Anticipating reminiscences of all you other survivors of our daily dalliances with danger while growing up !
Thanks for posting this.
..... Dealing with kids .... “Too Safe to Succeed” .... Is one thing .... but remember .... these useless people will eventually become the the main component of society .... That said ..... It does not bode well for the future of this nation .... Where are all of the needed “Producers” going to come from to support all of these useless idiots who will bleed this nation dry without contributing anything at all?
Kids need movement, edge, and stress --- not packing foam.
They need to reach the outer stature of adults without being stuck with the inner life of infants in swaddling clothes.
Let your kids be kids with a minimum of adult supervision. Seek out other free-range families and let the kids ally with each other.
Free kids for a free country.
TL;DR
how much of the “safety” BS is really about safety and not about avoiding lawsuits? Not doubting the end result: frightened, wimpy snowflakes, but I question the original motives.
When we were kids the playground equipment at school and the parks were on asphalt. If I fell and got any cuts or bruises up my Mom would clean me up and admonish me to BE MORE CAREFUL!
In November my trail life USA troop had a campout at a place with a large play area. The kids were up before dawn engaging in hours of unstructured play.
Artofmanliness.com has a great article entitled 23 dangerous things you should let your children do.
good post
Another is safety in numbers. There were kids all over my childhood neighborhood. When I let my young son out to play. There were no kids on the streets or at the park. It had to be a play date or I would tag along.
As a toddler, I would take him to the park and we would be the only ones there. Where were all the kids? Most likely in daycare.
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Anticipating reminiscences of all you other survivors of our daily dalliances with danger while growing up !
Btw, this is an OUTSTANDING essay .. thanks !
Two words........
Lawn darts
Thanks for posting this. Most of my childhood spanned the Sixties and it was an idyllic childhood for me. Both parents worked as did both my grandparents who lived four houses down the road. Unsupervised play was the norm then.
In my early childhood on an isolated farm, I played in hay bale forts and caves, learned to carve at a dead stump along the road, drank from a stream that emanated from our pumphouse, and learned to explore. (Actually, when just a preschooler, I had the run of our tiny house but not the farmyard because turkeys had free run and they took an especially disliking to me. It wasn’t until we dispensed of the turkeys that I truly found freedom to wander.) There was the pigpen, the granary, the barn and storage sheds, the orchard and sagebrush hills to discover. That’s not to say my parents didn’t take some precautions. For awhile, my dad strung me with a cowbell so they could find me if I got lost or hurt and he and my uncle captured a rattlesnake and displayed it in a bottle long enough for us kids to learn what they looked like.
Later we moved to the “city”, which was a small town of 6,000 or so. We biked or walked everywhere, skated alone on ice-covered ponds, rode out summer thunderstorms lying in dry ditches. At age eight, a friend and I hired ourselves out to local farmers (whom we did not know) to pick potatoes for $.07 per hundredweight. Another friend’s father was a welder and constructed fantastic playground equipment in his backyard to keep his brood of five kids and all their friends busy. I won’t go into detail about his creativity but it is surprising we all made it to puberty. Another friend and I spend hours mucking out a small stable to be our summer playhouse. I spent many hours alone at the nearby woods with a small stream running through it. My friends and I had a great time climbing on and operating the WWII surplus artillery and tank in our park. We would dare each other to shimmy way out on the tank shell barrel. The neighborhood park near our home had a nearly two-story high slide with only a little handrail to grasp as we climbed and certainly no enclosed slide. It also featured a wicked merry-go-round and teeter-totter where you learned who your true friends were. Not far away was a large canal over which some obliging adults had installed ropes so we could swing over the water. We swam in a gravel pit, had crab apple fights, slept outside all night. All unsupervised.
I babysat starting around age eleven, often after midnight most weekends. I did take swim lessons but my introduction to skating involved Dad taking me to the rink and pushing me out into the middle of the rink. My first time on a ski lift was alone and I had no idea what the sign meant “Prepare to Disembark” involved. I learned the hard way one didn’t use a rope tow on a bunny hill with knitted gloves.
In other words, I learned a lot on my own. And I can’t recall a single friend who was injured beyond some cuts and bruises. We were adventurous but not stupid, at least not often. I wish my own kids could have enjoyed the freedom. Alas, by the time my kids were going through childhood, we lived in California in a medium-sized city where helicopter parents were prevalent and we were constantly warned not to let our kids out of our sight. My kids are okay. They are independent and know how to fail and succeed with equanimity but I think their inner lives suffered.
Might as well just leave them in the womb........oh....wait.....
2 hour school delay because of FOG.
BTTT
Great article.