Kids in the US take no risks of their own accord anymore. I work in elementary schools, and I have to admit, while it's nice that we have recess again (by state law!), there's no point if the teachers micromanage every second of it. Therefore, I often turn my head when I see students crawling up the slide, trying to shimmy up posts, or jumping from one platform of the playscape to another. The playground is exactly the place to take these risks, and yes, sometimes bones get broken or knees get scraped. That's part of being a kid.
Isn't it funny that they're more permissive about kids taking risks in a country with socialized medicine? You'd think the government would try to mitigate risk ska to save money on healthcare. Maybe allow kids to take these risks makes them safer in the long run, since they are more aware of mitigating risks themselves.
15
The public school I teach at has no playground (just a blacktop courtyard by design) in Jersey City, the city does not allow children to access playgrounds/schoolyards at public schools throughout the city after hours, and now a program I run at a local city-owned reservoir where I take public school students (on a volunteer basis) to do science projects and for field trips is trying to require public schools to sign a hold harmless agreement and provide proof of insurance to use a public space managed by a non-profit that has its own insurance. Our society has become overly litigious and the poor public school students will suffer while those that can afford playgrounds, to sign agreements and provide proof of insurance will be able to learn to play in less risk adverse environments. The poorer students will maybe learn to play together in a less forgiving environment the sidewalks and streets. This is poor urban America in 2018.
6
Not so radical a concept considering all the innovative playgrounds that are being developed in the States today thru NATURE EXPLORE and other Reggio Inspired programs.
And not to mention that the junk yard playgrounds on Kibbutzim in Israel that are far more adventurous. Also important to think beyond the “safety” issues to developing play areas that are open for children’s creativity, exploration and
innovation.
2
This whole discussion is silly. If you've ever watched toddlers you would know that some are more reckless and adventurous than others, having nothing to do with what kind of playgrounds they are on, and you would know that some find ways to turn even the most harmless seeming equipment into tight ropes and jungle gyms. This is fine. It's also fine to minimize the risk of serious injury. I remember thinking that the padded playgrounds were overkill (this is before I had kids of my own) until I saw my friend's fearless four-year-old fall backwards off a swing at its highest and bash his head on the ground. If not for the padding, he would would likely have been very seriously injured or even killed. Kids can be adventurous without risking death.
9
Thank the good lord someone has finally decided to peel one layer of bubble wrap back.
13
In North America we encourage our kids to play Hockey, Football, Rugby and several other hard bodily contact sports but ensure that our adventure playgrounds are as unadventurous and "safe" as possible. Heaven forbid that a child should ever graze a knee or scratch a finger.
11
We've criminalized so many of the things relating to childhood and parenthood. We expect parents to know where their children are every minute of the day. We call in the police for fights between kids in school. We put their difficulties on their permanent records so that a child who was, for example, bullied and then hits back winds up penalized for his reaction while the bully gets away with it. We rush to conclude that children are abused when they complain about their parents yet real child abuse often goes undetected until a tragedy occurs. We don't let children have recess because they need to excel on their yearly tests. In other words, children have little or no opportunity to express or rid themselves of their feelings during the school day or outside of it.
Children need time to do "stupid" things without adults interfering. They need to know that they can walk to the store to get a bag of frozen spinach if Mom needs it for dinner. They need to know that it's okay to fall off the bike, scrape themselves, cry, and get back on. That's how resilience is built. Not by fencing them out of everything, chasing them away from trees that can be climbed, and not by watching over them every second of every day.
We got into trouble in and out of school. I don't ever remember anyone telling us that they'd call the cops on us for what we did as long as no one was hurt and nothing was stolen. And we walked all over the place alone or with friends.
17
Unsafe play was pretty much the norm when I was a kid. We climbed whatever we could climb--trees, waterfalls, spiral staircases (on the outside). We wandered around and dove off the high dive and played in the waves at the beach. I tried to give my kids similar experiences, while teaching them to swim at a very young age for safety. We all survived and are doing well.
7
Hooray! Someone is finally pushing back against the "safe space" indoctrination that starts in grade school. Real progress!
9
Some risk of minor injuries should be tolerated in playgrounds sure. But, that thing with the bricks, that is just ridiculous. A child could be seriously injured from a flying brick.
Sure kids need to learn some things themselves. But there are materials in between the foam harmless things, and, wow bricks. This is giving too much opportunity to allow some kid with bad judgement to more easily and quickly severely hurt another child
Funny to note the "Wear safety helmets in this area" sign... and the kid without it, says it all. Hey sometimes we even need laws even to prevent adults from getting hit on the head with bricks.
Common sense middle gound please!
25
I grew up in Brooklyn not far from the ocean. Our part of the ocean front had a concrete esplanade which over the years had been battered and broken by storms. I climbed over the rocks and broken cement frequently alone and with friends. What do you know, I'm not risk averse. Of course no way to prove that it wasn't my parents, both of whom worked, who were not risk averse as well and trusted me, while in junior high, aka middle school, not to kill myself on the streets.
3
These so called safe playgrounds are not all they’re cracked up to be. My crazy, active son managed to get a piece of the “safe, rounded” bark through the heel of his new sneaker and into the soft skin/muscle of his heel. When the school asked me to come up, I gave my son clean socks, Advil and ice; I sent him back to class.
I think the change in playgrounds (certainly in the US) coincides with the rise of helicopter parenting. If you’re constantly coddling your child and watching their every move, it stands to reason you wouldn’t want them “hurt” while playing. I’m of the other mind that you need to get dirty and survive a few cuts and scrapes. We’ll never have another “Greatest Generation” if the kids are surrounded by bubble wrap.
14
Bring in risk? Geez, just leave kids to play without all the plastic, padding, and electronic gadgets. Life's a risk, not to mention terminal. Yes, by all means get them a tetanus shot, and explain that playing chicken with a car and teasing pit bulls is stupid. Save your much-needed credibility for the truly important risks in life. Don't squander it trying to ban every "owie" from kids' lives.
Today it's "risk-free" playgrounds, tomorrow it's college with "safe spaces" banning "micro-aggressions." What you end up with is a generation unprepared when Mommy and Daddy and in loco parentis are no longer around to run interference. A generation unable to move on after a Kent State and a Jackson State. A generation lost if it has to fight a non-optional war. A generation that has not come close to having to deal with the personal repercussions of rejection and hardship that the Depression, World War II, and Civil Rights/Viet Nam generations did in their time.
Common sense precaution, of course! But parents need to understand their inherent dilemma, that the one thing they want to do is the one thing they can't do, and that is to protect their children. All parents can do is give kids the tools with which to interpret and manipulate the world as they find it, not as they fear it is or wish it were. Without those tools, which include learning how to get up off the mat after getting knocked down, the children will be helpless when their parents die.
6
Has no one thought that exactly the same principle applies to the intellect as the body, and that that goes double when those concerned are young adults? Down with safe spaces!
7
I grew when kids played unsupervised all day long, and I played with construction materials, etc, alone and with my friends. However, at school, I was glad that bullies were restricted to hitting me in the head with a rubber ball, rather than with a brick.
19
The writer was perhaps 'playing it safe' when she shied away from exploring the roots of the so-called Cult of Fear that underlies the drive to sanitize risk out of our daily lives. Could it be because a major contributing factor to the cult could be gathered under the rubric of the feminization of culture? No doubt some will scream chauvinism, but a pattern starts to emerge as we scan our cultural horizons, filled as they are with such phenomena as celebrity worship, food and fashion obsessions, health crazes, and legislative campaigns to rid the world of ‘bad’ things.
At the risk of over-generalization, it’s fair to say that by nature women are wired to nurture and protect, while men take risks and are belligerent. The question is, how do we draw from the ‘best’ each has to offer, without ending up in a culturally homogenized or stultified world?
5
I hear you. However let’s not forget women are half the population and half the workforce. We need to be half of the Congress sometime soon. The world belongs to both genders...equally. Future decisions and life in this country needs to reflect that. It will be for everyone’s benefit. Hear us roar!
6
Oh, please. I agree a "Cult of Fear" is driving this, but you've mistaken the element of empathy & awareness [shared by both mature men & women] with that of right-wing Preciousness. You're conflating the specialness of little Robert & why I want him to be exposed to minimal toxins vs. the specialness little Donald & the argument that he was "forced to plagiarize & therefore shouldn't be punished."
The "Cult of Fear" is build on a circular relationship with this strip of preciousness, which manifested itself in helicopter parenting, corporate brainwashing about fear, elitist self-aggrandizement and money.....While there is an element of [let's call it...] "granola parenting," in this Cult of Fear, these parents are far more likely to want to make sure little Tiffany's class is nut free than to contribute to a cult of fear, predicated on the desperate need for perfection & specialness. The cult of perfection/fear is pretty much ALL about a rich, right-wing notion of..."My child's the best, My child's the smartest, My child can do NO wrong, nothing is their fault." "Better not make that playground slide too high, too hot, too fast or I'll sue." "Cheat, son if you need to, you're better than them." "Blame someone else for falling down or failing." It is NOT about some made up construct of "feminization of culture." [BTW, I don't have a clue why food and fashion obsessions, and celebrity worship are feminine "phenomena."]
4
It is almost impossible to find a diving board in any private or public pool in the USA. In fact you can't get homeowners insurance if you have one.
Meanwhile in our condo in the South of France there is a large pool and a diving board at one end.
All summer long happy children dive or jump off it again and again.
The children are taught not to jump or dive if they see someone in the "danger zone". Swimmers, having an IQ higher than a brick know not to swim into that area.
Accidents over the last 40 years. ZERO.
13
Nor are there slides at pools. Or see saws at playgrounds.
Matter of fact public pools are shutting down more today due to lack of town or city money.
2
Keep in mind this is the result of legal issues, most of which have been decided upon by men in politics and in business...not by parents trying to overprotect.
5
After reading this piece I see where seat belts, kids' car seats, electrical plugs, cabinet locks, cancer warnings on cigarette packages and best before dates on food are simply over rated and enable soft behavior.
9
The first time I saw a playground with a padded surface in San Francisco, I freaked out. We played on concrete surfaces, of course, and skinned our knees or worse. I once got kicked in the head by a kid on a swing at my grammar school. I had made the mistake of moving in front of the swing as he rose. I never did that again. I used to run cross country track in high school, walking home two plus miles in the post 6 PM dark of the New York winter, on streets with hills and no sidewalks. Nobody drove me anywhere. We all survived. Today's kids are coddled sissies who play with their phone or computer 24/7 instead of riding a bike without holding the handlebars over to a friend's house a mile or more away. I see no prospect of change, not with our penchant for litigation. I suppose part of it comes from the tendency of the affluent and aspiring to have fewer children and view them as an investment. It's an investment with a very weak internal rate of return.
6
Best news story I've read in a month. This is the celebration of the human spirit.
13
Seriously.
No tort lawyers in England?
Will be soon.
2
Two things stood out to me
1) "Indoors, ...sharp-edged tape dispensers ('they normally only cut themselves once,' she says)." Truer words have never been uttered. Learn by consequence.
2) "American families must 'find someone to blame to cover the cost' of medical care"
I don't think it is so much about covering the cost of care but that the American attitude is that there is always fault to be laid, people to be blamed, rather than stuff happens & you just have to learn from it. Medical care is a prime example of this state of mind in that when something goes wrong, possibly death or injury occur, lawsuits galore. Many times it is just that outcomes can't always be determined but lawsuits always follow. This, in turn, makes physicians reluctant to out their fellow physicians who may actually commit malpractice.
