for kids. The thought of your
child going out into the big wide world alone may seem terrifying, but one
day, it will happen. It might be when they are teenagers, or it could be when
they are younger. Maybe it will be planned, or maybe it will just happen –
they could get lost in the supermarket, or run through the trees at the park
looking for their ball and then suddenly have no idea where you are
(hypothetically). Before that day comes, start preparing them.

Ask yourself the following questions.

□ Does your child know your actual name (not ‘Mum’ or ‘Dad’)?

□ What about your mobile number? Who would they call if they couldn’t
contact you?

□ Do they know their address? Is there a local school, shop or landmark

from which they could direct someone to your house?

□ Do they know what to do in case of emergency? Do they know how to call

000?

□ And the big question: can they identify when they feel unsafe?
Jack and I practised saying where he lived and I showed him how to use a
phone. We spent a bit of time learning my mobile number. I thought this
would come in really useful if he were ever faced with a scary situation.
Instead, a few weeks later I received a text message from a number I didn’t
recognise saying, ‘Hi, our kids are in kindy together and Jack gave me your
phone number to arrange a playdate, hope it’s the right number.’

So obviously the other risk here is that your role as social secretary will
really ramp up.

But the biggest part of solo prepping is talking to your child about how they
can know that they feel unsafe. Preschools today are great at teaching kids
the ‘UNDIES rule’ for understanding their own safety around their bodies,
which includes getting them to nominate the ‘five heroes’ who they trust
above all others. Beyond these concepts, talk to your child about what it is to
feel safe. Stranger danger is still very much a thing, but what if your child
was faced with a choice between not talking to any strangers, or asking a
stranger to help them call their parents if they are lost? Which decision
would be the best one? Talk to your child about people in the local area they
can trust.

When I was growing up there were ‘safety houses’. You could see which
houses in your neighbourhood had the friendly sticker that showed its
residents had had criminal history checks and could be trusted if children
needed help. The campaign was discontinued a few years ago, and one of the
reasons cited was that kids are driven everywhere now, so it isn’t needed
anymore. This just shows the cycles that we perpetuate when we don’t let
kids take some risks.
39. Keep something alive

We used to have two dogs, Spook and Bandit, but when Alice was born we
gave them to some friends because they (the dogs, not the friends) were not
adjusting well to having two small people usurping them. They
communicated their displeasure by urinating on the kids’ toys. With two
full-time jobs we just couldn’t do two kids and two dogs, and frankly, giving
the kids away seemed like an overreaction.

Now Jack is at school though, I do think of how growing up, my family had
a dog, Rusty. My brother and I would walk Rusty, feed him, and he would sit
on our feet while we watched TV and get right up in our face before letting
out a massive fart. My parents, being the lawyers they were, had my brother
(aged seven) sign a contract of dog ownership, which listed the jobs he had
to do.

(That was slightly futile because it didn’t include a subsection on what

happens if the child goes overseas at age eighteen.)

There is something to be said for keeping a pet alive. It teaches kids about
responsibility, companionship (sure, maybe not with a hermit crab), and
empathy. Depending on the kind of pet that suits your family, pets can bring
risks as well, from health issues (the pet’s) to sanity issues (yours, from the
mess). Of course, with life comes death, and having a pet will at some point
mean your family will mourn and talk about death, as discussed in risk 30.

Studies have shown that pets give children a greater sense of self-esteem and
security during stressful times. So pet ownership for children can offer great
opportunities for increased responsibility, autonomy and social benefits. If
you can’t justify getting a dog – and I really don’t suggest it unless the whole
family wants one – maybe a fish or a plant is a less intensive way to
introduce this idea. We agreed Jack could get a pet fish to keep alive for a
while before there is any discussion about getting another dog.
40. Go alone

In 2018 the Australian Heart Foundation conducted a survey that looked into
children walking or riding to school. The results paint a picture of risk
avoidance, which in turn increases risk for later life. The survey showed that
only 15–20 per cent of children walk or ride their bikes to school. The main
reasons given for driving kids were safety and time. Ironically, most parents
said they were concerned the traffic was too busy to let their kids walk –
their cars are contributing to that traffic. Parents were also worried not about
authorities but about ‘local mums’ or ‘concerned citizens’ who would judge
them for letting their kid ride to school.
Across the world there are very different parenting moments happening. In
Japan, children are encouraged to leave the house and run errands on their
own from the age of two or three. There is even a TV show called Hajimete
no Otsukai or ‘My First Errand’. In Switzerland over 75 per cent of children
walk to and from school. On the first day of kindergarten, Swiss children are
given a reflective necklace to make them extra visible to cars. They have to
wear the necklace for two years, until they start big school when they’re six.
By contrast, in Vermont, USA, in 2011, Kim Brooks left her son in the car
(with the windows down) for five minutes to get him some headphones for a
plane trip. Within a few days she had been contacted by the police for
breaking the law.

