Should you let your 8 year old ride their bike to school or walk to the shops on their own? What about going to a party alone? Daisy Turnbull, teacher, director of wellbeing for High School students and daughter of a former Prime Minister discusses with host Amelia Phillips the 50 risks we should take with our children. They discuss physical, social, emotional and even parenting risks that build resilience, confidence and equip our kids for their teenage years and ultimately adulthood.
Below is an unedited transcript of the podcast episode:
I’ve got this dilemma. I recently let my eight year old Lockie start riding his bike to school. Now it’s about a 10 minute ride. He has to cross some quiet roads, and then one busy road with traffic lights. My gut instinct says that he’s sensible enough and he’s ready for it. So after a few weeks of this, another mum friend came up to me and asked if it was actually true that Lockie was riding on his own, because now her son, of course, wants to ride on his own too.
She told me that the school has a recommendation that kids don’t go to school on their own until they attend. So now I have a dilemma. Do I backtrack and stop him or do I go against the school guidelines and potentially make it harder for other parents by setting a precedent?
This is healthy Her with Amelia Phillips raising our kids can seem like a never ending risk assessment exercise, and in many cases it’s just easier to mitigate the risk by protecting our kids. As much as possible and always choosing the safer solution. So this could be physical risk, social emotional, and even parenting risks.
Yeah, by being labeled that parent. But my guest today has witnessed the downside of overprotection, so much so that she was compelled to write a book about it. Daisy Turnbull is a high school teacher, director of wellbeing for high school student. And an accredited Lifeline support counselor. She’s written the book, 50 Risks to Take with your Kids and wants to open up the conversation about risk taking and resilience.
Daisy, thank you so much for joining me on Healthy Hair. Thank you so much for having me. Now, you, my friend, are perfectly positioned to write a book like this when you are the mother of two young kids. You’re a high school teacher who runs this amazing wellbeing program and you’re the daughter of a former Prime Minister and Jeep’s.
Politicians have to be resilient. So tell me what motivated you to write this book. You know, there’s so much research out there about resilience and grit and autonomy. But what I couldn’t really see much of was strategies for teaching these skills to kids. And as a teacher, that’s what I try and do in our wellbeing program.
So, you know, I’ll, I’ll read interesting research about gratitude and then coming up with the gratitude activities. But as a parent, I felt like I was using all that stuff I was learning and that most parents don’t spend their days learning. Yeah. All that stuff I was learning at work and practicing it at school, like I was kind of doing everything in double time.
Yeah, absolutely. The other reason is, as you said, I’m a high school teacher, so it really to me became about recognizing what you want a year seven student to be able to. and how am I getting there with my two kids who are four and three quarters and almost eight, and it’s like, what? You know, my son will start senior school in a few years time, like four or five years time, and it’s like, well, we don’t just expect them to turn up to year seven, ready to do everything and do everything on their own.
but we don’t necessarily do that backward mapping of going, Well, if we expect them to get to school on their own at 12, then what are we doing at 10 and eight and seven and six and five mm? Because we’ve sort of got this deadline right at 18 where suddenly they’re given all this freedom and it’s like, well, You can now drink alcohol and drive a car.
And if we haven’t sort of, as you say, set that map up, are they going to just literally, it’s like you, you know, open the gates and they’re gone and they’re not prepared for that. Absolutely. And the thing I think I would say is that, When we stop our kids being able to take risks, the biggest impact is that they don’t learn their own risk profile.
Mm. And what that means is they kind of go, I can do anything cuz I’ve never gotten scared or freaked out or hurt my knee or, you know, broken an arm or anything. Not that we want kids to break arms, but you know, like I’ve never had any consequences because of what I’ve done. So what I do is fine. Whereas if.
Let your kids try things and go, Oh, that was too scary. Then they learn what their limits are themselves. They create their own boundaries rather than you creating them for them. Yeah, exactly. And you know, I’ve got this story shortly after the book came out, I was sitting at North Bondi on the, you know, on the grass, and there was this little kid who was scootering along the promenade and I heard the mom go, Stop, you’ve gone too far, you’ve gone too far.
And this little kid stopped and turned around and started. And for that kid it was getting in trouble with mom was what made him or her realize they’d gone too. What it should have been is, you know, there are no cars on the promenade. It’s just people. Yeah. It’s a safe space. Yeah. It should just been stopping, turning around going, Oh my God, I can’t see mom or dad right now.