It is also something that happens in turns of natural disasters. Oops, my house built on the ocean has been swamped again, where's my insurance or federal aid? Even though it was clear that this would be the outcome as a result of natural consequences, surprise is all around.(Exceptions to getting aid are Californians who should have known better & citizens of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands).
In America we are risk-adverse, but we are also reality-adverse. The children we are raising in this environment are not going to be equipped to deal with real life & kudos to schools in the UK who are implementing these learning environments.
9
This school seems like they didn't want to shell out for actual play equipment, so they plunked down so stray bricks and wood planks and made it 'A Thing.'
2
We don't want to raise scared, risk-averse children, but most children I know, although they're a variable lot, take plenty of physical risks and don't need any help to hurt themselves. In general they need safer neighborhoods, more green spaces, more daily exercise, and more contact with other children. However, there's nothing great about dangerous play spaces. They require adults to be constantly supervising, which hardly builds character. Nor do I miss the play spaces of yore. I remember breaking my arm on the old metal jungle gyms above the hard concrete. I broke the arm again trying to jump down wide concrete steps two at time, sprained an ankle jumping off a wall, fell out a tree (can't remember what I suffered), scraped myself head to toe slamming into a tree when I forgot there were no foot brakes on the bike,etc. These were just a few of my misadventures; my sister had plenty of her own. I was no adventuresome warrior, just a regular kid. In short, while I like more natural looking play spaces, I don't see any advantage to manufacturing risk.
9
This is ridiculous ! I would never send a child to a school where he/she is encouraged to throw bricks near other children. I understand the want for a more " character building " childhood, but this is not how it is done. Just because children of the 21st century are not the previously thought of idea of " tough " does not mean that is true. They are tough in a unique way. I don't see the riskier- raised British teenagers taking active roles in politics like the Americans.
6
It's easy to be cavalier about risk when everyone assumes the injuries will be minor. But not all of them will be. In addition to cuts and scrapes, the risks include traumatic brain damage, deafness, blindness, loss of fingers or limbs, and for some kids, death. Yes, those risks exist in the world at large, but it's not wrong to reduce them in places where children run, jump, fall, and throw things. It's not naive or stupid to protect children who still lack the judgment and fine motor skills to protect themselves from injury.
To all of you bragging how you grew up "back in the day" -- I bet if I polled your parents' friends, they'd remember some kids who were disabled or killed in preventable accidents. We can do better now.
9
Your Canadian neighbours in Toronto work with OPAL (Outdoor Play and Learning) from the UK to create great playtimes at schools for all children all year round.
4
If you look back fifty years to the British "Adventure Playgrounds" which looked like assorted building materials strewn about in ways that Americans parents then and now wouldn't have tolerate
2
Loved the kid pics in this piece - kids mid-flight over planks perched on bricks, about to hurl logs and other children with plastic construction? gizmos on their feet with their pants sliding down (therefore lacking the mobility to avoid the logs coming their way), knee-deep in wet sand and likely kicking it up into someone's eyes. Today I rather like my forehead scar caused when I was jumping on my bed and crashed into a glass bookcase. Today no one would dream of putting a glass front bookcase immediately next to the bed of a 5 year old. I kept jumping on beds after that incident so I didn't learn much I guess.
2
It's totally different letting kids play with construction materials with their friends and putting kids in a place they can't leave where bullies can hurt them. When kids are at school, breaks should consist of actual exercise.
4
Bring in risk? Geez, just leave kids to play without all the plastic, padding, and electronic gadgets. Life's a risk, not to mention terminal.
Today it's "risk-free" playgrounds, tomorrow it's college banning "micro-agressions" and with "safe spaces." And you end up with a generation unprepared when Mommy and Daddy and in loco parentis are no longer there. A generation unable to move on after a Kent State and a Jackson State. A generation lost if it has to fight a non-optional war. A generation that has not come close to having to deal with the personal repercussions that the Civil Rights and Viet Nam generation did.
Common sense precaution, of course! But parents need to understand their inherent dilemma, that the one thing they want to do is the one thing they can't do, and that is to protect their children. All parents can do is give kids the tools with which to interpret and manipulate the world as they find it, not as you fear it is or wish it were. Without those tools, which include learning how to get up off the mat after getting knocked down, the children will be helpless when their parents die.
3
Being an only child with a mother always hovering must be the worst possible childhood. I was eldest of ten. We fed ourselves breakfast and lunch. We suffered no broken bones or serious injuries. We considered our house the craziest zoo on the planet. Lemmy outta here!
Mommy was always prego. She lived to be 82yrs old.
I am close with some sibs, but others I would not recognize on the street.
2
It's about time. I grew up in a million people city with plenty of safe places to play but my favorite playgrounds were a snow covered wooden milk box storage shed and an abandoned soap factory. I came home with a new scratch every day, and my mom didn't make a federal case out of it.
5
Agree with others who say there has to be a happy medium here. We have plenty of playgrounds with swings and sandboxes. Spaces that are differentiated for the wee ones and older kids, so that playing spaces for the kindergarten set are more gentle. It's true that as a kid I wandered around everywhere alone for hours and most city parents don't allow that today (it's different in the countryside). On the other hand, it's common to see really young kids riding the tram to school by themselves. Being a so-called latchkey child here is very common, and there's nothing negative about it. Kids generally move out and about the city at an earlier age.
I guess I don't understand the rationale for introducing things like bricks and things with nails sticking out (see London Mom). When I was a kid it wasn't the 'danger element' that attracted me to our local playground. Much more important to me was the free range exploration on my bike. Which brings me to my point that I am really struck by how spatially confined these playgounds seem.
Personaly I wouldn't put bricks into the hands of little kids, but maybe that's just me.
11
This must be the ultimate privilege culture, when life has become so safe one needs to artificially create and manage risk. It feels like listening to prosperous house-wives complaining about "the help". Most of the world does not have this problem. I grew up in different era, riding in the back of a pickup truck, going 5 miles an hour through a parking lot, until we rolled over a small speed bump, causing the open tail gate to flip, which tossed a 13 year old girl into the air, who hit her head on the way down and died on the way to the hospital. People aren't allowed to put their children into pickup truck beds anymore.
This article exposes us to an interesting group of people, but they are still quacks, with way too much time and money on their hands.
1
I'm old enough to recall the adventure playground movement of the seventies and eighties with large structures made of wooden beams large enough to support an elephant. These were removed in the late nineties as evidence mounted that kids were getting injured in increasing numbers. The concept seems to have returned but in a far more dangerous form.
I was saddened when the medal spinning ride was taken out of one of the playgrounds we went to when my son was small, and one of our favorite playgrounds then to this day has old-fashioned see-saws and a tall metal "jungle gym" (climbing apparatus)? When my siblings and I were children, we played in an old rotting shack, climbing up and dropping through the roof, etc. Still, I have to say, the first picture made me laugh. It should be captioned "Disaster Waiting to Happen." I would have never wanted my small child playing in that mess of a space, with "loose bricks" and other things scattered all over. That doesn't seem like a happy medium but just bad caretaking!
4
I've been debating on the bricks. Seems wildly dangerous....but is it really? The hard hat sign made me think about football helmets. We now have football helmets, for both professional & youth players, that are HIGHLY padded and massive. We also have rapidly rising rates of concussions and progressive brain damage. Remember when those poor souls wore just leather helmets? Well, those players did not suffer the incidences of concussion brain damage we see today, despite appearing to be dangerously & insufficiently protected. There is evidence that those early football players suffered fewer injuries because they instinctively protected their heads as opposed to the football players today who'll dive head long in to an opponent on the erroneous belief that they are protected.....despite the fact that no helmet protects the brain from the real cause of brain damage--the ricocheting of the brain in the skull. A kid with a hardhat on might stand a little too close to the action for the same reason.
Still, flying bricks do seem a bit much....
2
Alright already. We get that the Brits seem to come up with things ahead of others.
Let’s posit that it has something to do with intellectual honesty and independent thinking.
If so, then bring it on. Let’s get going with some of that over here.
Safety is an attitude. Being aware of ones surroundings and attentive to them is where safety intimately lies.
Being dependent on society to protect you subs out that which is better done on ones own.
The coastlines of countries are not fenced with railings or barricades yet pedestrians and bicyclists seldom tumble into the sea.
2
A key element in playgrounds like this is adults who are actually watching the children, instead of being glued to their phones. Children need opportunities for free creative play, but they also need real adult supervision.
4
"In addition, American families must “find someone to blame to cover the cost” of medical care, unlike their counterparts in European countries, which have socialized health care, said Ellen Beate Hansen Sanseter, a Norwegian professor of education." In other words, the U.S. healthcare system has now become so broken it is influencing our decisions about whether or not to accept risk, how we accept it, and what happens when things don't go right. Not the profile of an expansive, intelligent, inventive society.
3
Amy, I'm old enough to remember life before the insurance took over and ruined healthcare in this country. I remember going to the doctor, not waiting forever to be seen, and then at the end writing a check for $40 dollars and leaving. I miss that.
2
Excellent article, only one point to add. The author states that the US has high litigation because someone has to reimburse the injured for medical costs. Wrong. We have high litigation costs because of the punitive damages for "pain, suffering" etc.
3
Basic safety measures (like soft padding on playgrounds) make sense, but things have gone too far. I'm afraid we've raised a generation that won't be able to function in the real world.
2
What a wonderful article!! Many of the comments are very encouraging, as well. I have watched with despair, the over protection of our children. We are making them afraid of their shadows. We are making them afraid of adventure. They sit on the couch and play with their electronic devices without experiencing the real world.
When I was a child, my friends and I ran through the woods. We built tree forts and explored every street and path of our town. We fell and were sometimes hurt, but we learned to take care of ourselves. We sometimes encountered scary people as we got older, but we learned how to identify and avoid them. We formed our own neighborhood teams to play baseball and other games. No adults were needed to officiate. We learned how to be independent, to settle our own disagreements and to take care of ourselves.
Today's children are being smothered. It's no wonder that so many adult children are still living at home.
4
I rode a bike without a helmet, made fireworks from weedkiller and other household chemicals. I built electronic stuff that ran on the 240 volt supply. Yes, I bumped my head, got electric shocks, got burns.
The most important lesson was that things and stuff can hurt you. Learned an awful lot and came through it well prepared for the challenges of just living in this world. Better to get the bumps in the playground than in a factory or construction sit,e while still unprepared.
If parents didn't have to worry about the costs of medical care when their children get hurt we might still see seesaws, swings, monkey bars, and tree climbing as the wonderful childhood things they are. We wouldn't be afraid to have our children walk to school, go sledding without us, or roughhouse. I see too many children who are overweight because they aren't allowed to run around the way we did at their age.
We went through school with scraped knees, bruises, the occasional broken bone, ruined clothes, and yes, even tears when it hurt after a fall. But we learned that we could survive it. We learned how to fall better, pick ourselves up, play without hurting each other, and how to solve things amongst ourselves. Today adults protect children from the work of childhood which is play and involves learning what one's body can and cannot do, how hard to throw a ball, when it's permissible to be rough, when to make allowances for the little guys.