In both Japan and Switzerland, there is an onus on the bystander to step in

and help the child if needed. In America, and to a similar extent in Australia,
it can feel as though you are parenting in an Orwellian state. Japan has a
very low crime rate, but Australia’s actually isn’t much higher. However, we
just don’t have that expectation of others in Australia. In fact, we are more in
fear of judgement from bystanders than we are of the police getting
involved.

Letting your children go to school (or the shops or a friend’s house) alone is
a complex risk, especially because the laws in relation to child safety and
children being on their own at home or in public can be bloody hard to
figure out. Especially if you are not a lawyer. Your kid’s sense of
responsibility, your local community, and whether there are places for your
kid to walk to are all going to be major factors in this decision. As a caveat, I
will add here that Jack is not yet eight, and he has been allowed to walk
some distances on his own. Sometimes on the way home he will take a
different way and I will meet him at the next corner, or he’ll go bike riding
down the laneways and I can’t see him for all of 150 metres as he turns a
corner.
But I think this is a really important risk that can be safe and appropriate for
children under the age of ten, depending on the kid and the context. Some
families have limited options when it comes to school transport – especially
children in regional areas or without access to good public transport. But in
my years working in schools, I have seen children being driven less than two
kilometres to and from school, and can’t help but feel that getting to school
on their own is a risk children would seriously benefit from undertaking
themselves. Fifteen minutes of riding or walking twice a day would get
children halfway to the one hour of daily exercise that is recommended for
school-aged children.

One factor to be considered is the age of siblings. You might be fine with
your ten-year-old walking to school with a six-year-old, but in two years’
time when the then-twelve-year-old changes school, is it okay for the eight-
year-old to walk on their own? That’s up to you. There are issues involving a
child’s peripheral vision that need to be considered – studies have shown that
seven-year-olds have weaker peripheral vision than ten- or eleven-year-olds.
The child’s ability to identify vehicles and understand their own visibility are
also still developing at this age.

The best answer to all of this, of course, is role-modelling safe pedestrian

behaviour, and explaining how to be a responsible pedestrian from as early
as you can. My kids know to stop at the corner of the road, and if I’ve got
shopping bags in one hand and I’m holding Alice’s in the other, Jack will
sometimes cross the road on his own. I always tell them both to cross the
road ‘with intent’, because the worst thing a kid can do is dawdle.
41. Get the bus

Letting her ten-year-old get public transport earned Lenore Skenazy the title
of ‘worst mother in the world’, but she did it because her kid loved getting
the subway and reading maps, and she knew he was old enough to do it.

Once you have solo prepped your child, and they have done some small
errands on their own, maybe it’s time to get them on public transport. School
students are often eligible for free or heavily discounted transport, and
getting your child comfortable with public transport means you are less
likely to become a taxi driver later in life.

There are many different ways you can start this risk – maybe you get the
bus with your child but don’t sit with them. Or you could put them on a short
bus ride – say, to three or four stops away – and meet them there. Don’t do it
in peak hour, and let the bus driver know what you are doing – or let your
child know what they should say in response to any questions. Make sure
they are comfortable with getting buses in general, and with that bus route in
particular. Then eventually, let your child take public transport to wherever
the family is going one day, and meet them there.
42. Take charge of the kitchen

My Year 11 English teacher said that everyone should have seven meals they
can make without a recipe. To be honest, at that point I don’t think I had any.
I think the peak of my cooking ability was the year before we had kids.
Since then I have been so consistently beaten by fussy eating and general kid
dinner chaos that I haven’t done much cooking for the fun of it.

What recipes do you want your kid to be able to make by the time they are
teenagers? I recommend introducing them to a new recipe every few months
so they can build up their repertoire. Get them involved in choosing what to
have for dinner and finding a recipe. You could watch Junior MasterChef
and Nailed It! for inspiration, or find a cookbook you both enjoy. Or you can
just start with what they like eating. Sure, your meals might be a bit hit and
miss for a while, but the payoff will be worth it. Imagine not having to cook
dinner. Every. Single. Night.

Teach your kids a bit about supply chain logistics. Work with them on
writing the shopping list, explaining concepts like budgets and food waste (if
you buy a whole bag of onions, what are you going to do with the other
seven of them?). Have them read the recipe and start by cooking it with
them, helping them with safe knife skills and food preparation, then
eventually work yourself out of the process. May I suggest a glass of wine
while they cook? You can be management and quality control. Once they’ve
mastered that recipe, start on another one.
Make it enjoyable, of course, but also remember that in reality, not everyone
is a MasterChef. Cooking isn’t always going to be fun – sometimes you just
have to put a meal together.
43. Be the first risky parent

It is difficult to be the first parent to be a bit ‘risky’ in a family, or a group of

friends, or a school. You might be the subject of ‘looks’ when letting the
kids ride their skateboards, or struggle on the play equipment that one
minute longer than other parents would. But don’t let that stop you.