I’m freaking out. And that would’ve been a far more useful lesson for the kid. Yeah. Rather than I freaked my mom out. Yeah. That’s a really great analogy. And I imagine, you know, you see so many school students in high school. Do you see a really broad. Kind of risk profile. You know, you’ve got like the outrageous risk taking kids versus the , you know, versus the not.
So is that an observation that you’ve noticed? Yeah, and look, there’s, there’s always gonna be kids that are riskier than others. And I think, you know, to that point, I probably wouldn’t have written this book if my son hadn’t been a bit risky as a kid, cuz I wouldn’t. Had to reflect on what I was doing and whether or not I needed to give him more, you know, more risks because he wanted them, You know, if I had had my daughter as my first child, she’s very happy to walk down the street holding my hand and you know, and I probably wouldn’t have thought so much about needing to do things and figuring out what their limits are because I had a son who wanted to do stuff.
Mm. And it really is interesting, this kind of nature versus. Nurture discussion. You know, you cite in your book that one of your passions is crocheting, which doesn’t particularly strike me as high risk. But then would you say your upbringing was resilience building merely by watching how your parents were dealing with their high pressured jobs?
I mean, you must have learned something or absorbed virals, something from that. I think what I learned from my parents is that they worked really hard. They always worked really hard, and they’ve always. Very generous, and we’ve always been connected to charities and talked about people who need support and society, and I think that that is who my parents are.
And I think it’s important to remember for, for me, growing up, my parents weren’t really in the public eye as much as I knew Yeah. Until I was like 13 or 14. Yeah. So my childhood, you know, the, the ages up to 10 that, you know, this book is based. I was very much just, you know, kid in Sydney and going to Centennial Park and that kind of thing.
Like, and, and I think to that end, it’s not so much about who my parents are, it’s that I was raised in the eighties. Mm. So I had that eighties childhood. And then I had , you know, parenting in the 20 teens and going, What’s happened in this time? Why is everything so different? So I remember when my son was two.
Yep. Santa needed some assistance with putting together a trampoline. Mm-hmm. on Christmas Eve. And I remember one of the, uh, assistants saying before, You know, the, the, what do they put around, like the net around the trampoline was done. They, well, the 1980s trampoline is done. Yeah. . Totally. And I was like, No, we, we wrap them now.
And so I think, you know, all of those changes. Yeah. But, you know, I’m thankful that they wrapped them. Like I, I, I’m actually on the. Trampoline. Oh, absolutely. You know, like I, I’m about to get a trampoline and I must say I’m so relieved that they have those now. Cause I, you know, it is so different than than the eighties.
It is. And a lot of it is better, but I do think we’ve probably, the pendulum has swung too far. And this leads me onto my next question. Why do you think that allowing our kids to take risks is important? I think the reason is that kids need to feel autonomous and competent, and this comes from a psychological theory called self-determination theory.
So there’s autonomy, competence, and relationships. They need to have some choice in what they’re doing. Autonomy. They need to be able to do it so competent and they need to have a connection with the people they’re doing things with or or for. So either that’s their parents, their friends, their teachers.
The problem with not letting them take any risks is they don’t actually know what they can do and what they. and that can lead to a lot of frustration and feeling frustrated and like you don’t have control over anything can lead to depressive symptoms. And also feeling like you can’t control anything can lead to anxiety.
Interesting. And we know that. Teens are having increasing rates of anxiety and depression. We know that a lot of mental health diagnoses happen in the early teen years. So it’s the stuff we do in the years before that that are really important. Absolutely. And in your book, you actually categorize a different types of risks.
I don’t know if there’s a eighties trampoline category, that falls into the physical risks. Yeah, the physical risks, but I, I don’t promote eighties trampoline . It’s a, it’s a, it’s a funny story. So there’s physical risks, which are things like climbing trees, riding on a scooter when they’re little, like letting them roam around the house.
And I do think it’s funny, we’ve gone from, when I think of watching Mad Men, you know babies were in Playpens. Yes. And now it’s like they get free range of the whole house, which is great. But then we end up like overprotecting the house. Yeah. Yeah. And I do think like we’ve gotta find a way to coexist with babies.
