You have heard of the Greatest Generation (the ones who beat Hitler and the Nazis), Generation X from 1965 to 1980, the Me Generation of the 1980s and Generation Y that has no memory of the Cold War. It might be proposed that the current generation should be called the "Bubble Generation," as it seems we want these kids to live in a bubble of complete and total safety, leaving them with no skills to deal with adversity.

I recently heard some people are looking to ban bunk beds. That got me thinking that we might well be protecting our kids from every possible negative outcome so that the end of it all they might be ill prepared to deal with anything negative.

We are at the point that we ban everything that might even pose a minor possible risk to our kids. We are making it increasingly difficult for anyone in any sort of authority position to say "No" to our kids and we sterilize their environment so much that we should start to wonder about the effects of that as well.

Do you remember those big wooden jungle-gym sets that were in every playground a few years back?

As kids we all did some crazy things on them at one time or another, be it walking across the big beam that held the swings up, or doing crazy legs-only flips off of the bars. Naturally, some of us got hurt doing those things and of course the result has been that those sets are no longer available and in fact every play area in the province (and I think the country) had to replace that equipment with "safer" stuff. Did it not occur to anyone that the kid using the equipment improperly was the problem more than the equipment itself? The new equipment can be just as dangerous when the kids climb on the outside of it and do things that were never part of the original design. That is part of the risk and it is part of being a kid.

This is even better: Do you remember when your parents, your babysitter and your teacher all had one thing in common; they could all say "No" to you and it was just a regular part of being a kid? These days the parent who says "No" with consequences can end up listening to a sermon from a parenting agent about how the Supreme Court is questioning whether parents should spank their own kids. Raise your hand if you would like to ask the members of the court if they ever spanked their own kids.

Just to make matters more fun, a father in Quebec was recently told that withholding a trip from his own daughter who had done some very inappropriate things with her Internet connection was wrong and he had to let her go. We are in very dangerous waters when the Courts are telling parents how to raise their own kids and what kinds of consequences are available, especially since it is starting to sound like there really are no consequences that are not open to court challenges.

It seems that almost every cleaning product on the market today stresses two things in its marketing; one is that the product is not going to have a negative impact on the environment, the other is that the product will kill germs and make kids less likely to get sick. Nobody likes to be sick, and as a parent I can testify to the lack of joy in having kids home sick, but there is a reason our bodies take on illness when we are young. It is so that our bodies can learn how to fight back against colds and infections as we get older. If we continue to sterilize the environment our kids may well find their immune systems are not strong enough to deal with more serious issues later in life. This is not something that is a guarantee, but it is something we should consider as we sterilize more and more of our lives.

It would be wonderful if everything my own kids tried left them with no bruises, scrapes, cuts, hurt feelings, tears or feelings of failure. Unfortunately, the world our kids are growing up in will leave them with all of these and more, and in an effort to be the source of all that is safe, right and secure, we may be preparing them for none of the hard knocks they might see as they get older.