by MIA FREEDMAN
The woman outside the supermarket had something to say to my father. She marched over to him angrily with her face full of disdain. “How can you keep your child on a leash?” she exclaimed, gesturing to the tethered toddler trotting happily beside him. “Children are people! Not dogs! What a disgrace!”
Taking a deep breath, my father patiently explained why his recalcitrant daughter was attached to a harness. Except not patiently. “Would you prefer me to let her run onto the road?” he replied. “How about I mind my child and you mind your own business.”
The kid on the end of that leash was me, of course. You see, I was a mad dasher. I don’t recall being leashed and it’s never come up in therapy so I assume any emotional damage was negligible. As opposed to the physical damage involved in running into traffic.
As a parent myself now, I’ve given the leash thing a whirl with each of my own kids although these days they’re innocuously cute backpacks in the shape of puppies and monkeys whose long tails that parents can hold. People still go a bit nuts about leashes though. They’re polarising.
Personally, my view is that there are far worse things a parent can do to their child than be so concerned for their safety that they go to the trouble of buying a leash and getting their kid to wear it.
But it’s not just runaway toddlers being leashed. Today, mobile phones are the new leash, tethering older kids and even teenagers to their parents for better and worse.
I have lots of friends deciding whether to buy phones for their kids at the moment. Over dinner recently, my eyes were rolling as one close friend explained why her 10yo daughter wouldn’t be getting one. “We’ve found the nearest public phones near school and home and she always has the right change. We’ve discussed different ways to ask for help if she needs it; going into a shop, looking for a police officer….it’s how we grew up and we were fine.