Mm. So there’s physical risks, there’s also character risks, like the risks that help you develop as a person. And I think of this as if you don’t develop character, then you can become someone who blames everyone for everything. You can become very entitled. Not really understand gratitude, not understand other people, which of course leads to the next area, which is social risks.
So the risks around, you know, making friends, learning how to talk to people. We know that relationships are at the heart of life satisfaction, and there’s a Harvard longitudinal study which shows. That over 80 years I’ve been researching people and the biggest factor that makes a happy life is positive relationships, and that doesn’t just have to be with a life partner.
Okay. It also doesn’t have to be 5,000 followers on Instagram. It’s about quality relationships. So I get social risks, but can you just backtrack and give me some examples of character risks? Yeah. So character risks are things like anything that helps you develop responsibility so when something goes wrong, recognizing that things go wrong.
Okay. Writing thank you letters. Some of them cross over into multiple areas. Yeah. Okay. For sure. That might be social and character. And character. So for example, letting your kid have a tantrum. Mm-hmm. is an important one because we always talk about self-regulation and that’s really, I. But at the same time, we have tantrums all the time.
And I start that risk by talking about how I got really angry at the printer at school one day. And it’s about learning to contain it, not pretending it’s not there. Ah, got it. Because that shapes your character. Totally. Um, cleaning up their own mess. So taking responsibility for things. So cleaning their room is a big one.
Mm-hmm. . And also one thing that’s I think a really important one is letting them level up in their own time. So that idea. Don’t feel you need to rush your kid to get through all these risks cuz there’s 50 of them in a week, like mm-hmm. , Figure out where they’re at and when you see them being able to do something, let them do it.
So, you know, my daughter started wanting to climb into her high chair. I saw her do it one day, and then the next day I just lifted her up and put her in and she got really frustrated with me. Yeah. And I was like, Well, yeah, that’s something she’s learning to do. I need to let her do that. Mm. And it’s that same thing, you know, they can put their own shoes on, but then you end up doing it for them because you’re in a rush and you’re trying to get out the door and, and sometimes you are in a rush and that is totally fine.
Yeah. But I think it’s important to communicate that to them. Mm-hmm. . Okay, so we jumped around. We said physical risk, social risk, character risks. Are there any other categories? There is, and the last category is, the one that you were talking about at the start of this episode is parenting risks. And it’s those decisions as a parent to take a risk and back yourself in it.
So you talked about, you know, your son riding his bike to school, which I think is brilliant. And one of the funniest things is, um, Leno Nazi who started the free range parenting movement mm-hmm. , she talks about the worst first principle. Worst first. What’s that? The worst possible thing that could happen.
Oh, don’t say that . And then you put that first in your mind. Okay. So worst possible thing that could happen, you know, gets hit by a bus and then you go, Okay, well he can never ride his bike to school. Yeah. But if that’s how we lived, every decision in our life, We would never do anything. Yeah. You can’t actually live your decisions like that and even more so, you can’t let your kid know that’s how you’re making your decisions, cuz then they will become really anxious from it.
Mm-hmm. , the other thing that’s interesting is we often don’t know where the law ends and judgment begins. So you mentioned at your school, a parent said to you, Oh, they don’t like them doing it till they’re 10. Yeah. I absolutely bet you that if you rang the school principal and said, Hey, I want my son to ride his bike, he’s eight, he’s.
Everyone would say that’s great. Now that we know that, we’ll, you know, let you know if he ever doesn’t turn up on time. And I think we do often think that we might be doing the wrong thing, when in fact we’re just being judged for doing what we think our kids can do. So also it’s very hard. Kids develop at such different ages and stages that, you know, putting a chronological number on a child development, it’s so gray.
It’s so gray. I mean, you even have to look at puberty, for example, and the, the decade that kids, you know, start puberty. So broad that you as a parent must trust that gut instinct and you have to know your kid and how your kid will do. So it might be that your first kid will be awesome bike riding to a school, but your next kid might not want to ever do it.
Mm.
So let’s talk about some of the risks. There’s 50 of them and I love them. And just to clarify, these are not risks like jumping off a cliff. One of them, for example, is ordering their own baby Chino. And I love that one and I actually did that. I’m very proud to say with Lockie when he was three to four years old and we used to go to the same cafe each week and he didn’t just order it.
