When my son was small I was anxious, as all new parents are, that something might happen to him. At that time, the back to sleep campaign had just started and so there was much awareness raising about sudden infant or cot death. But once those first few weeks and months passed my fears subsided, and the dangers became much more avoidable in my mind, and we bought various child proof gadgets for cupboards, to put into electrical sockets and stair gates to prevent him getting up or down stairs. These were a challenge for adults too and those calling round found them difficult to negotiate!

What I didn’t realise was that my anxiety about his safety would be higher at age 16 than they were at 6 weeks or 6 months, but you can’t watch the news or pick up a paper without feeling that the world is suddenly very risky for the average teenager. Kim from Emergiblog, (and I am sure many other bloggers) has been speaking about her fears for her children in the wake of the tragedy in Virginia and here in the UK many parents have recently lost sons to a series of teenage boy gun and knife murders. My son is not black and we do not live in any of the large cities where these murders have taken place, and the risks US teenagers of being murdered within the campus of their own colleges may not be large, but as parents of teenagers and young adults we fear for our offspring.

Teenagers in general terms seem to have little fear of their own mortality, they are certainly not as risk averse as we would like them to be and we have to allow them to complete their journey into adult hood. We have to keep our own fears to ourselves, or certainly out of their earshot, while trying to get them to recognise the risks. Who ever said parent hood was easy?