Remind yourself why you are taking risks with your kids. It is so they
develop skills like resilience, resourcefulness and empathy, and so they
generally grow up to be better humans. It is not for external validation from
other parents or from grandparents.

Secondly, talk to local community leaders about it. If your kid is at school
already, talk to the school principal or P&C and ask for definitive answers on
questions like what age kids are allowed to walk to and from school. Find
out what your local police think of kids riding bikes on the footpath. If your
child is going to walk to a local shop to buy milk, maybe let the shopkeeper
know, so they don’t freak out.

Thirdly, build a bit of an army of other pro-risk mums or dads. I definitely

suggest buying many copies of this book for friends! Start in your
neighbourhood – no kid wants to go bike riding after school alone. One way
that conversations around risk can start is when other parents comment that
your kid is allowed to do things that their kids may not be able to, or allowed
to. Without being annoying about it, explain how you’re trying to raise them
to be self-motivated and resilient. Or hark back to your own childhood, when
you were able to do these things, and point out that the world is actually
safer now than it was when you were kids.
44. Say thank you

How awesome is receiving a thank-you note? Like an actual hand-written

letter, with a stamp on it. Writing thank-you notes is a skill we need to teach
our kids. Okay, gratitude isn’t really a risk, but a lack of gratitude is.
Entitlement is a risk. A dependent mentality is a risk. And gratitude can be
instilled earlier than you think.

The benefits of gratitude have been extensively discussed and researched

and TED-talked about. People who regularly practise gratitude are healthier
and happier. This isn’t limited to writing thank-you notes, of course.
Gratitude can – and should – be practised in all sorts of ways. Writing down
three good things that happened (or even better, three people who helped
you) in a day promotes higher rates of psychological and physical health, to
the extent that people who practise gratitude have less aches and pains.
Some studies have shown that gratitude even improves sleep – people who
spend fifteen minutes before bed writing down what they are grateful for are
more likely to sleep better.

Gratitude is great for relationships, both new and old. Noticing and
appreciating how others make your life better will, in fact, make your life
better. Gratitude makes you more empathetic – when you recognise how
people help you, you are more likely to recognise other emotions in people.
This also helps boost your own self-esteem, because it means you are more
likely to appreciate the way others help you, rather than being resentful of
your need for help, which can make you feel devalued.
But gratitude is fundamentally countercultural at the moment. Professor
Brené Brown talks about gratitude being vulnerability. Gratitude tears apart
the idea that we are absolutely independent and self-sufficient. Being
grateful means you see, recognise and admit that other people help you. That
we are in relation with other people, and that we cannot do things on our
own. For this reason you can’t teach your children gratitude while overusing
the vertical pronoun in your own life: ‘I am so awesome, I did this all by
myself, nobody ever helps me with anything’.

Gratitude should be a big part of parenting. You are doing a lot for your
child, but as they grow older (and more independent) and you ‘do’ less for
them, gratitude keeps a relationship strong. Raising kids with gratitude and
not a sense of owing each other (which promotes shame) develops a
healthier, more mature relationship with your children as they grow older. I
see this in the students I teach: those who really appreciate their parents and
what they do for them, versus those who just expect it.
Apart from writing thank-you notes, there are many other small ways to
practise gratitude with your kids. For starters, just say thank you more often
– and authentically – and make sure they see you saying it. You’ll know
you’re doing it right if ‘thank you’ comes naturally and doesn’t need to be
prompted.

At dinner or family meals, ask questions about each person’s day. A

colleague once said her family asked three questions: ‘What was a good
thing that happened in your day? Who did you help? Who did you laugh
with?’

Have conversations that develop a sense of appreciation for what happens

without us noticing it in society – for example, clean streets are thanks to
local councils. Gratitude for farmers who grow food we eat. Gratitude for
lifesavers and firefighters. This also works in the home, by noticing how
each member of the family contributes.

Finally, help your kids develop an appreciation for what they have, and
realistic expectations of what they should have. Avoid the accumulation of
crap, and stuff they don’t appreciate, and develop a sense of charity. One
friend has a ‘one toy in, one toy donated’ rule, which helps with both
gratitude and clutter.
45. Be on the team

If you baulked at your under-five-year-old climbing trees, it is important to

note that just 2 per cent of tree climbers have actually broken a bone,
whereas 4.3 per cent of children under eighteen who entered an emergency
department were there due to sporting injuries. Sport can be dangerous, but it
is also incredibly valuable for children.