He’d also, cuz I’m lazy, he would take my credit card up to counter and pay for it at the end of the of the meal. Perfect. Talk me through a couple of your favorite risks that you think, or risks you think are super important. So my favorite risk in the whole book, because I think it is so important for young moms, you know, early moms to know this, is that the baby can’t fall off the floor.
Oh, , I read that one and laughed out loud because we are so paranoid about. Putting babies down. And what it does is it develops huge dependency on overstimulation. And I think that I totally did this with my first child and a friend of mine, you know, just was on such, they can’t fall off the floor. Just put them on a towel, put them on the floor.
Tummy time is great. And then you can go and make a cup of tea. And you actually want to do that as early as you can. Mm. So you can still see them. You can still hear them. There’s nothing they can choke on, like they’re. Yeah, because if they can’t do a few minutes on their own when they’re little, they won’t ever be able to.
So they actually need, It’s about that learning to, you know, enjoy their own company effectively. But it’s okay cuz if you didn’t do that risk with your first child, you’re sure as hell gonna do it with your second and once you get to four honey. You were leaving that child, they’re screaming for you and you’re like, Sorry honey, I cannot get to you.
I’m here but . So we know that kids can, you know that. So I do think that’s the, the one thing I’d say like parents, we need to relax from day one and not, not in a negligent way, but we need to go, Okay, you know what, actually. a baby. Making a noise does not mean I have to drop everything and go there right now.
Mm-hmm. , you know that and we know as parents what, what different noises are and there is a difference between a Google and a cry. Absolutely. So that’s my first one. For the first year, my favorite for the one to four years old. So when they’re on the move is, And I love it, but I hate it. God, I hate it. It is the worst.
And I wrote it for myself. is helping, not helping. Oh yeah. I was the same again, this is that thing. We expect a kid at age 10 or 11 to be able to set the table for dinner or make themselves a sandwich or fold laundry or hang laundry up. Do do things right. You kind of go, What do I expect the 10 year old to be able to do?
Yeah, but what are we actually letting them try doing? And what you need to do is you need to find. Where you’re not stressed and you have time and you say, Hey, you know, You’re gonna help me fold laundry and put it away and it will take you approximately five times longer to do it than it would normally.
Yeah. Oh, it so frustrating. But it means they’re learning and one day they’ll be able to put the laundry away. Yeah. Because how else are they going to learn to put the laundry away? Mm-hmm. , like I said, I wrote it for myself and I love this analogy give of, of, we’ve basically gotta work ourselves out of a.
Like that’s what parenting is about. Yes. And you had a great quote. The more you help them, the less you help them. And , that’s, Oh, I was thinking about the shoe analogy in that one. It’s so true, and, and I see it now, actually, now that my kids are getting a little bit older where it’s like, Oh wow. Making them wear their backpack from the car to the preschool.
Like now they’re grabbing their backpack and they’re actually taking it to the front door and they’re carrying it to the car. For me, it’s actually starting to help me now Absolut. . And what about the older age group? Do you have a favorite in the next age group? I do. So my favorite is that they need to learn how to suck at something.
Yeah, okay. Because it doesn’t matter if your kid is gonna go on to be an elite athlete or the best spell, be competitor ever or whatever. Mm. At some point we need to learn as people that we’re not great at everything and the sooner we learn that and we clock that experience. , the easier it is when it happens in real life.
So if the first time you ever get rejected for something is for your first job when you’re 21, that’s a pretty big blow. Mm-hmm. , but also in school, like no child is good at absolutely every subject. You know, you might have the child that’s amazing at maths and then absolutely sucks at English. And if they have.
Attitude of, unless I’m the best at this, I’m just not gonna try school is gonna be a really challenging, tough environment. Yeah. And I try really hard, you know, in a lot of psychology stuff, they always refer to sports and I must say I’m not a huge sports ball person. Mm-hmm. . But the analogies always do easily come for sport.
But it’s like even if your kid is amazing at nep, Get them playing a sport that they’re not brilliant at. So they experience being part of the team rather than being the star of the team. Yeah, absolutely. Because it’s just, it’s important that we all learn. We’re not brilliant at everything all the time.
