AS a 12-year old, I would often go around with a large sheath knife fixed to my belt. It was to help me do the things 12-year-olds did back then, like whittling home-made spears, or perfecting the art of dagger-throwing.

Today, the very idea of a 12-year old buying a knife would set health and safety bells ringing. Buying a small multitool in TK Maxx a few weeks ago, I was asked – at the ripe old age of 52 – whether I was 18 or over. The assistant confimed she had to ask this question even when it made absolutely no sense to do so.

I thought of my sheath knife, the air rifle I got for my 14th birthday, my bow and arrow, the various rope swings, the expeditions through a rat-infested disused railway tunnel, the lighted bangers we threw like grenades, the times we jumped off waterfalls into Pennine streams and all the trees I climbed – and occasionally fell out of – when I heard about a new book from America.

Fifty Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do) by Gever Tulley is an encouragement to us to allow children to explore by means of calculated risk. They include licking a 9-volt battery (honestly, who hasn’t?), breaking glass, burning things with a magnifying glass, deconstructing an appliance, squashing pennies on a railway track and learning dramatic sword-fighting.

Some of the “dangerous” things seem pretty tame. Number 41 in the list is “cross town on public transit”, which reminds me that by the age of ten I was daily catching two buses each way to school. Others, like number 39, “cook something in the dishwasher”, and number 46, “superglue your fingers together”, were not available to me because dishwashers and superglue were not around when I was a kid (though I feel sure I would have glued my fingers together, given the opportunity).

Even so I was able to tick off 35 of the 50 “dangerous” things on the list.

My own two boys – now 18 and 16 – have never been wrapped in cotton wool, but it’s unlikely they would have notched up as many as 35 of the 50. They have had ample opportunity for broken bones through skateboarding, and there was a swelling of fatherly pride when they dug a potentially lethal tunnel into a grassy embankment near our home. But more of their childhood has been spent indoors.

That is children’s choice today. Research has just found that youngsters between eight and 18 spend an average of seven hours a day in “electronic life”, using phones, iPods, TV and video games. And given the choice between a PlayStation and whittling a spear, I’m sure I would have made the same choice.

But there is more to the risk-averse climate of today than just the enticements of gadgetry. Paranoid parenting has undoubtedly stopped kids notching up as many of those 50 “dangerous” activities.

Perhaps this has been a reaction to the fact that my generation of parents is bringing up kids in the safest era human beings have ever known. Unlike those who grew up earlier in the 20th century, world war – and therefore bombs raining out of the sky - was not a consideration for us.

Old enemies like smallpox, polio, measles and the like had long been thwarted by public health. Growing up with “clunk-click” and all the other safety messages, we came to believe that almost all risk could be legislated out of our lives. And having dealt with the big things, the small things assumed huge importance. “Stranger danger” looms large. Swine flu – at which previous generations would have shrugged their shoulders – caused disproportionate worry.

We even start to fret about how our children play. We replace the Tarmac in the playground with bouncy rubber, and then we ask: should our children be climbing that tree, digging that tunnel or camping out in the garden?

The answer is yes. They may learn something.

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