As a children of the 60s and 70s we spent time out of sight of adults. We biked, walked to school, to the library. We sledded down steep hills. We roller skated, played hopscotch,, hung upside down on the monkey bars, jumped off rocks that we'd climbed. We got hurt and we lived. We got scared and we tried again. The most important thing we learned is that we could manage in our world. There's nothing like being 6 or 8 years old and riding a bike around your block with no one beside you but a friend.
7
Today the average American family can go bankrupt from one medical emergency or accident alone.
5
Right - we have long been raising hot-house children. I grew up in a NJ town which still has a very low crime rate. My brothers and I walked 4/5 of a mile each way to the Catholic school. Now the school requires parents to drive the kids, but they cannot drop them at the curb to walk across the school/church parking lot to the building. Cars must wait in line and circle through the parking lot until the child can be dropped-off right in front of the teacher standing outside. Ridiculous, to say the least! The kids get no exercise; the parents get the message that their lovely, safe, community is somehow too dangerous for their kids to walk the streets; the kids get the message that the world is a dangerous & scary place.
60
I'm mostly in agreement with you, certainly 100% about the school drop off method. Partly our of sheer stubbornness, I used to park down the street from my son's nursery school and walk him up to the door. They hated it. I drove him because we were nearly 5 miles away & driving was the sensible solution, but the whole waiting in a line of cars for someone to remove him from my car was ridiculous & is even sillier for older kids.
But the trend toward driving kids to school isn't entirely about helicoptering or laziness. I'm guessing that the little town you grew up in now has many times more traffic than it did when you & your siblings walked to school. My old NYC neighborhood is choking on traffic now. Most schools had a crossing guard at the major street crossings, but now you'd need one on nearly every corner. And since both parents are often working, having one parent do the school run before work is the only sane way to get everyone out the door on time. So I think the problem is at least partly structural, rather than entirely about personal choices.
2
Many of these kids actually have paid bus service available to them too. Why would not a parent want their kids to ride the bus? I guess because it's too dangerous? Playing daily mom taxi seems arduous.
2
I can say I have never felt so judged before in my life as when I became a parent. Common sense judgment calls are tempered with the very real possibility of someone calling child services. In the good old days that wasn’t even a possibility.. for example I can’t like leave my child in the locked car on a cold day while I run into the deli 10 ft away for literally 2 minutes to grab some snacks for our road trip, on the flip side when I bring him in with me and he has a total meltdown from the packing and unpacking into the car seat I get sneers for not controlling my child. Can we all just back off the judgement? Most parents are trying as best we can to work it all out and do right by our children.
57
Now if we could only add some allowance for ‘emotional risk’ in our kids’ lives! That’s not to say that parents and teachers shouldn’t be key sources of socialization or should tolerate physical or emotional abuse by students... but we are seeing a generation of young children unable to tolerate any teasing, verbal correction or strong reprimand without tears or emotional breakdown. They will certainly need the resilience to absorb these things in real life.
25
The same goes for projects children are assigned.
I found out recently that my daughter still remembers the humiliation she felt in her Brownie troop re; their hand sewn doll project.
My daughter (now age 30) took hers home and sewed it herself, crooked stitches and all. At the next Brownie meeting, she saw all the other dolls, somehow perfectly done (by the mothers of course), and she felt horrible--and was mad at me!
But: my daughter soon was not only sewing (by hand!) but also designing the patterns for her own stuffed "creatures," that she made by the dozens.
And she has gone on pursue a lot more in the arts and now makes a living in the art field.
If I had done it all for her, I don't know what she would be doing now.
68
good for her ... and her parents
4
And the pendulum swings the other way when it reaches its apex. We don't have to try this in our schools in the US....our kids get to practice "shelter in place" and soon will probably wonder if getting their teacher aggravated will mean they get shot.
21
A few years ago those spinning whirligig things were banished from playgrounds because kids might fall off. That's the kind of thing they are talking about.
8
I had a constant ding-dong relationship with my mother who wanted neither me nor my younger sister. My father was away at sea in his warship. So at the age of four I ran away from home. Foolishly, I allowed myself to be talked into returning.
Unfortunately, I allowed my parents to drum all the independence out of me by the time I was ten. If I had half as much initiative today as I had when I was a small child, then I might have made something of my miserable life.
12
I was very surprised to read this article, because, as I remember it. the adventure playground movement /started/ in England! Back in the '70s I read a book by a British advocate of adventure playgrounds, and I vividly remember the book's advice that you have to surround the playground with an opaque fence that's higher than anything a kid can climb, or else you'll be shut down by timid neighbors.
2
My daughter accidentally poked out her eye at a very young age. Since then, she has viewed the world as a very dangerous place. She's generally fearful in life and this holds her back big time.
Has anybody considered this as a possible outcome for kids playing unsafely?
18
I'm not sure everybody has to suffer because of that. Nor should parents on either extreme of the safety spectrum (too much or too little safety) control it for everyone else.
18
To "Brian"
What an unspeakably cruel response to a mother and her daughter who has experienced such trauma.
11
Very sorry about what happened to your daughter. Consider this, too: a child who has been protected from every failure, physical or emotional, will crumble to bits like a stale cracker at the first whiff of failure. I see this every year at our university.
It's worth the risks or we continue to be a nation of fraidy-cats, which me most certainly are (one reason for the gun-as-talisman). But I grew up in a neighborhood so tough that I got a few bully-beatings by the local thugs. I too view the world as a potentially dangerous place, but somehow I'm not fearful. I got a PhD, lived abroad, and enjoy outdoor sports. Do what you can to help your daughter overcome her fears; she'll be stronger one day as a result.
17
An unfettered childhood was a gift.
26
There is risk and then there is plain ol' stupid. Sending bricks towards others is risky - but not for the instigator. There is an actual balance to be found.
Please stop with the stories of just how bold you were when young. We know more than we did 50 YA. That's why helmets make good sense on bikes. No, I never wore one and I didn't for a long time skiing. Then I figured out avoiding brain damage is not cosseting but a reasonable reduction of risk.
Just because you get away with something does not mean it's o.k. or harmless. All it means is you beat the odds.
45
When you say "All it means is you beat the odds", are you saying that 50 YA, the odds were that a child would get maimed? If most of the children of my generation got maimed, I think I would have known about it.
8
Brian: About 60 years ago, long before bike helmets, I pedaled out a driveway without checking for cars, slammed into the side of a car, bounced backward through the air, and my head missed a fire hydrant by about an inch as I landed.
OK, I didn't get "maimed." I beat the odds. But that taught me what a bike accident can do to a kid. As soon as bike helmets were available I bought them for my family (including me!).
I don't use near misses as an excuse to risk potentially deadly harm to my kids. And I'd never let a child or grandchild of mine play in an area where kids were encouraged to catapult bricks toward other kids' faces, even if I saw that happen a few times without bashed-in noses or dented skulls.
12
To beat the odds does not mean that something is common. All it means is that events did not occur. This is a common misconception about safety issues. In industry, it is often phrased as "We've done it this way for years and nobody has been hurt." Just because you get away with unsafe behavior 100 times does not mean it is actually safe or that trial #101 will not the disaster.
I teach scuba diving. There are a number of things that are not safe but you might get away with. This time. In larger samples we know that untrained cave diving is not bold but stupid.
3
I really thought I was reading an article from the Onion.
Schools need to be safe; outside of school parents are responsible for children’s safety. Let the parents teach their kids about risk. There are laws to distinguish the difference between risk and neglect.
For all you bemoaning helicopter parenting: shut up. They aren’t your responsibility.
23
YES!!!
When I was in elementary school, a 5th grader died after falling off playground equipment and hitting her head on the cement beneath it. After that, the school got soft padding to put under the climbing equipment. That certainly helped going forward, but was too late for that little girl and her family.
We protected our daughter in every way we could and she turned out to be a very strong and resilient human being.
Life brings enough risk naturally. We don't need to create it.
3
No, but they make our civilization weaker. And their children so often end up emotionally frail. I see it every year.
So heck no. I won't shut up. It's my society, too.
1
This is nothing less than INSANE.
Yes, we all need lessons that teach us there are consequences, many unfortunate and unpleasant, to our actions, but WHAT IF a child is encouraged to engage in risky behavior but nothing happens to him or her (as the law of averages certainly dictates a substantial percentage will happen)? And that child goes on to engage in more risky behavior, or, worse, increasingly risky behavior, laboring under the ever-increasing certitude that nothing CAN happen to him of her, until, one day, that law of averages DOES catch up with the child (who, by this time, may even have reached adulthood)? And what if the consequences of the child’s ignorance, that had been encouraged by no less than the state governing the society in which the child lives, is so dire that its ultimate consequence vastly outweighs and overshadows any lesson that might be learned?
The REAL lesson to be learned here is that it is, indeed, INSANE.
8
I think the author is suggesting a return to the balance we had 50 years ago.
12
Surely piling one "dire" hypothetical on top of an "unfortunate and unpleasant" "what if" to arrive at a "vastly" hypothetical consequence is an incredibly weak method of argument, revealing the very fear of Life that the article addresses.
J
Playing in a natural environment that children had done for thousands of years is a risky behavior? American overproteciveness is indeed insane.
This is all nonsense. We lived in London for five years recently and the way they deal with risk is shambolic. While there, two children drowned in 3 feet of water in a man made pond in a park - the six year old wading in frantically to save his panicked seven year old sister while TWO police wouldn't enter the water because they hadn't had water rescue training (seriously). Murderous criminals receiving witness protection program new identities to protect them (!!!) when released from jail after extremely short sentences. One can't buy topical antibiotics over the counter so minor infections turn into raging illness while MRSA and C Dificle infections run rampant....I could go on and on re how risk management is completely botched there. Even the article's examples are ridiculous - tape dispensers with sharp edges have been introduced - kids will learn how to use them after one Ouch! The UK needs a proper reset, not a puff piece article on how it's leading in introducing risk to children.
19
This comment displays a complete lack of risk assessment and suggests the author should not lecture others on managing risk without looking at himself/herself.
The point which is extremely worrying is the seemingly complete lack of awareness of the looming problem of antibiotic resistance displayed in this comment. One hopes that it is not in fact true that in the US it is possible to buy antibiotics at will. If it is then I'm afraid that the US is on the level of third world countries in terms of education about medicine and is contributing to a looming catastrophe.
MRSA and C Difficile (a problem with spelling difficult scientific names as well? ) are caused by the growing resistance to antibiotics and is why their use should be controlled. Minor cuts used to kill before antibiotics and will again if antibiotic resistance continues unchecked as seems likely in the US if antibiotic use is not managed.
Perhaps at least some adult Americans need educational help in terms of risk management as well as their children? (eg gun control as well?)
5
How quaint in Britain they have to manufacture risk whereas here in the good old US of A, school children face the daily risk of being mowed down by a disturbed gun toting nut. I’d rather take my chances with the pile of bricks.
80
I had one of those 1960s childhoods where I could roam around and take numerous physical risks. But we live in a different world now. There are far more cars on the roads going at much higher speeds; far more awareness of the number and types of serious childhood injuries and fatalities, not to mention sexual predators. (After I became an adult, I realized that when I was that free-roaming child, I had had close encounters with potential child molesters on 3 different occasions, although I did not understand it at the time.)
I would not want my grandchildren to attend Ms Hughes' school. Confidence in making one's way in the world comes from many factors. Playing in a playground with bricks flying around is hardly conducive to that.
33
Fads are cool. This is little more, but one supposes that it's worth a decently publicized try.
But routines are most valuable when they reinforce with kindness.
Kindness is always more difficult because it takes both analysis and ongoing care.