There is a lot of research on getting kids moving, especially for those who
are reluctant to participate at all, and a lot on the effects of focusing on just
one particular sport, usually an elite sport. But what about those kids in the
middle, not the elite kids, nor the kids who are carried kicking and
screaming over their parents’ shoulders to each training session? Most kids
will be in the centre of the bell curve.

Sport is great exercise, it develops team building and communication skills,

and it gives children practical ways to develop resilience. It also teaches kids
responsibility. You know all that. But studies have shown that specialising in
one sport at a young age increases the risk of overuse injuries (nasty ones). It
also increases the pressure associated with playing sport, and can lead to
children rejecting that sport entirely. Some research has suggested children
shouldn’t do more hours of training a week than they are years old – nine
hours of training a week sounds like a lot for a nine-year-old.

Developing team skills and being able to understand the benefits of shared
responsibility will help serve them later in life. Once when I was teaching,
there was a semi-final netball game for a middle-ranking team, and more
than half the team didn’t turn up to the game because some pop star put on a
concert that night. I remember the school’s head girl gave the most amazing
speech reminding students of their responsibilities to their teams, and saying
that if they can’t make a game, the worst thing they can do is just not turn
up. There are times when your child won’t be able to make a practice or a
game, and while the goal should always be to get there, the second-best
thing is telling your team mates up front if you can’t, and taking
responsibility for it.

‘Being on the team’ doesn’t just count for sport – the same ideas still apply
to being part of the drama troupe, school band or chess squad.

Team activities are also opportunities to consider how involved you want to
be as a parent. Dr Judith Locke advises against having both parents and both
sets of grandparents at every football game or recital night, because it sets up
a very child-focused view of their world. You can’t make every game, you
have to take it in turns, or you’re a single parent. There will be carpools.
Remember, the expectation management around this starts developing earlier
than you realise. And when you are there to watch, remember you’re not
there to commentate or to coach (unless you are the coach). Just enjoy it, and
that will help your child to enjoy it too.
46. Sleep outside

Look, I’m not exactly a fan of camping, but it is one of those things we do
‘for fun’ to ‘build character’, so I had to include it. Despite not loving tents
and sleeping-bags, I did enter a career where five days away camping with a
dozen fourteen-year-olds was part of the job description, so my choice of
work knew camping had something to teach me.

Alice is desperate to go camping – I blame the camping episode of Bluey.

While she hasn’t braved the great outdoors yet, James and Jack have on a
few occasions and have loved it. In his book Camping with Kids, camping
afficionado Simon McGrath writes that ‘camping encourages us to slow
down, to stop and connect with the natural environment around us … It
enables us to watch our children play as they make their own discoveries.’
So, risk the dirt, and the discomfort – it’ll be worth it. Start in the backyard.
As your kids get older you won’t even need to camp with them (as you may
have gathered, camping is really not my thing). Then, if camping is your
thing, you could start to go on some adventures together as a family.

Camping is an activity that can be divided between parents, and one that
allows for some one-on-one time with parents and kids. It also offers screen-
free time, and gives kids a new understanding of slowing down and relaxing.
Kids will love the other risks that go alongside camping, like exploring,
going to the toilet in the dark (with or without the bunny nightlight) and, of
course, building a campfire and having those campfire conversations.
47. Prick a finger

I am an obsessive crocheter and knitter. When people see me crochet, they

often ask who taught me. The answer is my grandma Joanna and my friend
Julie, and I am very grateful to both of them. But as I yarn over and hook
and stitch, I often think that their question is greater than that – it goes to the
lost skills we are no longer teaching our children. This risk is about craft, but
you could substitute any other skills you learnt as a kid that it may not have
occurred to you to teach your children. Or maybe even a skill your parents
had that they didn’t teach you (YouTube is very helpful for this).

Crafts are risky because you can stuff them up, you can make mistakes and
have to redo the whole thing, you can realise you’ve lost hours of time with
nothing to show for it. You can get frustrated and then get better. Craft
represents life in general, and practising it helps prepare you for those
moments of frustration that we all go through.
Another reason to teach your child a craft, and it can be any craft, is that
crafts are good for your wellbeing. There is a sense of flow that occurs,
which has a meditative effect. Your brain relaxes, you get challenged and
frustrated, you gain a sense of achievement. In other words, it is a great way
to practise grit and a growth mindset on a daily basis.

