Resilience - are we helping?

I went to one of the Alfred Deakin Lectures at Ballarat University last week. The title was 'The Geography of Hope' and it covered a range of issues under the banner of environmental challenges. One of the speakers was Dr Brian Walker, Research Fellow with CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems. But it was his role as Program Director and Chair of the Board of the Resilience Alliance that caught my attention. Brian pointed out that given the very significant changes that are going to be forced on us all because of climate change we will need to build resilience in our communities and individuals to cope with these changes.

When Preston B. Cline was here in Australia last year he also said that in these times of rapid technological change we need to build resilience in our children if they are to cope with the rapid pace of change.

Increasingly we are hearing from commentators and academics that we are 'cotton woolling' our children in our attempts to protect them from risk. Our society is becoming increasingly risk averse - and yet it is our contention in the camps and outdoors sector that by supporting and encouraging children to engage with risk in a thoughtful and planned way that we can in fact build their resilience.

We continue to hear about the 'obesity epidemic', increasing rates of suicide amongst teenagers and increasing incidences of mental illness and depression. Surely we can't solve these problems by withdrawing further into our protective cocoons? That might be a natural reaction but it must be detrimental in the long term because it suggests that it is safer at home on the couch than it is to be out riding your bike, safer in a tightly controlled environment than it is exploring and playing. Well it might be safer in the immediate short term - but what about the longer term impacts on our health and wellbeing? To believe that we can, or need to, somehow protect our children from the disappointments that inevitably are a part of growing up and working out how they fit in the world is, while understandable, not helpful in the long run.

So is trying to manage risk out of existence, in an effort to protect our children and ourselves from harm, actually counterproductive? I suggest the answer is yes.