Training is a hugely important corollary to any sort of education worthy of the name.
But, kindness lies at the heart of any pursuit put forward seriously as education.
3
Gates ,and microsoft? an introverted kid in his room and then the garage. Kids today who can program,a worthy profession,my need more time on the computer.Maybe they will be successful enough to avoid chain saws and such ,no great loss.Carpenters can be trained on weekends and summers by their family members,as we've always done. Nothings wrong with hiking in nature and learning the trail and the playgrounds full of rocks are exciting .
3
I grew up in the relatively unsupervised 1950s, but I don't think any of our neighborhood parents would have been happy with the idea of bricks being catapulted toward their elementary school children, or the class bully wielding a club. If I want to introduce the realities of risk to my children, I will do it while they are under my personal supervision, not running loose on a public playground. Feel free to decide otherwise for your own children.
24
This kind of thing is in line with, "I'm cold, you need to put on a sweater". Who are parents really trying to protect, kids or appearances?
4
There has GOT to be some middle ground here between plastic playhouses and bricks catapulting over kids' heads. A traumatic brain injury isn't going to help anyone "find their position in the world."
57
Amen!
1
Are there no factories? No workhouses?
28
when I grew up it was normal to play on sand pits and my parents taught me how to properly use scissors and stuff I took my own training wheels off at 5 and I'm a female ... new age parents let ur kids live a little scratch their knees its good for them
7
The unceasing feminization of daily life in America. The fewer the children born to middle class couples, the greater the perceived cost borne by the woman. With each child so precious of course we cosset and protect them from any form of physical or psychic harm.
5
Oh, please. It’s women’s fault?? Who raised you to be the man you are, Robert? Women have always raised the kids.
19
I'm reminded of my youngest days in Brooklyn. Lacking a lot of the formal manufactured toys we improvised. Some of the stuff was dangerous junk and what we did with it was even more dangerous.
Make a scooter from a wooden milk crate, a half pair of roller skates and a 2X4X4 with part of the skate on each end. Coast down Steep De Kalb Avenue into Knickerbocker Avenue starting at Irving Avenue. Prepare to jump off. Take a 2X4X2 and put a cross piece on it with two clothes pins and rubber bands. Cut linoleum into 1/2 squares and shoot them at people. It works well with paper clips and nails.
Put lit Cherry Bombs into glass bleach bottles and run away fast.
Jump the turnstile and walk in the subway tunnels between stations. See if you can get into the safe spaces before the train comes in.
It was rough stuff and I wouldn't let my grandchildren do any of it. They're too soft.
9
Here we have the predictable adult over reaction in the opposite direction...with children as targets. Whose risk is acceptable...the kid who gets bashed in the head with a brick by another 7 year old.? Different liability laws and socialized medicine make this possible in the UK & Europe. The other word for “risk” is “danger,” and there’s no lack of it out in the real world and in many homes. This is in fact NOT the 50’s, and it IS IN FACT a dangerous world. So how about common sense. We don’t need to “coddle” and overprotect, but nor do we need to create intentionally unsafe play areas by bringing in knives, fire, bricks, boulders to satisfy adult social experiments. This is political correctness gone a muck in the opposite direction. If you want an unsafe play area, do it at home. Don’t transform grade school playgrounds into boot camps! Kids should be able to play safely, learn to get along, learn alternatives to aggressive behavior, get some exercise, and have fun. They’ll get plenty of cuts and bruises all on their own, just by living.
20
I am not sure what you mean about it not being the 1950s. Can you elaborate?
Children were at lower risk.
Lower risk for what? I’m not being argumentative; I seriously want to know.
2
Groups of small schoolchildren outfitted in matching high-visibility overcoats or vests struck me as logical and clever when I witnessed their use in Sweden...It made the kids really stand out on a city street...
I think they're a good tool for guardians overseeing gaggles of our young citizens away from campus...Nothing overwrought at all
18
Future policy makers, if we could effectively profile them, need not take resiliency training in a culture which institutionalizes not having to take personal responsibility for ones words voiced, and deeds done, or not, when they should have been. As well as not being accountable to anyone while enabling a daily, toxic, WE-THEY culture, which violates selected "the others" with impunity. Perhaps someone, with influence, will enable education, and training, post-resiliency, for much needed menschlichkeit.
Mutual respect! Mutual trust! Caring! Mutual help when, and if, needed. Overcoming structural barriers to equitable sharing of human and nonhuman resources needed for developing, and sustaining, viable levels and qualities of wellbeing in safe living spaces. At home. In communities. Neighborhoods. At school and at work. At places for leisure as well as for prayer and experiencing unbounded spirituality.
2
The lad learning about levers (bricks and boy on a plank/fulcrum) is oblivious about the need for safety helmets in that play area (see 1st photo, notice on the corner of the shed). Or he has carried out a robust risk assessment on the flying bricks,
Good on him!
7
It wasn't about a 'nanny state' it was about litigation imported from the United States. We're finally getting over that nonsense and my local kids park even has a fire pit and the kids love it.
8
And then, of course, in so many parts of the globe that is becoming smaller and smaller, the growing, devastating conflicts, whatever their underpinnings and stakeholders, enable children of all ages, should they somehow survive, to do levels of graduate studies in Resiliency. Some of THEM may even BE beyond resiliency!
You are really trying to blame the UK's exhaustively documented Nanny State on the Yanks? Text book Risk Aversion...
3
The U.S. resolves problems through litigation. He’s right about that
3
All most kids want is to be left alone by adults, free to explore, discover the world. Insecure, neurotic overly protective adults are the problem. Kids don't want adults to be their friends. They simply want normal parents doing normal things in a normal manner.
26
I could not believe I was actually reading this article. A major Western country actually embracing risk as a means of teaching its young people? Stunning. I can only hope this grasping of reality spreads to the rest of the advanced world, especially the United States. Indeed, school administrators from Yale, MIddlebury, Berkeley et. al should send administrators and professors to London on the next plane out. Perhaps they will learn something, and then dispose of "safe spaces" with Play-Doh and cookies for allegedly adult underclassmen. Maybe that would give way to something more useful, like perhaps rock climbing. Or maybe even learning.
15
Bringing IN risk? Shouldn't it be bringing BACK risk? It never should have gone away in the first place. At least it's nice to see the pendulum swing back even just a little in the direction of typical boy's play--which has been unfairly stigmatized for years as leading to 'toxic' masculinity and maligned for promoting the 'patriarchy'. And to showcase a boy playing in the photograph is almost positively radical. Interesting that this is coming from Britain, where at least in one community, cat-calling, whistling and even saying hello to a woman is now considered a hate crime and can lead to arrest, loss of employment and incarceration.
5
Could you let us know which community in Britain would incarcerate a person for "cat-calling, whistling and even saying hello to a woman"?
Some of the (presumably) male commenters here seem to be getting a little hysterical.
4
You can have all the risk you want, just don’t involve others. You may enjoy whistles and catcalls; the female targets don’t.
3
Ah, but the female targets DO--when done by men they, themselves are targeting. That's where this whole argument starts to crumble. Holding doors and being nice are only done by creepy men when some women welcome that treatment from men the would want to be with.
A mind-blowing program! How did the Brits manage to courageously live through years of being ravaged, savaged and traumatized by V1s and V2s during WWII without such an educational opportunity? Would Brexit not have occurred if this planned educational process had existed decades about? What does, can, resiliency training mean in an ever present reality of uncertainties? Unpredictabilities? Randomness? Lack of total control, whoever one is, or isn't, notwithstanding types, levels and qualities of efforts?Lastly, what are, can be, the implications and consequences, for curriculum building, and assessment, given that this buzzword, term, concept, process, and outcome, is documentable, but not measurable, only AFTER one has, or has not, overcome a significantly experienced threat, challenge, trauma to ones life, coping, adapting and functioning?
1
My son tells his daughters to get up and brush themselves off when they fall. I am so pleased with him! Yes, I survived many needless, but educational risks, and I resent comments here that criticize so-called "survivor mentality", or some such nonsense. Hurray for heedless and impetuous risk-taking! And condolences to those who experienced the loss of dear ones to heedlessness and carelessness. It's a big world, full of endless possibilities. Risk as much as you dare, or live as cautiously as you want. It's up to you!
12
The lawyers have won long ago in America, we cant have anything here that anyone can manipulate for a payday.
14
Finally some common sense. Every year we find more ways to take all the fun out of being a kid. I never thought that part of the reason people are always looking for someone to fault is because of the high cost of medical care, but it makes sense. Another good reason for universal health care.
8
Titter-totter's, merry-go-rounds, plank seated swings, monkey bars, asphalt playgrounds, snow covered walks and steps, "duck and cover"...and we bloody well survived it all and were, for the most part, the better for it.
10
I was reading in the attic overlooking the playground of my school and I am the better for that.
Not everyone wants to be out there on the "titter" totters, etc . (in my neighborhood we had Teeter Totters, but perhaps you were more advanced).
Every parent should recognize an introverted child and every introverted child should have an understanding parent.
8
I remember the "adventure playgrounds" which were just great! All that scattered boards and junk just begging to be used for imagination fueled structures. Of course it never occurred to me then that any injuries which may have happened would have been taken care of by National Health. What if we have better health coverage here? Would children be free to have more fun?
14
Too bad this would never work here. A) too many people looking for easy money lawsuits and B) we have to affirmatively tell our children not to eat laundry detergent. Enough said.
19
Bravo! The only thing the overly protected generation has "learned" is that their hurts and negative outcomes are someone else's fault entirely. Someone who is responsible should have made sure nothing bad would happen to them! Children who are allowed to reflect on what led to a hurt grow into responsible adults with at least a modicum of wisdom. Random tragedies like the falling tree can happen to anyone, but risky play in a controlled environment is not about fate. It's about learning in a risky world.
10
Interesting how risk in American playgrounds has been been seen as something to be eliminated over the last 20 years while gun danger is seen as something that is just going to happen. My kindergarten class here in Germany light their own birthday candles with matches and cut fruit and veg with sharp knives but will never know the joys of unregulated gun ownership. I'm trying to sell the NRA on using this in one of their ads.
117
I'm surprised that this article did not mention play:ground on Governor's Island - built on the British model. It is a terrific place for kids.
4
Here’s a great way to increase risks in education: let administrators make ego-driven changes on a whim in the absence of any real evidence of their efficacy.
9
Living in middle class Brooklyn, I almost never see a couple of kids unattended, except when walking to and from school. Just the knowledge that you can stroll the streets unsupervised, wander in and out of stores and even get in some mischief is supremely liberating but since these kids are being prepped to ace the SAT's, beginning practically in utero, so they can wither away in some drab future cubicle, I guess any outside activity is frivolous.
29
So I guess those biographies I've read about Prince Phillip and Prince Charles "whinging" about how tough life was at boarding school - having to sleep in a bed next to an open window that poured in snow and rain and other such hardships- caused a swinging of the pendulum to "softie schools" that have now caused the pendulum to swing back again to school that will toughen kids up?
Here is a thought. Just leave kids alone. Provide them with a reasonably safe school environment (without the possibility of AK-15s being brought in) and the kids will sort things out for themselves.
Of course rational adult supervision is required to prevent a Lord of the Flies scenario.
15
Oh dear, you're a bit over the top aren't you.
1
Both monarchs you mention did not go to “tough” schools. Very expensive prep schools for aristocrats, yes. Real life, no. They went to schools replete with servants and top hats.
