Can I go to the shop?” whines my son, wearing what he hopes is a winning smile.
I look at him, head on one side. He wants to buy sweets, and I’m torn. I don’t want him to have too many, but he doesn’t have them often and he’s been a delight since I fetched him from school. Admittedly this was only fifteen minutes ago, but some days he lurches out of his classroom with a comic strip thundercloud almost visibly hovering above his furious little strawberry blond (ginger if you prefer) head.
Today though, he’s been happy, communicative, and has even volunteered information about what he did at school, “We played with clay all afternoon Mum”. In short, I feel he deserves a reward. It’s also a good way to develop his independence and confidence, as he likes to go to the shop ON HIS OWN.
This was no big deal when I was eight, in fact I’d been going to the corner shop since I could talk, to fetch packets of Gladstone for my Gran. But that was another time and another place. It’d be illegal for me to send him to buy cigarettes, even if I smoked, and some parents are horrified that I’d let an eight year old cross two minor roads to venture into a Co-op which was once robbed by teenagers with knives during daylight hours.
The first time he went he was seven, and I watched him as far as the end of the road, timed him, and was about to go in search of him when I spotted him trotting back round the corner.
Today though, I give him a key and start preparing tea. He arrives back, puffed, red-faced and empty-handed. Has something happened? No. I only let him take ten pence to limit the damage to his teeth, and therein lies the problem.
“You can’t get anything for ten pence Mum.” So, feeling rotten for being the cause of a wasted journey I say,
“Okay, take twenty pence.” But he looks reluctant and mutters,
“Can you come with me?”
“Why? I thought you liked going on your own.”
“I have to run all the way there and back and it’s tiring.”
“Well walk then.”
“I have to run in case someone tries to snatch me.”
So the sum total of all that PSHE, Newsround and Radio Four blabbing on in the background, is a fear of walking.
We have a conversation about how rare it is for a stranger to snatch a child, and I stress that what makes it news is the rarity of it.
“I know,” he says, “it’s just me being stupid.”
But it’s not him that’s stupid, it’s the rest of the world, and he has to grow up in it.
