Article in the Atlantic says being overprotective of kids creates more problems. Kids need risk to learn and grow and deal with risk later in life.

Subtitle says it all! “A preoccupation with safety has stripped childhood of independence, risk taking, and discovery—without making it safer. A new kind of playground points to a better solution.”

You must read the article. I won’t try and paraphrase what a great job the author did.  Here are some quotes from the article: The Overprotected Kid

It’s hard to absorb how much childhood norms have shifted in just one generation. Actions that would have been considered paranoid in the ’70s—walking third-graders to school, forbidding your kid to play ball in the street, going down the slide with your child in your lap—are now routine.

One very thorough study of “children’s independent mobility,” conducted in urban, suburban, and rural neighborhoods in the U.K., shows that in 1971, 80 percent of third-graders walked to school alone. By 1990, that measure had dropped to 9 percent, and now it’s even lower.

Over the years, the official consumer-product handbook has gone through several revisions; it is now supplemented by a set of technical guidelines for manufacturers. More and more, the standards are set by engineers and technical experts and lawyers, with little meaningful input from “people who know anything about children’s play,” says William Weisz, a design consultant who has sat on several committees overseeing changes to the guidelines.

“Reasonable risks are essential for children’s healthy development,” says Joe Frost, an influential safety crusader.

Children, she concluded, have a sensory need to taste danger and excitement; this doesn’t mean that what they do has to actually be dangerous, only that they feel they are taking a great risk.

And all adults also!

We might accept a few more phobias in our children in exchange for fewer injuries. But the final irony is that our close attention to safety has not in fact made a tremendous difference in the number of accidents children have. According to the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, which monitors hospital visits, the frequency of emergency-room visits related to playground equipment, including home equipment, in 1980 was 156,000, or one visit per 1,452 Americans. In 2012, it was 271,475, or one per 1,156 Americans.

I love this quote.

“The advent of all these special surfaces for playgrounds has contributed very little, if anything at all, to the safety of children,” he told me. Ball has found some evidence that long-bone injuries, which are far more common than head injuries, are actually increasing.

Is it Risk Homeostasis or is it that kids don’t know or care about surfaces, they just need to have fun!

“There’s a fear” among parents, Roger Hart told me, “an exaggeration of the dangers, a loss of trust” that isn’t clearly explainable.

Wow, very interesting.

If a mother is afraid that her child might be abducted, her ironclad rule should not be Don’t talk to strangers. It should be Don’t talk to your father.

This is simply life. It probably at some point in time was said thousands of times a day. Now hearing it once is enough to be quoted in an article. The conversation is between two kids.

“You might fall in the creek,” said Christian.

“I know,” said Gideon.

For once there is an article about children playing that did not talk about the harm of computers. Why because children who have the opportunity to play don’t want to spend time on computers. Play is more fun. It is more fun to go out and explore than to shoot something on a screen!

Do Something

However what is described in the article just sounds like my life growing up. Getting skinned knees and bruises was called growing up. We learned first aid on ourselves. This worked, this burned and this made a mess and did not help.

Read the Article!

See The Overprotected Kid

What do you think? Leave a comment.

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By Recreation Law Rec-law@recreation-law.com    James H. Moss       #Authorrank

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