I don't know - I grew up during a time when Swing sets were part of the playground and swings were heavy wooden seats held on by thick iron chain. Everyone knew what would happen if you got hit in the head with a swing - no need to import knives, saws, and fires....
30
The "risk" factors may have changed, but the mentality has not. First they took out all the natural elements of the play space. Then the experts told them that the amount of "risk" was not up to required standards. So now they have added back "risk" in measured amounts: controlled, quantified, and certified.
Maybe they would be better off just extracting the experts.
18
So many commenters seem to think it's a freedom vs restraint issue. Doesn't sensible mentoring allow for both?
12
Oh boy, I remember being struck by a home made spear with a shale point. Missed my carotid artery by about a half inch. Only a un seen adult bystander unraveled the excuse I and my playmates gave for the accident.
Also, a playmate made custom slingshots with a carved wooden handle and innertubes. A rule: No headshots with the marble projectiles. Oh yes, fire-escape tag on the three story elementary school. Don't recall falls.
4
We are different, I guess. I looked forward to joining my cousins each summer when slingshots were our weapon. We shot acorns, and they hurt, but then we also played monopoly to win.
5
Sounds a bit over the top to actually design a booby- trapped dangerous environment for such young kids ON PURPOSE! I've observed the helicopter-parent trend but this sounds borderline if not downright sadistic...
I grew up in a very rural area in the late 40 s - 50 s and we were largely unsupervised for hours at a time outdoors. In retrospect it was by the grace of God we survived.
Later raising my kids in NYC they were supervised (though not at all hovered over) at all times till double digits.
Around 1991 my son, then age 2, was running in the playground and ran into / went flying over the bars of an unassembled slide. He came crashing down on his face, bleeding profusely from the mouth. At E-room we saw that his front baby teeth were basically knocked out... no APPARENT other permanent damage... However, it later became apparent he had developed floaters and once he started school it was found he was so nearsighted that he needed glasses (for everything, not just reading).. We will never know if that was the result of that accident but I believe so. Thank God it was not worse (brain damage, blindness...).
There is a happy medium somewhere in there.
23
And yet your molly coddling society has grown up to be the most violent in the developed world.
Surely there's a lesson there.
4
(Imo of course) there are such a variety of factors to that issue -- just look at the so-called "games" kids are exposed to (video games etc) that are super violent and gory, and certainly play to the impulses of ( esp) adolescent males; then there's the culture of shoot-em-up violence that is an intrinsic part of US history, the glorification of gun culture so embedded in the American- esp. rural - mentality -- the rabid invocation of "2nd amendment rights", combined of course with individual mental health and family dysfunction issues.
Yes, the juxtaposition of all this with the (I think largely urban, middle-and-up class) 'helicopter mom' syndrome is such a paradox. Still don't see purposefully booby trapping play areas as a good thing. Again , theres a happy.medium.
2
I laughed - and agreed with the observation “they normally only cut themselves once”. I miss the teeter totters of my childhood. That's where we learned about trusting others and managing risk. Everyone my age knows what happens when your totter partner is mean or mad and dismounts while you are 6' off the ground. Next time round, you know to avoid that person, or clarify the rules and you pay attention to avoid a hard landing if both of those strategies fail.
28
I too was a child of the free-range sixties in Northeast Ohio. What a joy! We were poor and my single mother worked most days, but we had an abundance of activities year round, mostly without adult supervision: Riding ponies bare back around the neighbor’s yard; in summer picking blackberries on the hill that we rode our sleds in winter; swinging from monkey vines across the ravine, rock-hopping from boulder to boulder across a local stream, where we also hunted for salamanders in the shallows; Trekking through the woods and building “forts;” and skating on a frozen duck pond, where we fished in summer, to name some of the more memorable activities. My childhood imagination flourished and was further nurtured by the stories I read after a day of play. I grew up into an creative, inquisitive adult. Unfortunately by the time I was in my early twenties, the land we roamed so freely was starting to be bulldozed flat for housing and retail construction. I feel so sorry for the kids who have nowhere to play outside and hate to read inside. All that “risky” activity, and the imagination it sparked, kept me sane during a difficult childhood. Although my mother was a high school dropout, I was on the honor roll most of the time in public school, and went to college.
19
These are my Heroes. American children of affluence tend to be cocooned and pampered, and it leads to amazing dysfunction when they enroll in college. They have never been allowed to take any risks while being subtly whipped up the ladder. Nothing good will come of that.
9
In Verona Park, (New Jersey) there was a set of magnificent large swings. After grade school hrs. at Our Lady of the Lake, across the street, they were wonderful to play on. I loved riding them high enough that I could almost touch the tree branch nearby with an extended foot. The cool breezes made for a happy time.
In my adult years I would walk our toy poodle, "Misty", on the paths of the park. One day I decided to ride the swing with her. I gathered the pup in my arms and sat in the swing. She didn't know what to make of this. Little by little, higher and higher, her floppy ears would go up and down as we traveled the arc.
From then on I could never pass by those swings without her little body pulling me over to them, then she would look up, waiting for me to lift her up to go for another ride. She loved the long graceful glide and the weightless sensations during the magic ride in the park. And it was an opportunity for me to enjoy them too.
Sadly, the last time I was there, these wonderful swings were replaced by a set small swings. The are just a little larger than the baby swings down the way apiece. I hope the Essex County parks people realize that adults, and little dogs, like to be as happy as kids.
Although I no longer live in the old country, "please" find a spot for a large set of swings. Many smiles have been waiting to join those flowers in Verona park again, just like in the days gone by.
25
More free range children, please. The experience is the foundation of self-confidence, mutual aid, and citizens.
Let’s allow dogs to play off-leash with the kids too. Together they can hunt coyotes.
7
Oh! Thank you for a hearty belly-laugh! The mental image of children roaming the fields with their dogs, hunting coyotes . . . .priceless!
1
I guess we're returning to social Darwinism -- this will be great for the majority of kids, and we must be ok with a few children dying from head injuries? Is that the price everyone has agreed to pay? How many flying-brick-to-the-head deaths are acceptable so that the surviving children can learn the consequences of risk?
15
Wow. With our litigation-prone country, the sign that informs parents that risks have been “intentionally provided” would be Plaintiff’s Exhibit 1.
6
At long last, some sensible changes. When we were young, we'd hang upside down from the top of the monkey bars. Britain has taken chance of risk to the extreme. I read about a fire department that wasn't allowed to hang a purple banner on their firehouse to honor their dead because they would have to climb a ladder to do it.
4
It’s really only happened in the last 20yrs. Media scare stories, growth of legal actions to claim money off authorities when people don’t want to take responsibility for their own actions etc.
I grew up in 80’s Britain and did plenty of hanging off of monkey bars, building fires, running around the woods climbing trees and generally larking around. Cuts, bruises, scratches, scrapes etc. Good parents who were “hands-on” when necessary but also knew to let us find stuff out. Life lessons such as “falling off monkey bars upside-down gives you a headache”, met with “Why’d you do that you utter banana! Sit down there and I’ll get an ice pack for the bump and a drink...”. Fantastic!
1
It is easy to miss in this wonderful article the legislative actions that would need to take place in the US which would be radical ones before "risk enhanced" playgrounds to encourage creative play could become standard in the US. 1) Universal Healthcare so injuries are covered for all children 2) Removal of "fault" from providers of playground equipment when the primary provider is Mother Nature: Trees, sand, stone, wood, gorse bushes. I hasten to note that gun manufacturers currently enjoy this "no fault" status now in the US.
And I agree with the person who noted US school children are already facing significantly more risk of death and injury by guns than children in countries where guns are not owned by so many people and so many guns are so easily available to those who should not access them as in the US. Of course this is also a risk for adults who are employed, go to movies or malls, attend church or are patients in a VA hospital.
7
It is strange that kids are bubble wrapped and helicoptered by parents in this country, but learn to shoot guns at an early age, own them not much later and sometimes use them on other people not long after that. But perhaps the two go hand in hand: American paranoia is manifested by an endless desire to 'protect' from the 'threats' around us, and both padded playgrounds and guns are believed to be solutions. Let's get rid of the padding and stop feeding fear to our kids and maybe assault weapons will go away too. It's high time to undo the paranoia and fear that have oiled the American engine for so long.
9
The thing is, these are two different sets of parents. The ones in NYC, who bubble wrap their children and make them use baby scissors, are not the same crowd taking their kids to the shooting range. My relatives in Oklahoma, whose children do use guns, are also exposing them to risks like driving tractors, playing in the woods, etc.
3
Thank you for this article, and I completely agree with these ideas. I find myself having to shrug off other parents disapproval of my letting my two boys do things that many other parents would find "dangerous".
My theory is that many kids now are getting their risk taking needs/experiences on video games (especially boys) by engaging in extremely violent scenarios, and thus the crisis of video game addiction and increase in violence in schools.
4
Good article.
As a father of four, I recall when my oldest daughter was a baby and bottle steamers were standard (to sterilize baby bottles). At the time I questioned the need to sterilize a bottle given that I’ve seen children growing up in conditions where goats were roaming freely in and out of their homes and yet those children managed to survive.
My fatherly reflection on bottle steamers was dismissed.
I also hadn’t matured enough as a parent to fully trust my instincts when they contradicted the current child rearing dogma. I continued to steam my daughters bottles.
By the time my youngest was born, we had learned the benefit of childhood exposure to “dirt” and bottle sterilizers were out.
I would encourage parents, especially male parents to reflect on and consider the harms in creating “safe” and sterile environments for our children.
There is no free lunch and “safety” comes with a price.
8
I can’t believe that bricks go over children’s heads. What if they land on a child’s head? A Head concussion is not worth it. There are other ways to help children take risk in their play.
16
When I was a child, our parents let us take many unsupervised risks. But we kids were also well aware of times when our kind of "freedom" had led to disastrous consequences: brain damage from head injuries, broken bones from falls, severe whole-body infections from poison ivy, accidents from riding bikes or playing basketball in the streets, and even kidnappings. As a teacher now, I have seen serious injuries happen even on "safe" playgrounds. I think the way helicopter parents raise their kids today, making all decisions for them, has more to do with killing engagement and challenge than reduced-danger playground equipment does. I do agree that family camping trips, hiking, and the experience of nature are a more realistic way to encourage exploration and initiative than deliberately introducing risky school or park play zones.
12
Just wait until the first law suit...risk management certainly goes overboard (sharp edges tape dispensers...I thought that's all there was) but someone's kid will get seriously hurt at some point. At that point, the concepts of standard of care and duty of care will put an end to this.
3
"What can we add to the sand pit to make it more risky?”
Broken glass and rusty nails? A tetanus shot will learn the kids real quick. Maybe a bit of cat feces just to round out the whole experience.
We should also bring back the metal slides too. On a sunny day, anyone in shorts was walking home blistered with their friends laughing at them. Man they were fast though. A spray can of palm oil with a head-first dive. You better hope there wasn't any hard object within 10 feet of the landing. I won't even start on long-chained swings over asphalt.
You're right. Kids are too soft these days. We need to teach them how to handle switch blades and pipe guns before middle school. These are important life skills. Personally though, I didn't go to play ground when seeking risk. I just raided my father's tool box and headed to the park with friends. Pre-adolescent boys know perfectly well how to invent risk.
17
You had me thinking “ok maybe we should try this”, right up to the bricks flying. That should not and would not happen in the USA. We may not allow enough risk but that is too far.
