Thanks Gym Buddy Dennis!Think hard – when was the last time you saw a high dive outside of the Olympics? Our local pool sure doesn’t have one. Indeed, the last time I can remember seeing one was in my high school pool when I was on the diving team for about two seconds. (Although I stuck around long after I quit to help all the guys shave their legs before meets. What can I say? Swimmers are hot. Even freakishly hairless boy swimmers.) There’s a reason we don’t see many high diving boards anymore. Or any diving boards at all. Or merry-go-rounds. Or ten-foot-tall metal slides. Or see-saws. Or many of the playground favorites from our childhoods. It’s because they’re not safe.
At the risk of sounding like a cranky old-timer who walked to school in paper bag shoes – uphill both ways! – and played hackey sack with a hairball for fun, I have to say: What is happening to children these days?
An uproar in New York about unsafe playgrounds brought out some intense emotions in parents and children alike. And what was the object of their protestation? Tetanus-laden uncovered screws? Uncoated swing chains that pinch little fingers? George Michael policing the restrooms? Nope. They were mad about the rubber surface that was installed to protect children against falls. See, when the weather gets hot, so does the rubber and apparently the kids felt like it was burning their feet.
I do have some sympathy for those New Yorkers. As a parent I completely understand the pain that ensues when children start whining. If mine keep it up long enough I swear my ears actually bleed. As a playground veteran I can vouch for the fact that children find any number of things outdoors whine-worthy. In addition to hot playground surfaces, there’s hot playground equipment, hot picnic tables and hot (read: lukewarm) juice boxes. There’s also cold swing seats, cold monkey bars and cold (read: lukewarm) bottles. You know what helps with all that? Earplugs. Oh, and shoes.
Are Safe Kids Fat Kids?
In a day where it is postulated that over 85% of the U.S. population will be overweight in 20 years, it seems like a lot of parents aren’t getting the message about the importance of exercise. While the above example is a little extreme, many parents end up curtailing physical activities – especially the spontaneous outdoor kind that experts have long advocated as necessary for children’s mental and physical health – because of safety concerns.
I have to admit I have done it. I won’t let my six-year-old walk two blocks to his friend’s house to play because I’m concerned about all the street crossing he’ll have to do. I don’t let any of my children play outside unattended because we don’t have a fenced-in yard. So if I’m busy when they want to play outside, they don’t get to go outside. If they want to practice riding their bikes? I drive them (!) to a local park because we have no sidewalks in our neighborhood. In fact, most parents I know make some marked concessions to safety that our parents didn’t do when we were kids.
My mother accuses me of trying to wrap my kids in bubble wrap but I am a mother to three boys. And I say this with love but they’re crazy. The two-year-old gets his kicks from scaling the bookshelves and then jumping off the top. The four-year-old literally thinks he can fly, as evidenced by his ability to jump down an entire flight of stairs without touching carpet until he lands in a heap at the bottom. We’ve already had multiple visits to the emergency room involving such innocuous objects as a banister, a bungee cord, and a fluffy red pom-pom. Can you imagine the carnage that would ensue with, say, a pellet gun? Or a roller-derby Barbie??
What Is A Parent To Do?
There has to be some middle ground between protesting that the ground is hot on a hot day – last time I checked suing the laws of physics isn’t usually productive – and leaving your kids in the care of no one but your dog while you go out on the town (Hello Peter Pan!). Out here in the frozen wasteland, parents compromise by paying exorbitant fees to have their kids play hockey. I however have a problem with a sport that makes me pay out the ying so my kids can knock around the noggin I spent nine months gestating. (I didn’t even eat soft cheese because it might be bad for them!) I suppose the biggest problem is what kids are doing instead of playing outside: generally something involving a screen.
Safety is a concern for adults wishing to play in the outdoors as well. Even with reflective gear, cell phones and pepper spray available, many women cite safety as a major reason they don’t exercise outside. Not to mention that injuries and accidents can happen to the best of us. Aron Ralston, anyone? (Hint: he’s the man who cut off his own arm with a pocket knife to save his life.)
Other than spending a lot of time wishing I lived in a place where I could chuck my kids out the front door after breakfast and tell them not to return until the dinner bell rings, what can I do? How do you guys balance the concerns of safety with the need for exercise? And, more importantly, how do you get your kids to stop with the whining??