And even if you’re not a keen crafter, there are some basic ‘craft’ skills that
are important to have. Much like learning to use a knife, learning to sew on a
button, hem clothes or attach a label are all skills that you don’t want your
kid to find themselves lacking as adults. And if your kid is five, you have
thirteen years of school labels ahead of you. Why not get them to do it?
48. Plan a holiday as a family

There is a lot of planning that goes into a family holiday, but in the end it
needs to be a holiday for everyone, so why shouldn’t everyone be involved
in that planning? This is risky because it is going to involve a lot of
discussing and explaining with children, but now that they’ve learned how to
argue (see risk 34), at least you know the discussions will happen
respectfully. Set parameters on a holiday plan – for example, distance from
home, budget, maybe a list of no-go places (the Democratic People’s
Republic of Korea sounds like a really friendly place, what with democracy,
people and it being a republic, but maybe skip it for now).
Give your kids a chance to think about what they want out of a holiday.
Don’t shy away from talking to your children about the cost of travel, and
why it is something the family chooses to invest in. Talk about what kind of
activities they might want to do (swim or play with other kids, for example)
and the kinds of activities you want to do (go on hikes or drink cocktails, for
example). This will help your kids understand everyone’s different
perspectives, and also link to the effort involved in organising a holiday,
which should help with gratitude, without guilt.
49. Raise a child with boundaries

In risk 34, I mentioned the role of reflective rebels, those who think about
what is going on before acting. Teenagers who stop for a second to think
about whether it is actually a good idea to ride down a hill in a Coles trolley.
Those who question you when you tell them to do something ‘because I said
so’.

The thing with reflective rebels is that they have started developing
boundaries and are learning to use them. Some of us adults have never really
developed our own boundaries, and so we end up saying yes to everything.
But as parents, we should have boundaries, and it is really important that we
are explicit with both ourselves and our children about what they are.
Professor Brené Brown talks about the issue of crossing boundaries or limits
when role-modelling to children. If you say no more ice cream, then give
them more ice cream anyway, your child will grow up thinking that limits
can be broken. This can be bloody exhausting as a parent. Sometimes you do
just want to give them another ice cream or ten more minutes of screen time,
but going back on your word, changing your limits and letting children push
your boundaries shows them that those boundaries don’t need to be
respected.
As your child grows up, and especially as they approach the teen years, it is
important to give them age-appropriate responsibilities, and consequences,
and stick to them. Again, this can be exhausting. It is sometimes easier to
clean out their lunch box for them than it is to ask them fifteen times to do it.
But this is about the development of autonomy and responsibility, and the
meaningfulness of that responsibility. If it is their job to clean up after
dinner, and they don’t but it’s cleaned up anyway, then what is the point of
them having that job? By raising them with actual boundaries in place, they
develop, as self-help author Dr Henry Cloud writes, ‘a deep sense of
personal responsibility for their own lives’.

This whole ‘boundaries’ thing is going to lead to a LOT of arguments,

especially when your child is at school and spending time at other kids’
houses. Your parenting is going to be different to other parents’. For
example, I use the screen time function on Jack’s iPad, while other parents
don’t. I’m not judging. The fact is, I am no better a parent than those who
don’t use screen time. I just do it so I don’t have to ask myself how much
time he’s spent playing Minecraft – I know exactly when he’s clocked thirty
minutes. And hand on heart, I extend screen time a lot after he’s done a
chore or a job or spent some time reading. Jack whinges about it: ‘Other kids
don’t have screen time, why do I have to do it? It’s unfair.’ But I have to be
confident in the rules we set. I have to be able to argue my own boundaries
and explain to Jack why he has different rules.

Ultimately, it isn’t the rules that matter, it isn’t how much time they get to
spend playing Minecraft – it is that kids need to see you parenting with
boundaries. As a result, they learn to respect those boundaries, and they
develop their own boundaries and critical-thinking skills. That means maybe
they’ll stop for a second, and ask themselves whether it is a good idea to ride
a trolley down a hill. Maybe they’ll still do it, but at least they stopped and
thought about it. And maybe they won’t do it the next time.
While I don’t imagine anyone has worked through
this list of risks and ticked them off one by one,
there is one risk that I think it’s important to finish
on. If you are the kind of reader who flicks to the
last few pages, this could actually be a good way
to start as well!
The language of risk in our society is very negative. I hope that by reading
this book, your relationship with risk has developed to help you think about
working with risk and managing it, rather than avoiding it altogether. If you
are not letting your child be exposed to risks and you are not talking to them
about risk, they can’t mature enough to assess risks and will continue to be
anxious about them. Allowing children to be exposed to risky play that
challenges them means they develop that skill, but we also need to change
the language around risk.

Risk needs to be discussed openly. If your child wants to do something, talk

about what the consequences could be, discuss the chance of something bad
happening, and consider what they would do if something did happen.