13
GREAT!
And giving children risk does not just apply to play.
A few decades ago I was head of our county's Red Cross disaster team. We were brainstorming ways to respond to disasters, such as a flood. I suggested that one possible resource to call upon was the scouts. People were aghast that I would suggest involving children. But when long ago I was a child in Southwest Louisiana, typically more than once a year there was a large flood. The scouts in the parish would deploy dozens of their personal boats. They tried to have at one scout rated at least second class per boat. The seven and eight year old Bobcats and Wolfs would help with sandbags. Two of us would hold the sandbag open while an adult filled it, then we two would drag (in pouring rain, on a slippery levee) it to be put into place by another adult. If you slipped once in the mud, you became careful at not slipping a second time.
That built grit. And it kept the levee from being overtopped by the flood, which was a very good accomplishment. And those boats provided supplies and sometimes rescue to those stranded by the waters.
9
I couldn't believe it in the mid 90s in East Asia when the teachers of a school group I was with just gave the 3rd graders matches to light up the barbecue grills on their own.
I wasn't surprised they were capable, just that my experience in the USA was that it was an insurance liability issue to let kids do anything remotely dangerous.
"Aren't you worried someone might get burnt?"
"No. They are responsible."
6
Bravo!
Life is not safe and children should learn that.
They should learn to deal with disappointments, defeat, and danger.
They should live in reality from the beginning.
2
Disappointment and defeat, yes. Danger? How much danger? I remember when 3 houses were torn down on my street in Berkeley; later a builder began to put up a large apartment building; there were loose boards, nails and other debris. I didn't allow my little girl to play there, even if others were. I don't see the point of exposing small children to needless dangers and risks. Explain why you don't want a child to play with flying bricks, or nails etc. Most children do understand certain risks when explained. That is not being over protective; it is part of a child's education.
3
I'm an American, raising my half British, half American son in London. My son loves the "adventure playgrounds," but boy, oh, boy-as an American lawyer, all I can think is lawsuit waiting to happen. Why they work in the UK is that you can lose a leg on a roller coaster and only receive 100k in compensation(!) Places I've visited have nails sticking out of wood, pieces of plywood all over the place, vertical slides you're supposed to go down in a sack. I'm fine with "adventure," but a few of these that I've seen are actually *dangerous*.
37
Back to the future. A million years of evolutionary training how to survive the real world. Amazing that we can think we are smarter than nature.
Like my old peers, most of us survived w/o bicycle helmets or much adult supervision. Our playgrounds were concrete pads with all metal devices.
My much younger teacher fiance' is of like mind, "Things need to explode; make them interesting!" Especially true for boys.
1
Good! Nowadays, there are too many "helicopter parents" and kids don't learn how to make mistakes and learn from them. It's good to keep tabs on what your child is up to and with whom they're playing, but let them take a few risks. I sure did some things growing up that parents would never allow their children to do today. Yes, things have changed, but we don't have to protect children from playing a bit recklessly.
70
In what way have things changed?
The majority of working people do not enjoy the luxury of too much safety and security. An even greater "danger" than too much safety is the insulation of the well-to-do from the realities of existence most people struggle with.
Children don't just "go play" anymore because of the way we have designed and built our communities, and because they are all hooked up to their tablets being marketed as consumers. This whole very shallow article lacks context.
1
Oh, I forgot: When growing up, if we got hurt, my parents didn't look for someone to sue or to blame. Also, we stuffed empty CO2 cartridges with match heads and made little bombs or projectiles (depending on how they burned). I got stitches when my brother's exploded unexpectedly. No, I don't condone that behavior, nor did my parents. We had bb guns and shot them in the neighborhood. Every so often, we'd hit a window.
Maybe instead of risk, people just want more natural playgrounds. But, I think, they should still be designed for as much safety as possible, especially for children. Accidents should happen by accident, not on purpose. The Trump chaos seems to be a trend all over the world, recently.
65
The world is certainly a risky place, and children are certainly too coddled today. But building in risk doesn't seem to make too much sense. How about just letting kids be kids and explore the natural (or urbanized) world the way they used to before the over-concern about avoiding all dangers.
The point about socialized health care in the majority of the developed world versus the American model is an excellent point though. One more argument to overhaul the failed American model.
7
THis reminds me so much of the United States; the tendency to go from one extreme to another. Too safe, let's make it dangerous! Too dangerous lest's make it impossible for anything to happen zero risk! When I was in jr high or high school in NJ,the movement began where everything was tree bark. Slides were considered very dangerous as they can be if you fall backwards or get on one when the metal is very hot on a hot sunny. I had a dream that when I woke up I recalled that all the concrete sidewalks were removed and replaced with a soft billowy material. I asked the workers why and they said that it's in case that someone blind, like Stevie Wonder might hurt himself. I love and loved Stevie Wonder but the dream was very long and complicated, with the theme that everything must be totally safe. Now it appears that the UK believes that everything must be able to inflict bodily harm to give the British children grit, like wearing knickers when it's cold out but this is dangerous. Once something truly horrible happens or maybe after 3 or 4 times, it will go back the other way and turn back the clock. All extremes when it comes to government policy are bad. Swinging the pendulum in the opposite direction and putting very young children in jeopardy is wrong. I put myself in enough jeopardy in elementary school hopping over the windows in new home foundations that could have easily killed. I dd develop common sense, eventually
9
And sadly you are judged as negligent if you let your children do such "risky" things.
One evening (safe suburban neighborhood) my daughter called me for a ride home from a friend's house that was a five minute walk away. I told her to walk. So the friend's mother drove her instead---!
84
When I was in the fifth grade in Summertime I'd escape the apartment and ride the subway and buses all day. My mother never knew where I was. I'd drift in at dinner time and never told her even if she asked. As an adult I told her of my exploits and she wasn't shocked, she knew what I was like and just said she was happy she didn't know about it then.
1
As a kid growing up in London in the '60s I went to the playground in Holland Park. It was 'unsafe' - but nobody died. Once I used a piece of wood, a fulcrum, and my body weight to send a rock skyward. It landed on my head. There was blood and an excellent lesson in "actions have consequences". A lesson no classroom or parent could have taught me.
51
I love your story. For sure the consequences are more the key to building resilience than the activity. It only takes one time with risky behavior for most kids to avoid it in the future.
1
Not sheltering children from the realities of the world that they will encounter the second they leave school? This should not be a radical idea.
34
We have too many lawyers looking to make a buck for this to happen here. Too bad, because children today are helicoptered into snowflakedom.
13
"In the United States, a country with far higher litigation costs, government agencies overseeing play safety are not known to have made any such changes." But places in the United States are doing exactly the same thing. In New York. As reported on by the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/nyregion/on-governors-island-mountain.... How in the world could the Times write this article without noting the same efforts in New York?
9
Great article! Yes, let's please fix health care once and for all. And maybe teach kids the notion of personal responsibility. A useful mantra, "It may not be your fault, but it is your problem".
64
Great piece that documents some of the philosophical and pragmatic change that is being embraced by parents, caregivers, educators, designers, academics, health care professionals and many more in a host of communities and countries. It is really a breath of fresh air that will benefit kids right now and society as a whole later when these kids mature and encounter problems and risks in the adult world. As a father of five, I know that it is hard to let go of fear, regardless of how unfounded and irrational it might be. Last night I was unnerved when I couldn't find my son who was out on his pushbike in a snow squall that became a storm. Everything turned out well and we have reinforced the requirement for him to call to let us know where he's at in future instances.... There are grass-roots organizations and individuals in The Americas, Europe, Australasia and beyond who are moving the markers forward for kids play. In New York, this publication has already done some great reporting on play:ground NYC. Check out what's available in your community and if there's nothing there - well there's an opportunity to get something started. For some exciting developments in the world of play and playgrounds, I invite you to visit playgroundology.wordpress.com
2
Those who survive will do splendidly later in life.
10
No mention of the class barriers that are the most endangering structures British children will encounter in their lives. Just finished watching "The Family", a 1974 BBC horror show and a pioneering reality series that showed the world what the recently coined expression "chav" really means: kids growing up in potty little houses surrounded by voracious chain-smoking and fiercely swearing grownups. All the grownups were failures, having chucked education and apprenticeships aside at the first opportunity, in order to marry or otherwise couple with another adult at the earliest possible age. Those kids from the Wilkins family were stunted, blighted creatures from birth. Play outside the house wasn't even an option, at least not from the producers' perspective. Eliminate the class barriers and permit the bright and ambitious to escape the prison of low or half-caste life, if it can indeed be done, and do these kids far more good than merely devising physical activity, however necessary it may be.
6
The class barriers are coming down. It’s a far different Britain than when I was child. It’s now down more to income. And, that also applies to the “classless” American society.
2
First of all the Family is a television show. Secondly, the class distinctions in the UK are no more or less complex than in the USA. Certainly the distinctions are different but....so what? This has precious little to do with the subject of this piece which I enjoyed and think is a step in the right direction. Over coddling and lack of risk or over protection from any form of danger does not help the healthy development of our kids.
I was second guessing myself a little while reading - thinking we should have exposed our son to more risk when he was younger - until I got to the 2nd to last paragraph:
"As she thought through these changes, a towheaded kindergartner nearby had fashioned a catapult, stacking seven bricks on one end of a wooden plank and jumping solidly onto the other end, sending the bricks flying into the air, over the heads of his playmates."
BRICKS FLYING OVER THEIR HEADS! HAHAHA! I'll stay up here in my helicopter, thanks.
31
Personal injury lawyers and liability insurance would make this initiative in the USA. We live in the Age of Bubblewrap.
29
Lol privilege at its finest
5
Heck! In the United States we have mass shooting drills in our schools! It doesn't get more real than that. In most states - our kids can buy guns. Guns! Guns! Guns! Guns for everyone! Nothing is more character building than a kid with a gun! Right?
126
Kids can't "buy guns" but in some states they can hunt or target shoot with adult supervision.
We lived in the city but could hardly wait for the frequent trips to visit our cousins in the country. They all had BB guns and we had a ball plinking in the fields behind their houses. We knew the iron-clad rules and nobody got hurt.
At summer camp, we had marksmanship classes from NRA-certified instructors for campers as young as 9 or so. Every class began with stern lectures on safe firearm handling and responsibility. Again, no injuries.
We were always taught that guns were dangerous if improperly handled. I took my own daughters and grandchildren to firing ranges before they were ten for the same stern safety lectures and allowed them to fire small caliber weapons. None of them shoots regularly but they have a healthy respect for firearms without being either terrified or fascinated.
"Risk enhanced"?! Precisely engineered risk?! It seems to me that risk-free-risk makes about as much sense as planned spontaneity or spirituality-without-religion. So yeah I guess this is the next big thing in old-is-newism.
7
Please get the basic facts correct: Ofsted does not inspect schools other than in England. The other nations of the UK have their own inspection regimes and run to often rather different rules.
9
I grew up among other free range kids in the 60s, disappearing between breakfast and supper to roam the neighborhoods, empty lots and city parks with such dangers lurking as merry-go-rounds and tall metal slides. My schoolyard had monkey bars installed over asphalt, no forgiveness for clumsiness there. We built rafts out of wooden pallets and poled these half-sinking crafts across sloughs to pick blackberries in our wet Keds. We stopped to watch the meat packing plant sluice gore into a pond, holding our noses at the smell, and rummaged around the abandoned "haunted house", hiding in closets and jumping out to scare holy hell out of each other, until the neighbor threatened to call the cops on us. By luck, we survived.
