Ian Lewis, of Campaign for Adventure – Risk and Enterprise in Society, and clerk of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Adventure and Recreation in Society, put up a valiant effort to counter this state of affairs. He talked enthusiastically about testing young people’s ‘adventure thresholds’, setting ‘new horizons’, and berated us to ‘change our own perceptions of the possible’.

Dr Tony Sewell, CEO of Generating Genius and a columnist with the black community newspaper The Voice, also injected a much needed dose of inspiration. He echoed Lewis’s warning that in the absence of sufficient risk taking opportunities children will seek it out in the kind of activities society frowns upon, like drug use and antisocial behaviour. If we don’t provide young people with the opportunities to take risks, he said, they’ll seek out bad risks and join gangs. We need more ‘controlled risk’ he continued

Full article http://www.culturewars.org.uk/2007-12/riskchildhood.htm