Yeah, absolutely. I have to say I love number 34. Disagree with your kids, you know, which is essentially all about teaching your kids how to argue effectively, which becomes very useful in life, I think. . Yes. Tell me in that one, how do you think we can teach our kids to be better arguers and. Not just tell them to, you know, shut up and be authoritarian.
I’m sure that you guys are all very good debaters in your household. . Yeah, I was gonna say, I’m starting to regret writing this one because it’s really coming back to bite me with my son at the moment, . I can imagine. Look, I think it is about talking to your kids respect. So that they see respectful language modeled and that they learn how to argue respectfully and they need to learn that.
Mm. I also think the ability to create a logic chain. Of like you said this and this made that happen, and therefore blah. Mm. Is a really useful skill. And I say that mainly as a history teacher. Yeah. Right. Being able to get students to explain why something happened in history or how something happened in history.
Mm-hmm. , that is easier if you can explain why you’re in a bad mood. Yep. I also think it’s okay to sometimes pull rank on your kids and go, Look, this is not a thing we’re arguing over. You’re not getting TV tonight. Or, That was so rude, like this is the consequence. You’re not getting this. You know, you do sometimes wanna be able to say to your kid, Yeah, nah, this isn’t one we’re gonna argue over.
Just suck it up. Yeah. It absolutely has to be a line drawn. Yeah. And I also think to that end, really important for kids to respect boundaries and recognize that some, you know, not like always no means no. But sometimes, yeah, if you argue with mom enough and she said you can’t have any red frogs, and then you argue enough and then you get red frogs.
Mm-hmm. . You don’t want kids to get the idea that coercion always works because that obviously can lead to really bad behavior later on in life. Yeah. You want kids to respect you. But you also want to respect their ability to argue their case. Well, and on this topic of communication as well, I love this rule.
You have, you call it the three question rule. So if you’ve got one of those kids that aren’t a great talker and you’ve asked your child three questions and they haven’t asked you one. Stop talking. Yeah. What does this achieve? . So, um, Dr. Judith Locke actually talked to parents about this at our school for parents of teenagers.
And she say, you know, so how was school? Blah, blah. Yeah. Good. And what’d you learn? Not much. And who’d you sit with at lunch? Katie? Because I don’t nosy back then. Don’t keep talking because they shouldn’t expect all conversation to. Focused on them and they should learn to be good conversationalists. Mm.
Judith Locke makes the point that you should also have that approach to if you’re talking to someone at a party. Yeah. You know, if you’ve asked them three questions and they don’t ask you anything back, then walk away because interesting people are interested. Yes. And I think you wanna raise your kids to be interested and and see other people as people they can learn things from.
Yes. And not think that the only reason adults come to your house is for them to find out about the kid and then assume adults are boring. Yeah. And that was another recommendation you had in the book, which was encourage your kids to ask questions to other adults. And I actually have been adopting this with my kids at the dinner table when we have friends come over as well.
And I’ve been doing it every night at dinner and I can’t tell you the conversations that have opened up where I’ve sat down and said, All right, kids, every is gonna ask someone on this table two questions tonight. And I don’t care how it happens. And we just have the best conversations. The other night, my four year old asked my six year.
How do you think clouds are made? And this 15 minute discussion, one of them thought it was made from trains. And I was like, How do I think it comes from trains? And then I realized steam trains. And then, you know, my eight year old launched into his, um, you know, his very scientific, he launched into his scientific reason about particles.
And my husband and I just sat back smiling, going, This is so nice. Just watching them all interacting like that. Totally. It’s really great. And, and realizing they can learn from each other as well. Yeah, absolutely. It was, I could see the bond developing between them. Yeah. Now I wanna discuss the difference between giving a child space to learn and take risks and be sistant.
And neglect. Yeah. And I wanna just preface this by telling you a really quick piece of advice. I’ve got a colleague who’s very high up in the police force on the northern beaches of Sydney, and she gave me this piece of advice. She said, Every time we have a missing child, the parents have no idea where that kid was.
And they’ll say, Okay, so where was the child? The last, you know? And they say, Oh, they said they went to a friend’s house. Okay, Which friend’s? I think they said it was Kirsty. Okay. Kirsty who? Um, And the parents actually don’t know where their kid was. Mm. And it’s this balance between, okay, how can you give your kids space but also keep them safe?
