Dignity of Risk: Why Protecting the People We Love Can Quietly Harm Them - and What to Do Instead

The easiest sentence to write is "for their safety". You can end almost any argument with it. You can take away someone's front-door key, their walk to the shops, the morning routine that holds a whole life together - and if you write "for their safety" underneath, very few people will fight you.Leticia Passadore spent more than twenty years inside the care sector, where a doctrine almost unknown outside it - dignity of risk - names what the rest of us rarely see: that protecting a person from every risk is not the highest form of care but a quiet form of harm, and that lives are made smaller not by bad decisions but by a long series of careful ones.This is a book about how to stop. How to name what you are actually protecting, and what you are actually afraid of. How to decide when the safe answer and the right answer have come apart. And how to give the people you love - your children, your parents, yourself - a life lived at full size, instead of one that is technically safe and not really a life.