Two 17-year-old boys, one Hungarian and the other German, have died in accidents while on holiday in Malta and the internet is full of wise owls and know-it-alls saying that ‘something must be done’. But nothing can be done, and nothing should be done. Boys that age are biologically hardwired to take risks, and that’s about the sum of it. Some take smaller risks, and others take greater ones, depending on personality and circumstances.

The only ones who take no risks at all are those who are raised in cotton-wool padding by parents who teach and train them to be afraid of everything, and that makes for a very different set of problems that are even less desirable because the character flaws they create last for a lifetime, while the risk-taking tends to be very temporary and associated with that particular period of development.

One jumped into very rough and unfamiliar sea with strong currents and the other fell off a cliff. The bodies of both were recovered after many days. In both cases, distraught families had to deal with horrible circumstances in a foreign land. Had their parents been present, it’s a safe bet that the one would have not fallen off that cliff and the other would not have gone into that sea, because a frightened mother and a furious father would have pointed out the dangers and prevented it physically if necessary. But parents are not routinely present around 17-year-olds; they are barely present around them at all, and they shouldn’t be.

Those of us who raised boys of 15, 16 and 17 – in my case, three of them concurrently at precisely those ages, which easily aged me by a decade – look back in a cold sweat wondering how we got through it, and thanking God (or the stars or whatever we like to thank) that they did. If you don’t know what it’s like to go to bed every night, year after year after damned year, wondering whether the phone is going to ring in the small hours with the voice of authority at the other end, whether you’ll be in a hospital waiting-room in the morning, then don’t comment. I know just how easy it is for a boy that age to wind up in perilous circumstances, so I reserve judgement.

It’s actually a whole lot worse when they are younger: extreme risk-taking with boys begins roughly as soon as they learn how to walk. But up to the age of 15 you can more or less keep an eye on them and after that you can’t. From the age of 15 to 18, it’s three years of trouble and suspense as you wonder, every time the phone rings at an awkward hour, what fresh hell might this be. And of course, there is that other peculiar hell of the phone not ringing at all, when it’s 5am and your routine nocturnal bed-checking tour (I’ll bet lots of you are reading this and shaking your heads in recognition) reveals that the 15-year-old’s bed is empty. Two tense hours then follow until you can reasonably begin ringing around the most likely suspect locations – good manners and the fear of being thought insane tussle with instinctive worry as you keep your hands off that phone until the sun has actually risen – before you begin checking the hospital. But of course it’s not the hospital, you tell yourself; the hospital would have rung.

I was at the local health centre and the Accident & Emergency Department at the general hospital so often when my sons were growing up that when I look back I think that nowadays – when children live increasingly sheltered lives between four walls – I would probably have been put under investigation by the ‘authorities’. The reality is that the place where we lived offered so much scope for gargantuan risk-taking that short of putting bars on the windows, locking all the doors and surrounding the house with a barbed wire fence, there wasn’t much I could do. Even going to the beach was supremely unrelaxing as they would swim off across the bay and disappear for hours, aged nine or whatever, while I swore to myself that I would not, repeat not, turn into a shrieking, bottom-slapping harridan on their reappearance (but then did exactly that).

So when I read about the Hungarian and German boys who met their unhappy end, I didn’t say ‘But where were their parents?’ or ‘What on earth made them do that?’ I said that I’m surprised that kind of thing doesn’t happen more often, how many lucky escapes there must be, and how many parents who had boys that age must be looking back and thinking of those years when one impulsive decision meant the difference between life and death and nobody even knew it at the time.

 

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