46
You survived by good luck. Other kids don't, by bad luck.
10
My dentist had to remove asphalt from a couple of my teeth after I fell off the monkey bars (stuff tastes awful). But the rubber mats went in after a classmate fell and broke both arms.
7
Sometimes I wonder how we survived our childhood. I remember climbing to the top of our steep corrugated iron roof to adjust the antenna with no safety harness when I was 14 or 15 years old while my parents were at work. Now, I shudder to think of how easily I could have slipped and fallen over 30 feet with no one home to witness. Talk about risky! Climbing trees, running around on the top of walls, playing cricket all day with no protective equipment...those where the days.
Childhood is a sterile process now with a rectangular screen plastered to one's face...
15
Risk enhanced playground?
That banging you hear is Orwell slamming his forehead into palm.
11
I love reading this and seeing adults realize that our kids learn skills they need later in life but encountering appropriate risky situations in youth. “Outside the Princess Diana Playground in Kensington Gardens in London, which attracts more than a million visitors a year, a placard informs parents that risks have been ‘intentionally provided, so that your child can develop an appreciation of risk in a controlled play environment rather than taking similar risks in an uncontrolled and unregulated wider world.’” We need more places like this in schools and playground in the US as well. My kindergartners use scissors, tape dispensers, have ropes at recess, know how to use hot glue guns, hammers and kid friendly saws. We watch them carefully and rarely need to intervene.
4
Growing up in London after the war, we had great adventure playgrounds. They were called “bombsites”. The least of our worries were bricks flying overhead. When I came to the Bronx in 1957 I can distinctly remember thinking that American kids didn’t know how to play. It was all sports until I discovered some kids that played on an empty lot building things out of junk (and sometimes setting them on fire). In both places we had elaborate role-playing games and it wasn’t just boys either. As a teacher for over 40years, I can truly say that play is very different these days, if it happens at all, outside of organized sports and media.
29
I remember there were three old houses being torn down near me on Knickerbocker Avenue. There was nothing to stop us from entering and we just tore out the doors and broke out all the glass. I pulled on a pipe and water flowed out, it hadn't been turned off. The bottom floors flooded and I fell on some broken glass and got a very nasty cut on my hand. I still have the ragged scar today.
We were fortunate growing up with Wyckoff Heights Hospital a block from our apartment. With 7 children at the time it seemed my parents were frequent visitors to the emergency room with one of us.
While it's great to allow children risk, I think it is a bit much to encourage this in a school setting where other children may be forced to experience risk as a result of poorly designed and implemented constructions. And while I have great respect for teachers, I don't think many of them have sufficient skills to maintain the level of safety awareness needed to sustain this sort of project.
Perhaps a parkour course would be better?
I believe it is better to use the schoolyard to develop relationship skills in designing and creating a project under supervision, not in a dangerous free for all. Who among us hasn't experienced, in one way or another, a child oblivious to the danger he puts other children and/or himself in during a bout of enthusiastic play using tools and materials improperly? How has it harmed anyone to learn that a sharp edges tape dispenser can cause a minor injury on their own at home rather than at school?
I'd rather they learned teamwork and planning along with better senses of spatial awareness and physical limits of materials and personal bodies before wilding, thank you very much.
12
Good them. A little risk now teaches lessons to avoid bigger risk later. A little dirt now actually builds the immune system. A lot of non computerized play coupled with the lack of electronic connectivity breeds imaginative, thoughtful, and social behavior.
9
But "building in" risk is downright stupid. Just let the kids be kids in the real world. There's plenty of risk everywhere. Why actually think through how to add more in?
5
With the plethora of "helicopter" parents out there, must disagree. And I add, most domiciles are "child proofed". -- and don't you dare go near that "whatever".
The British have long been rather blasé about playground safety. Often the elementary school playground is mere asphalt. My children were brought up partly in London and partly in New York. At their state primary school, there was a sign in the playground that "all head injuries should be reported." Apparently other injuries were not taken particularly seriously. Then (this was in the '90s), the great treat for children was to take them to an "adventure playground," in some large park, where there was plenty of risk, as far as I could determine--and where the parents had to sign a legal release before the children could enter! There has to be a middle ground between helicoptering around our children and arresting their parents for letting them walk home from school alone. According to this article, the new "risk-added" policy at Ofsted doesn't seem to hit quite the right spot.
7
My summer job was to leave at 9 and return by 5 for dinner. What I did and where I went in between was my choice, to possibly be discussed at dinner.
At 59, I’m still doing the same only with a salary. My parents done good.
16
I sent my 3 kids to an expensive central london private school with lots of freedom to play & explore (inc. a vast treehouse, zip wire & goat) . I learnt (from Tim Gill, who lectured there) that "benign neglect" was very hard for parents to do, but was great for kids. They learned deeply from trial and error and their mistakes: I see this resilience in them now (as young adults). I suspect many American kids learn similar things from camp and the "great american outdoors". We need to stop indulging our own selfish fears of not being good enough parents and give our children space to live.
6
Well, my kids do not go to an expensive school, and we have treehouses and zip wires in playgrounds available to all.
2
The idea of eliminating risk in childhood play will work here in the US if and only if we finally get to a single payer health system. If a kid gets a broken leg or laceration in Europe or Australia, he or she can easily get fully-paid medical care. The reason that the US is so litigious with respect to injury is the high cost of medical care, which--depending on the situation--may not even be fully covered by a specific insurance plan.
Childhood play--yet another argument for guaranteed single-payer medical coverage in the US. .
13
And don't forget paid sick leave so parents can take their children to the emergency room and for multiple follow-ups without losing their income. In the US, many parents risk their jobs when they miss work to take care of a child.
5
Experts say: "Useful in building resilience and grit"---- I say these experts are not the best experts. The goal of Education is to build Brilliance. The Brilliant IQ is the highest level of education achievement in the World School System. One of these "Survivor TV show" Playgrounds cost how much? over a million dollars? This article is so off track that I don't even care to read the article again to find the exact amount... was it 1.5 Million? Britain is being "suckered". And, first, they really should consult what the #1 Insurance Company in the World thinks about: Risk. How risk is described here, is not what actually risk is. So, these people are not even getting what they are paying for. These kids from the article, deserve what the kids from Well-educated, Intelligent Class homes are getting for their extra-curricular activities. Intelligence is Power. There is no competition, if they don't.---- There is another group who is currently creating additions to The School Curriculum to be put in place throughout the World. There is a problem with not enough people achieving The Brilliant IQ Score. England needs to get on the Brilliant Track. Limited nothing! Go for Brilliance! Go for the Top!
3
I would say Britain has been on the 'brilliant track' for a long time. A lot of high schoolers in Britain are at the same level academically as college kids in the US. Then there's Oxford, Cambridge ...
It really depends on the school district . My friend from the States moved to Britain and when she moved back she could not keep up with my classwork. She told me a lot about school life there, and it seems completely chaotic and unorganized .
Hooray, finally! Would that the U.S. embrace this concept. Too many of our children are growing up needlessly fearful and unable to evaluate risks. Part of the problem is overprotective, hovering parents, but also corporations and manufacturers who sell benign, harmless consumer goods laden with ten pages of unneeded cautions and warnings.
2
Britain was founded by jousting knights, the US was founded by lawyers. Only the military are exempt from the fear of liability lawsuits, perhaps not for long.
12
George Carlin on how everything is considered dangerous for kids - "Standing around (on playgrounds) is still okay. Standing around is still permitted but it won't be for long because sooner or later some kid is going to be standing around and his foot will fall asleep and his parents will sue the school and it will be good-bye standing around."
9
"Limited risks are increasingly cast by experts as an experience essential to childhood development, useful in building resilience and grit."
BUT WHO SETS THE LIMITS ? (AND HOW DO THEY DO THAT?)
6
I was taught “resilience and grit” by my parents and grandparents. It’s such a shame that we as a society have to rely upon schools to teach it anymore.
6
Totally agree with this. No one can eliminate risk in their lives even crossing the street or driving a car has risk. It is really important to my mind to learn in a reasonably safe environment how to manage risk before you face the harsh real world where risk is ever present.
The second point is that we evolved to deal and handle risk. To an extent we manipulate things so that the level of risk is at a certain level. This is known. When seat belt legislation was introduced in the UK it was correctly predicted that pedestrians and cyclists would be more at risk because drivers would drive in a slightly less safe manner to level out their feeling of risk and sort of counter the 'safe' feeling they got from wearing a seat belt.
There is this article from the New York Times reporting on this at the time.
https://www.nytimes.com/1985/06/18/science/science-watch-seat-belts-and-...
2
this article has it exactly right. What Britain and other European countries are doing is correct. But that cannot happen in the United States, because of our
out of control tort system. We need more exciting playgrounds and fewer lawyers this side of the Atlantic.
6
I'm having difficulty deciding if flying bricks is akin to 'risk enhancement to build grit' or some sort of convoluted malthusian population control effort.
54
This is an important move in the teaching of realistic life skills and creative problem solving. Though I imagine an American version should consider including loaded fire arms as part of the play?
3
Look around. So many of our boys have become so soft and effeminate, gaining weight; lacking confidence and initiative. It's ubiquitous now. Horse play is not a panacea, but risk adverse parents are not raising potted plants; we are animals. Yes, we are still animals and that part of our genetic past must be reconciled or harmonized with our egalitarian aspirations or we'll make a mess of the gene pool, like we have the Earth.
4
Also wondering to what extent helicopter parenting and the general sterilization of/removal of risk from childhood in the US has contributed to the so-called "culture of victimization" (safe spaces, silencing of speech, "right to not be offended," etc) that we're seeing today on college campuses
101
I think it's a good thing that bullying that has always been pervasive in school and work has come to the fore, and others have to at least attempt to be aware of their effect on others. Personally I think there's plenty of risk in the world.
1
Another gentle admonishment from the child-rearing brigade, which seems to love prodding us by throwing (supposedly) British/German/French/Chinese cultural norms in our face. What strikes me about these pieces is that, as a rule, they posit that all American children share the same lifestyle (i.e. that of upper middle class white families). What high-hat nonsense.
Don't worry, there is plenty of rubble, risk, and challenge to engage with in the America that is not represented here.
144
Absolutely a great point. My relatives in Oklahoma have a son who is seven years old, and tougher than most teenagers. It is not because of some conscious decision to free-range him-- it's just cultural. He rides motorbikes, wanders around in the woods alone, etc. The Times forgets that not everyone lives in Manhattan.
4
Yes, and they all seem to presume that most play takes place on the playground! Many kids, not just in poor urban areas, don't have access to playgrounds. If allowed to, kids will find a way, and a place to play & pursue adventure & risk. Even so, I do feel sorry for kids today when I see the sterile, fun-stripped spaces that pass for playgrounds. I'm all for the safer surfaces, but most city parks no longer have slides, merry go rounds, see-saws, monkey bars, or swings for bigger kids. Most now seem to cater to babies and toddlers. There's no equipment to challenge or engage the older child. And the list of things not allowed grows every year. I recently took my grandkids to a park that listed, among other things, the following forbidden activities: skateboarding, running (!), tree climbing, cycling, and roller skating.
Have fun, kids! These are the best years of your life!
1
@Feldallen, By gum you are right. I never thought of
it that way.Yes of course there is plenty of risk taking
children who are not from affluent back grounds in
the USA. And it is too bad they are not represented here.
