Freddy's blog: The right amount of protection

It’s a brutal place, the City. I saw a guy crossing the street the second the lights turned green and get called the worst word you can be called by a gang of Australian cyclists. I saw a cyclist get hit by a bus (not one of the same cyclists, sadly). There are banking bullies who seem to patrol the streets looking for people to smash out of their way. Sometimes even indoors, in the bland corporate safety of the office, minor tensions and disagreements erupt into shouting and aggression.

But I’m 34 (for another month or so anyway). I know when to cross the road, I pick my fights and I can more or less deal with ‘difficult conversations’ at work.

It’s much harder watching my daughter learn that people aren’t always particularly congenial. She smiles at 95 per cent of the people we meet. She’s never shy or afraid to get stuck in at the classes she goes to. Everyone is her friend and everything is fun. But there have been three occasions recently where she has met another child who isn’t her friend and isn’t fun.

Bully 1 was a boy (with an earring) of probably 2 years old who told my daughter to go away (in the worst way you can say it) when she said hello to him at the slide. Bully 2 was a different boy at the same slide who bumped her off the steps. Bully 3, at another play area, repeatedly ran at her and knocked her over until she was too afraid to carry on. Poor thing, at 17 months she’s only recently cracked negotiating slides and obstacles by herself and she can’t understand why someone would want to stop her doing something so exciting.

(I’d say one of those kids has been very unfortunate, one was having a bad day, and one doesn’t get enough attention and is angry about it.)

I know these incidents are really nothing. This week while researching for a speech I’m writing, I read that more than 600 children have died trying to cross the Mediterranean in boats this year and that last year the UN refugee agency was passed nearly 100,000 asylum applications from unaccompanied children. I cannot imagine their fear. And my daughter is lucky that she probably won’t have to experience it.

But of course it hurts deeply to see her get upset. And the conflict holds a new and difficult lesson for a parent too. It creates an internal conflict.

You want them to learn just a little about the nastiness of the world, but when do you step in to protect them? Without the vague, abstract structures we depend on at work or in our adult lives to resolve these things, how do you calm things down? And which one of the guys in the park is the other kid’s dad and could I take him?

Having children makes you realise how much you still have to learn as an adult. I’m still learning.

Freddy works a nine-day fortnight as a kind of deluxe jack-of-all-trades for a trade association in the City. On his day off he and his bright, happy one-year-old daughter read books about animals, play with animal stickers and go to look at animals.