What do you reckon? Yeah. So look, this book is for the over parent. It is not for the parent who is at risk of neglecting their kids. Okay, so let me just put that out very clearly. But how do we know? I don’t know which one I am. Sometimes I think I’m the neglectful mother cuz I’m plagued with guilt that I work so hard and I’ve got four kids.
And then other times when I look at how many times I’ve messaged a school teacher, I think I’m definitely the helicopter . No, I think, look, I. The parents who, who are at risk of, you know, neglecting their kids. Yes, they are. They are busy and they have worked, you know, very, very rarely because of a lack of love.
It’s because of extenuating circumstances. And yeah, the fact is the grownups who will tell you that they, you know, lived in a house where they would go out all day and come home when the lights, street lights turned on and that kind of thing. That was normal when we were kids, but I think also, Those grownups would say to you, I recognize that probably wasn’t great parenting.
Yeah. You know the, the kids who say my parents had no idea where I was. Yeah. And we do know that there have been kidnappings, but those grownups also probably are quite resilient, know what to do, blah, blah, blah. But that can also partly be trauma informed. And this is definitely, these risks are not designed.
So your kid can say, When I was a kid I had to walk 10 miles to school in the snow every day. That’s not the point. Mm. You know, if your kid is loved and fed and given you know attention and cared for and has friends, and then they’re not neglected, you know? Yeah. Look, on the topic of knowing where your kids are, it’s a funny one because you should know where your kids are or you should know where they’re going, but that’s a conversation that happens earlier than probably your friend is referring to.
Yeah. A few weeks ago, my son is almost eight and. Really wanted to go to the shops to get milk. And where I live, there are a few kind of grocery stores around. So I said, Okay, you go to this one and you get milk and you come back. And he’s like, Deal. And he took a little bit longer than I thought. So I was standing outside the front door thinking, Oh goodness, has he gone?
This would be very, I was like, Is he gonna come back? ? He’s made a run for it. . Yeah, he was made a runner. I’m looking in the direction of the shop. I told him to go. Yeah. And then he comes from the other direction and I’m like, Where are you coming from? He’s like, Oh, I went to the other shop. And I was like, No, no, no, no, no.
The deal was you’re going that, And I explained the reason is that if something happened to you, I knew the direction to go and look for you. Yeah. And so it’s having that conversation with your kid. Well, in my police example, she said to me, It’s really simple, she said, As your kids get older and you don’t really get to know the parents, you just gotta be that parent that says, Who’s Kirsty?
Yeah. What’s, I’m gonna get their mom’s number. And you literally have, you know, Kirsty and your kid’s name in brackets in your phone. So you know, Lock’s friend. Yeah. And you put the parents’ phone number in and that way you just literally send this stranger of a text that you say, Okay, Lock’s coming. Said he was coming to Kirsty’s tonight.
I’m lock’s mom. Just wanted to check if that’s okay. And she said even with teenagers, you just keep doing that. Yeah. Um, and I thought that was, you know, that’s manageable. I can do that. Absolutely. But also as your kids get older and they have mobiles, you, you know, hopefully they can communicate with you directly.
Oh, absolutely. Until they start blocking your call or not answering, or the phone’s turned off, well then they don’t really start to freak out. Yes. I think the rule has to be, if you are, if you’ve given your kid a mobile and you are paying. If you can ever not contact them or they’ve switched it off or it’s run outta battery, they’re not using it properly and you take it away for a day.
Yeah, I like that. I really like that consequence. Finally, Daisy, for a mom who instinctively wants to fix everything for their child, what is the first step she can take to feeling okay about letting go and not always choosing that safest option? So I would say the first thing you can do is start really.
And think of one area that you wanna focus on. So it might be, depending on the age of your child, it might be ordering the baby Chino. Don’t do all 50 risks at once. It’ll freak you out and it’ll freak your kids out. choose your moments, so don’t do it when you’re stressed. You know, again, a lockdown is probably a good time to get your kid to start helping with things.
Mm-hmm. and let them explore a playground. And let your kids be your guide. So if you’ve got four kids, you probably have four different approaches to risk. And yeah, your approach to introducing each of them to risk will be different. That is such good advice. Daisy, thank you so much. Thank you so much.
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