Growing up as a tomboy in Washington State a long time
ago, I climbed trees unobserved from the age of 6.
Would go mucking and splashing about in a creek which
had a deep section a quarter of a mile from my home, alone,
when I was around 9. Used hammer and nails often to
"build things" again unsupervised. But unlike some of today's
risk taking children, I did not have to circumvent drugs and
crime and gun toting crazies
The idea of manufacturing an appropriately safe/risky play environment seems a bit absurd when nature provides such excellent and risky playgrounds. I had the good fortune to grow up adjacent to a large woodland - a wonderfully rich educational environment for any child. I can imagine a thousand ways I could have been seriously injured (drowning, multiple-wasp attack, collapsing trees, etc.) but none of this happened to myself or anyone I ever heard of, so survivor bias is probably not coloring my assessment.
Playing in the woods, we were protected by an inherent sense of caution hard-wired into our young brains. Kids are not stupid - we knew the current was too strong to resist in flooded creeks and that rotting trees were bad choices for climbing. Minor scrapes educated us quickly about more serious dangers.
The serious risk-taking began when we left childhood and became young men. Suddenly we became stupid. Any child would have the sense not to drive on rural roads at night without headlights, or to mess around on a motorcycle after drinking five beers - forms of stupidity which killed two of my adolescent friends. Kids can be trusted, but perhaps the adolescents should be restricted to the rubber-padded playgrounds!
13
Please bring this to Brooklyn.
The only risk there is to adults who can get injured by jogging strollers barreling down the sidewalk and helicopter parents poking your eye out with their umbrella while teaching their toddlers Mandarin on a rainy day.
4
I agree that kids are generally too bubble-wrapped, shushed, and forced to sit still. This type of play seems reasonable. I have seen the pendulum swing too far toward embracing real danger. There’s this weird sort of nostalgia about how “in my day, we didn’t wear helmets, we drank from the hose, we wandered the neighborhood alone, and we turned out awesome! First there’s an obvious survivor bias, and second, there are real dangers and injuries aren’t a badge of honor. Where we lived, moms bragged about sipping wine while their kids were on the playground. Even when one had a fall and major head injury,they proudly exclaimed that at least they weren’t helicopter parents!
40
I am a proud member of the free-range parenting (IE, anti-helicopter) community, but you are so right! I hear a lot of people saying "Why, I used to ride in the open bed of a pickup truck, going 80, while my 14 year old brother drove." Well, good for you, I'm glad you survived, haha! That being said, I do think we have swung waaaayyy too far the other direction (my son is SIX and some of his classmates have parents who won't let them use adult tablewear for fear that they'll break a glass and cut themselves), so I am so glad to be reading that some balance is occurring.
10
Statistically speaking children are even safer today than they were "back in our day". All of this fear surrounding the health of your child and its proximity to risk is completely irrational. Survivor bias? We aren't growing up in war torn regions of the world...
3
" kids are generally too bubble-wrapped, shushed, and forced to sit still. "
Are we talking about "kids" in general --
or middle-class white kids in particular?
8
In principle, yes, but...
“[A...] kindergartner nearby had fashioned a catapult, stacking seven bricks on one end of a wooden plank and jumping solidly onto the other end, sending the bricks flying into the air, over the heads of his playmates.”
(What??!!)
161
Bill, it may have been a dangerous situation but the boy had an opportunity to learn that that setup, with that leverage and the bricks weighing almost as much as the kid, will certainly not send the bricks flying into the air.
You are right that there is danger in that playground. There is probably more risk of kids falling onto something than something falling onto them.
How will children learn not to stand on unstable things, if not by doing it?
My reaction too.
Reminds me of an incident when I was in kindergarten. The children were asked to help clear the playground of stones by picking them up and throwing them into a wheelbarrow. One of the stones landed on my hand, smashing the little finger and causing the nail to drop off. They decided maybe that wasn't such a good idea after all.
The playgrounds pictured in this article look dreary and dangerous. Swinging the pendulum to the opposite extreme is not the answer. One of these children WILL be severely injured. It is just a matter of time.
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Hooray! Americans, send your coddled kids to Europe where they can have the same kinds of playground experiences I had growing up in the USA in the 1950s.
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As a college educator, I wonder if the elimination of risk in our children's lives is related to their lack of self confidence. I see my students questioning every decision they make and having limited confidence that they can handle stressful situations like exams and job interviews. The ideas in this article sound very intuitive and helpful.
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Yes indeed. As an educator, I believe it is all connected. Kids gain great confidence when we don’t get in the way of their can do attitude.
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Rich, it's possible but I think part of it is due to the lack of certainty in the lives of the adults around them. They see their parents making what they believe are the best choices at the time only to regret them later. Or they see their parents losing jobs and unable to find new jobs or move ahead even though these same parents made all the right moves.
On a personal note, I'm from the generation that wasn't over-supervised as children. However, when I entered the job market the economy wasn't too good, jobs were hard to find and they stayed hard to find. You start to second and third guess yourself after repeated downsizings or failed interviews or advice from people that suggests to you that everything is your fault. Our country believes that the individual is in control but any person who has been downsized will tell you that's not so. So will any person who is over the age of 50, jobless, still interested in working, and receiving very few responses even though they are well qualified for a job.
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I could not agree more with the concept that we have to let our children experience risk and dangers in order for them to learn about it. Living in America as a Dutch immigrant in the 80's I was absolutely appalled about the absence of any exciting play equipment at the playgrounds. I did make sure my kids had access to areas where they could play with sticks and stones and climb and jump and run and get dirty and experience the consequences of their actions. We had a few falls, skinned knees, a broken arm but that was the worst of it. None of the three kids are averse to risk in their adulthood now, they are now avid climbers, hikers and one flies planes. I am so glad that I bucked those rules of 'good parenting' and did it my own. more risky way.
Kids bodies have to learn from experience and it is a parents duty to provide that environment for that to happen. I would say to also is true for childhood diseases.
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Thank the Goddess that some rationality is returning to the nanny state. Who knows, maybe some day American children will again be allowed to play in the backyard? Might they even learn to survive microaggressions and triggering?
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For Pete's sake! Bricks flying through the air over the kids heads? Really? Left to their own devices, those kids may have come up with the same scenario on their own in someone's empty lot, but setting them up to do it at school seems absurd to me. Just let kids explore the world around them, they are naturally curious and natural-born scientists. Honestly, way too much thought is being put into designing playgrounds. It's a dangerous and thrilling world that most of us eventually have to enter at our own risk. I recall many afternoons as a child when my friends and I would launch ourselves out of the playground swings at the highest arc we could achieve and do our best to avoid landing on the concrete border around the sand-filled playground. Sometimes we hit the concrete; we all survived. Also, we spent most of our days outside, exploring our surroundings without a cell phone leash. It has always been, and always will be, a dangerous world. But it is also tremendously wondrous.
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That's actually a great point. It's pretty funny to engineer risk into a playground. Maybe instead of just planting spiky gorse-bushes, just leave whatever growth was naturally there! But I think I still come down on the "it's better than nothing" side of the argument. Where "nothing" is my town's current playground-- plastic, about four feet tall, and so boring that children over 2 refuse to play on it. No wonder they want to go inside and play video games.
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Maybe my Child adventures and risk taking were a FACTOR, but... I look back and I seldom had an INJURY ,though I OFTEN was in a situation where it was quite possible. In a surprising EMERGENCY..I will not panic, I get CALM and come up with a good idea. Stuff I did when young... probably had value i never imagined.
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Susan - "Exploring our surroundings without a cell phone leash." Yes, those were the days - when one knew the other end of the see saw could hit you on the head if you didn't take care.
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It is conceivable that this could be tried in America, but the first lawsuit stemming from a skinned knee will nix it.
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Richard are there no lawyers in all of England who might sue there as well?
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I guess we could change the laws to avoid lawsuits but the personal injury lawyer lobby would fight it with tooth and nail
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The Land Of The Free needs to free itself from the chokehold of the lawyer caste. Europeans regularly laugh at the examples of liability lawsuits coming from the US. Grow up, people!
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I highly recommend bringing your kids camping. They can freely explore the outdoors and learn how to chop wood and make/tend fires, cook, set up a tent and tie knots, fish, etc. Basically what scouting does but better because you are their teacher. It gives them a sense of self reliance and introduces them to the natural world. The earlier the better. Leave all electronic devices at home or locked in the glove box. Bubble wrap should also be left behind.
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Great point. We do camp with our son, and it forces him to do things that he would never get to do in a structured environment, like school or even in a structured ummer camp.
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Dad was a Scout Master, but even Scouts got watered down through law suits and I'm not talking about sex abuse or truly legitimate criminal neglect, but obviously where kids have played or knowing done dangerous things and parents blame Boy Scouts organization instead of holding their children responsible for their actions.
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Good points! Regrettably, there are still many people out there who claim, parents are just getting rid of their kids for summer, and abrogating responsibility...Sad.
4
Nothing builds character like a ruptured spleen.
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Somehow I stumbled through childhood playing like this with hundreds of fellow kid life-travellers and not a single ruptured spleen among the lot of us.
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Thanks for that!
I had an 25 year old acquaintance not long ago who was permanently neurologically and physically disabled on her right side. We didn’t know why. Finally learned she had been hit in the head with a brick by another child at age 8. This is NOT an acceptable risk.
11
I used to regularly remind my children that Louis Braille, who invented the system of using raised dots for letters for blind people to read, was able to see just fine until he used his fathers' hammer without eye protection... Children are impulsive creatures who can't believe they are mortal.
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When I was a young girl I climbed to the roof of our 1 story house by using a nearby tree. I took long walks by myself tracing the railroad tracks. I wandered my neighborhood aimlessly in search of adventure. I called out to my mom “going out for a bike ride” and wouldn’t be back for hours. We just bought a house with a large backyard that’s fenced. There are windows everywhere so I can see the entire yard. Yet I find myself wondering when the weather is warmer will I let my 5 year old play outside without me. And my husband who had just as much childhood freedom if not more, would probably freak if I did. What happened? Those of us who had such freedoms are the same ones now too afraid to let our kids enjoy that same spirit of adventure.
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I was allowed freedoms of play in my 1970s childhood that no modern parent would allow. (We never wore helmets - except in Little League, because they made us. We were allowed to roam the entire neighborhood. We climbed tall trees and no one freaked out. We went hiking down creeks and streams without adult supervision.)
We got out and explored the world. We should learn to take risks - but sensible ones. (Some of the risks I, and children I knew, took, probably were not very sensible!)
2
What happened, I think, is that most of us who lived the childhood you describe grew up and realized how close we came to getting ourselves killed. I once almost drowned in a retention pond. Another time I almost got bounced out of a pickup truck while the driver took us joyriding down bumpy back roads. I fell off a table one time and landed on the pair of scissors I was holding in my hand. Etc.
So we overcompensate by going too far the other way. I want my kids to be free to explore the world on their own, but I worry about their safety, and I admit I probably get too protective. But then I remember the kid I knew who was killed running in front of a car and suddenly my fenced-in backyard looks a little more inviting.
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You can do it! My son is six, and I do let him (I mean, FORCE him) to play outside alone. Everything seems scary the first time you do it. When your daughter goes outside, and comes in with a caterpillar 20 minutes later, you'll realize she's perfectly fine, and you'll smile at yourself for being worried.
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