There is a concept in positive psychology known as active constructive

responding. When someone tells us something, we generally have one of
four responses, which can be shown on a matrix.
As a parent it is very easy to jump into protective mode and think about
everything that could go wrong when your child wants to take a risk. Just
say your nine-year-old comes in and says they have been invited to go
surfing with another family from school. An active destructive response
would be to say, ‘Oh, I thought you hated the ocean,’ or, ‘But what if you
hurt yourself?’ This is the worst response in relation to risk, because you
encourage the idea that the existence of risk is a reason NOT to do
something. A passive destructive response would be to decide that they
shouldn’t go, but instead effectively ignore them. ‘Right, well, it’s time to
get ready for dinner.’ A passive constructive response would be to not really
respond at all – something like, ‘Hmm, we can talk about that later.’ This
still discourages the child from taking the action.

Instead, you want to use an active constructive response that asks for more
information authentically, and engage your child in a discussion about the
action before you make any decisions. A rule of thumb is to ask three
questions: ‘Oh, where do they go surfing? What would you need to bring?
Who else is going?’ Being positive as a first instinct develops the
conversation and means it will continue and grow. It doesn’t mean that you
won’t discuss the risks eventually, or decide they can’t go, it just means that
the idea won’t be quashed immediately by putting the risks front and centre.

One great activity is ‘putting it in perspective’. The University of

Pennsylvania’s School of Positive Psychology suggests asking what the
WORST thing that could happen is (which is often our default), then what
the BEST thing that could happen is, and finally, what the most likely
outcome is. If you know what you would do in all three situations, then
you’re less likely to go hell for leather into a stupid decision – and if you
do, at least you know what the consequence will be.

As your child moves into the early adolescent years, the noun ‘risk’ will be
replaced by the adjective ‘risky’. Teens are risky, and that is always seen as
a bad thing. There are a lot of neurological reasons for this, as well as social
and emotional causes. As we grow up, our brains start to scan all the
potential outcomes of a decision and weigh them up in a more logical way.
We recognise the context around facts, and work with that context.
Teenagers are still developing that skill. (Dr Dan Siegel’s book Brainstorm
goes into great detail about the effects of dopamine and the teenage brain.)
Developing the language of risk and consequence and managing risk
effectively might help your teen navigate these decisions. If you can
develop your child’s self-awareness so they can be a reflective rebel, they
will pause for a moment to think about the consequences of actions, and can
really consider the pros and cons. This means they will have more of a
toolkit for understanding the potential consequences of a risk.

So talk to your child honestly, not only about the possible outcomes of a
risk but also about how they need to be weighed up. Let them know that if
they can’t do it, they can talk to you about it. When it comes to risk-taking,
the greatest protective factor you can give your child is a trusting and
connected relationship with them, one where they understand the physical,
emotional and relational risks that are around, and know that they are loved
and supported enough to make their own decisions.
Resources

A list of useful books that helped me write this book and helped me be a parent, and will
hopefully help you too:

Baird, Julia, Phosphorescence: On awe, wonder and things that sustain you
when the world goes dark, HarperCollins Australia (2020)

Barker, Robin, Baby Love: Everything you need to know about your baby,
Macmillan Publishers Australia (2005)

Brooks, Kim, Small Animals: Parenthood in the age of fear, Flatiron Books
(2018)

Brooks, Robert, & Goldstein, Sam, Raising Resilient Children: Fostering

strength, hope, and optimism in your child, McGraw Hill Professional
(2002)

Brown, Brené, The Gifts of Imperfection: Let go of who you think you’re
supposed to be and embrace who you are, Hazelden Publishing (2010)

Cooke, Kaz, Kid-wrangling: The real guide to caring for babies, toddlers
and preschoolers, Viking (2004)

Crabb, Annabel, The Wife Drought Why women need wives, and men need
lives, Random House Australia (2015)

Erikson, Erik H, Identity and the Life Cycle, W W Norton & Company
(1994)

Gilbert, Jack, & Knight, Rob, Dirt Is Good: The advantage of germs for
your child’s developing immune system, St. Martin’s Press (2017)
Ginsburg, Kenneth R, Ginsburg, Ilana, & Ginsburg, Talia, Raising Kids to
Thrive: Balancing love with expectations and protection with trust,
American Academy of Pediatrics (2015)

Haidt, Jonathan & Lukianoff, Greg, The Coddling of the American Mind:
How good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure,
Penguin, UK (2018)

Locke, Judith, The Bonsai Child: Why modern parenting limits children’s
potential and practical strategies to turn it around, Confident and Capable
(2015)

Siegel, Daniel J & Bryson, Tina P, No-drama Discipline: The whole-brain

way to calm the chaos and nurture your child’s developing mind, Scribe
Publications (2014)

Skenazy, Lenore, Free-range Kids: How to raise safe, self-reliant children

(without going nuts with worry), John Wiley & Sons (2009)

Taleb, Nicholas N, Antifragile: Things that gain from disorder, Penguin UK

(2012)

Waters, Lea, The Strength Switch: How the new science of strength-based
parenting helps your child and your teen flourish, Scribe Publications
(2017)
And some articles and reports, if you want to read a little deeper:

