Grown-ups will often talk about how health and safety wasn’t even a concept when they were young. This was in the days before helicopter parenting, where children played in the street and adult supervision was a distant notion. Parents nowadays are more concerned about protecting their children from getting hurt, though they have less to worry about – most kids are too busy playing games on their iPads to climb trees.
Adventurer Bear Grylls thinks we could all be a bit more gung ho. “You don't empower kids by removing risk,” he says, arguing that “life is full of risk”, and children should be taught to manage it at an early age.
The 51-year-old host of Celebrity Bear Hunt has put his own three sons, Jesse, 21 Marmaduke, 19 and Huckleberry, 15, through their paces. They’ve learned all sorts of survival skills and done extreme sports like base jumping and paragliding. Grylls once came under fire for leaving his eldest son Jesse stranded by himself on some rocks off the Welsh coast when he was aged 11, as part of an RNLI rescue exercise. But as he repeats: “Life isn’t about trying to minimise risk in kids’ lives.”
Grylls has had numerous near-death experiences, and it seems he has passed down the daredevil spirit. Aged 18, Jesse base jumped off a bridge topless with the parachute hooks stuck into his bare skin. “That one is outside of the correct health and safety parameters,” Grylls concedes. “We've all made a few mistakes in our life, and that one drifted on the wrong side of the line.”
The family live on a remote private island off Abersoch in Wales, where the children “learned from a young age how to tie knots, be respectful of the sea and, you know, check the weather and all these sorts of things.”
To that end, Grylls set up a festival called Gone Wild, now in its fourth year, which takes place in Devon in August. It’s a bit like Wilderness meets PGL. In between watching artists like Clean Bandit and Professor Green, revellers can take part in commando assault courses, paintballing, 10k races and catapult making.
Grylls hosts a “survival academy”, where kids learn skills like making arrows and spears, foraging for food and navigating by the stars. “I always say it’s the safest unsafe festival in the world, because you have kids throwing axes everywhere, but everyone is a policeman or a royal marine,” Grylls says. He set the festival up with an ex commando friend, and 10% of proceeds go to the Royal Marines Charity.
Nursing your hangover by going on a 10k run with a load of policemen may not be everyone’s idea of festival fun, but there’s clearly a market for it: Gone Wild expanded to a second site in Norfolk last year, and there are plans to grow the festival internationally.
At my festival, you have kids throwing axes everywhere
It’s all part of Grylls’ campaign to get kids off their screens and out into nature. “I’m not against screen time, it’s part of our lives,” he says, though he laments how many parents use screens to pacify their children. “The easy option is to shut the kid up and put it on an iPad every mealtime,” he says. “I see it all the time at hotels – the kid is just sat there when Mum and Dad are having dinner, on an iPad with headphones on.”
Grylls is nervous to “pontificate” about whether schools should ban smartphones, but thinks parents should encourage their children to “be their own policeman to their screen time”.
While his family may appear to be wholesomely detached from technology, they still struggle too. “Screen time is a continual battle for every family, and we're like that as well. Not just with the children, but with ourselves,” he admits.
His advice is for parents to encourage their children to seek out adventure. “You don't have to go halfway around the world to have adventure. It’s on our doorstep: green spaces, planning little trips away, cycle rides, getting outside, getting off screens.”