Arnsten, Amy, Mazure, Carolyn & Sinha, Rajita, ‘This is your brain in
meltdown’, Scientific American, 306(4), 48–53

Bauer, Ethan, ‘Risk vs. reward: Should parents gamble on their kid being
the next LeBron James?’, Deseret News, 20 October 2019

Colin, Chris, ‘What is “forest bathing” – and can it make you healthier?’,
The Guardian, 7 October 2019

David, SS, Foot, HC, Chapman, AJ, & Sheehy, NP, ‘Peripheral vision and
the aetiology of child pedestrian accidents’, British Journal of Psychology,
77(1), 117–135

Deci, Edward L, & Ryan, Richard M, Handbook of self-determination

research, University Rochester Press (2004)

Dent, Maggie, ‘Parental as anything’ podcast, ABC (Australian

Broadcasting Corporation), 17 March 2020

Ducharme, Jamie, ‘Being bored can be good for you—if you do it right.
Here’s how’, Time, 4 January 2019

Department of Education and Training Victoria, ‘Travelling to school’

Developing Minds, ‘The underwear rule – Seven sentences to use to help

keep kids safe from sexual abuse’, 25 November 2015

Fredrickson, Barbara L, ‘The broaden-and-build theory of positive

emotions’, Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London,
Series B, Biological sciences, 2004, 359(1449), 1367–1378

Gray, Peter, ‘Toddlers want to help and we should let them’, Psychology
Today, 25 September 2018

Green, Adrian M, ‘Gratitude’, Greater Good, 18 June 2020

Gull, Carla, Goldstein, Suzanne L & Rosengarten, T, ‘Benefits and risks of

tree climbing on child development and resiliency’, International Journal
of Early Childhood Environmental Education, 2017, 5(2), 10

Hesselmar, Bill, Sjoberg, Fei, Saalman, Robert, Aberg, Nils, Adlerberth,

Ingegerd & Wold, Agnes E, ‘Pacifier cleaning practices and risk of allergy
development’, Pediatrics, 2013, 131(6), e1829–e1837
Acknowledgements

This book, and my entire life, would never have been possible without the love and support of my
family. My parents, Malcolm and Lucy, raised my brother, Alex, and I in the mid 80s, and it was in
that context that I learned what sensible parenting was. They have always raised us to be curious and
kind, to be grateful and charitable. When I became a parent, they offered wisdom and humour when I
could find none amid the sleepless nights and anxious days. Mum approached the role of
grandmother with her sleeves rolled up and ready to indulge, and has been a pillar of strength and
love. And when Dad talks to children, especially to his grandchildren, he always addresses them as
the people he knows they will be, with dignity and logic.

My brother, Alex, his wife, Yvonne, and their children, Isla and Ronan, have been overseas for much
of this process, but I am always thankful for the moments the kids can share together, playing
together in person or on Zoom.

James is the best father a child could ask for, one of excitement and games, footy and fancy dress,
challenging discussions, and the ability to find his army officer voice when needed, especially if it
involves getting kids to put shoes on. Thank you for your encouragement during this writing process.

It takes a village to raise a family and my village is great. From day one, Sunita and Kerry have been
a source of checking in, comparing notes, and luxe plate exchanges. Maureen and Todd have been on
the same journey as James and I, and though our distances have been great, they constantly provide
love and support. Maria O’Brien welcomed me into the Working Mother’s Club and renews the
reasons for my membership every day. Andrew knows every way to sneak in vegetables. The
community at St Luke’s, who welcomed the kids and I with open hearts and have nurtured a love of
God in me, while also providing excellent parenting and life advice. The teachers at Jack and Alice’s
schools, who inspire curiosity and kindness in the kids. The team at wolf, who were our home away
from home at stupid o’clock and provided coffee, love, and good chats. The babysitters, Jack
whisperers and general people of awesomeness. Linda and Kaye – the greatest friends/aunts/surfing
lesbian duo that a girl could ask for. Felicity, Bec, Emily, Helena, Pauline, Mariele, Georgia, Indivi
and the entire harem. Thank you for everything.

I have to thank the friends who have held my hand through epic bouts of imposter syndrome, who
dispensed wisdom via WhatsApp and who went for walks and coffees and made me laugh through
the insanity of parenting. My best friends, Melissa Chan – who is always a sounding board, a fact
checker of my life and provider of truth, wisdom and goodness – and Maria Wang-Faulkner – who
while in the trenches of lockdown with a two-year-old and a newborn, read this entire manuscript and
commented on it. Amelia and JT, who provide laughter, pep talks, and excellent music
recommendations. Andrew and Lou, for love and pastries. Sally has been like a sister to me for
longer than either of us dare quantify; she is now Aunty Sal to the kids and has lost a mock trial with
Jack on at least one occasion. Thank you for helping, and for always being correct. Meersy has been
a great friend and a reminder of life beyond parenting; thank you for phone chats on the way home
from Lifeline. Thank you Bevan for stylistic advice and WhatsApp chats at all hours. Kumi has been
not only a Twitter-turned-IRL friend, but a great support over the past year when life has been
complicated, and a firm believer in trusting your gut. Thank you to Leigh, who provides truth bombs
like no other. To Mel, who drove up as soon as lockdown lifted to spend quality time together. To
Kirstin, Jess and Bec, thank you for your friendship and advice. Thank you to Risé.

Throughout this journey I have constantly had the support and friendship of some wonderful mums at
work, especially Bec Herbert, Jo Graffen and Kylie McCullah. I could not have written this book
without their friendship and experiences, and I look forward to holiday adventures again soon. My
colleagues at St Catherine’s are able to make the most frustrating day worthy of tears of laughter, and
multiply the joy that comes from a student’s success tenfold. Our ‘human’ leader Beatriz Cartlidge
plopped me into a history classroom when I was just a baby teacher, and I am constantly amazed at
her ability to tell stories that engage. I acknowledge the wonderful contributions of Elyse Read, the
best work wife in the world, not just to editing this book but also to my life. Kylie Wilson has been a
wonderful friend and mentor in teaching students about religion, and provider of great laughs. Julie
Townsend has been the most inspiring leader at St Catherine’s, as she has lived through raising kids
and working full time. When Alice was six weeks old she promoted me to Director of Positive
Psychology, showing her firm belief that working mothers can do anything (when I did not believe
that of myself), and started me on this journey of positive psychology, wellbeing and resilience. In
this role I have also been incredibly lucky to work with Deb Clancy, the most no-nonsense yet
generous boss I’ve had. She puts huge faith in those she leads and I am incredibly grateful for her
strength and support. Thank you to Sonya, who somehow manages to know everything that is
happening at all times across a school of over 1000 students.

The team at Hardie Grant got to know me when I was giving the history teacher’s essay-marking
treatment on another book they published recently. Arwen Summers and I started a conversation
about resilience, and what started as a joke list of ideas became this book, which it would not have
been without her stewardship. Arwen, being truly passionate about her work, decided to have a baby
during the process in order to truly test out each risk, and I started working with Emily Hart, who has
been a wonderful editor. We have worked on this book across different states, during lockdowns, and
managed to see eye to eye on almost everything, especially musicals. Vanessa Lanaway has been a
brilliant copy editor. And thank you to Sinéad Murphy, who I have also never met, but who has
illustrated and designed this book to match the personality of the author and the message perfectly.

Thank you also to the friends and colleagues who read this book over lockdown and provided
feedback: Fiona Martin, Annabel Crabb, Lenore Skezany, Ian Hickie, Madonna King, and of course
Judith Locke for her wonderful foreword.

This book is about children, and there are some very important children I want to thank. My
godchildren, Edward, Charlie, and Betty-Rose John-O’Brien; Max and Georgina Krugman; and
Winston Howard. You all have brilliant parents who will raise you to be excellent humans, but know
that I am here, at the end of a phone, or in a playground with a babycino, or on a church pew,
whenever you want to talk. As your godmother I should probably quote Colossians 3:20 and tell you
to obey your parents in everything, but instead I think I will remind you to be kind to one another,
tenderhearted and forgiving.

And finally, to the two children who made me a mother, make me smile every day, challenge my
mind and broaden my heart. Jack and Alice, you are the greatest loves of my life. You are growing
into people of strength and integrity, of kindness and empathy, of curiosity and thought. Jack, at
seven you are able to understand how other people feel with more emotional intelligence than most
adults have. Hold on to that, it is such a strength. Alice, you are so strong and determined and I hope
you never let anyone or anything make you want to be less than that. I look forward to taking these
risks with you, and watching you grow into kind, generous and resilient people.
Published in 2021 by Hardie Grant Books,
an imprint of Hardie Grant Publishing
Hardie Grant Books (Melbourne)
Building 1, 658 Church Street
Richmond, Victoria 3121
Hardie Grant Books (London)
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London SE1 1UN
hardiegrantbooks.com
Hardie Grant acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the country on which we work, the
Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation and the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, and recognises
their continuing connection to the land, waters and culture. We pay our respects to their Elders past,
present and emerging.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or
transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the prior written permission of the publishers and copyright holders.
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
Copyright text © Daisy Turnbull 2021
Copyright illustrations © Sinéad Murphy 2021
Copyright design © Hardie Grant Publishing 2021

50 Risks to Take With Your Kids

eISBN 9781 7435 8744 7