This sound familiar? Don’t worry, you’re not losing your mind – Thursdays are greatest hits day here at GFE. This post originally ran Dec. ’08.
I also want to point out that PE now-a-days is a joke, assuming that a school offers it at all. My 3rd grader gets 20 minutes of recess a day (if her class was good) and 35 minutes of physical "education" a week.
Also, I'm very tired of the Wii being touted as the solution to childhood obesity. What ever happened to actually riding a bike or playing a sport instead of just pretending?
I don't have kids but have a neice and nephew. When I was a kid we ran around the street playing with other kids, rode our bikes all over and were pretty much active from morning until night.
My neice and nephew can't do those things. There are a lot more cars on the road these days. There is also an increased fear of peodophiles. When I was a kid we had huge backyards too. Nowadays they make new subdivisions with backyards that aren't big enough to swing a cat in, let alone play.
My sister in law is one of the lucky ones, she doens't need to work so she can spend time taking them to the park and things during the day. These days both parents generally need to work, so outdoor playing tends to get left until the weekends.
I had no idea the emotional trauma parents go through in order to let their kids "go out and play"…I don't think my parents ever had that trauma though…I ran out and played by the streets since I was 6!
But I don't really think a parent can do much, except trust in God who will protect the children…whether they are in the playgrounds or not, there are a gazillion ways in which children hurt themselves…and they need to hurt themselves from time to time in order to learn to be careful…I suppose that's the big dilemma…
Our kids need exercise no matter what age. My 1 1/2 year old goes to daycare and they spend 30min twice a day outside playing. He is so happy when he is outside running around. Our schoold systems are a joke when it comes to PE. I remember when I was in high school because I was on dance team I didn't have a PE class cause we would come in the mornings to practice for an hour and a half. Not much exercise. It is so easy for kids to get out of PE in school aswell. I think we need to keep our kids active. It's all the video games and tv that is making our youth overweight, because they don't need to leave the house.
and I literally say that to my husband all the time. that I wanna wrap my daughter in bubble wrap and she can emerge when Im no longer on this earth 🙂 so I get what youre feeling entirely.
and am a little embarrassed Id not though of this/about this much before.
Is it her age? the fact we have a fenced in yard?
I can no more imagine kissing her head and sending her out into the street to ride her bike (!) than I can emerging from my house nekid and prancing down the aforementioned street.
My pediatrician firmly believes that a kid who doesn't get a couple of bruises and occasionally a few stitches, is a kid who has not had a happy life.
Its a tough line between making kids safe and coddling them so they don't have fun.
Love that cheese-grater slide! You know, that might be a great weight-loss aid?
Childhood memories…at Boysen Park in Anaheim, California, we had a real, genuine airplane, parked with one wing tilted down to the ground and the other wing up in the air. For about 10 years, it had all the buttons and wires and steering mechanisms before it got vandalized to pieces.
Lots and lots of opportunities for death and mutilation. The best one was to run up the lower wing and jump over the body and allll the way to the edge of the upper wing, which was about 15 feet off the ground.
Nothing matched the thrill of squeezing through the intake tubes (I think thats what they were called.) The day you got totally wedged in there and couldn't get out by yourself until someone saved you by grabbing your ankles and yanking you out is the day you were no longer identified as "a little kid".
And being metal, that thing got to be a jillion degrees on a hot day. We'd start climbing early, and we'd stop when someone touched it and got the first blister of the day.
great post. i feel the same way that kids are being very protected. granted i don't have kids so i obv don't have the same perspective but i remember being younger (i'm 23 now so not *that* old) and being able to walk to the elementary school to play with my friends. my younger sister who is 11 isn't allowed to do that and can only go outside when there's adult supervision. kind of sad how so much has changed in a short amount of time.
I don't have kids living with me but it is sad. I remember growing up & playing outside ALL THE TIME no matter what season…. for hours!
Now, it is so touchy with kids being abducted right & left, traffic, & more. Here in southern CA, it is crazy & plus many homes/townhomes don't even have room for play. But with traffic & who knows what else, I don't know what I would do.
When I jog EARLY on the weekends, cars speed thru stop signs. I jog on the side walk for this one outside jog day!
Our county has aquatics and gymnastics centers where you can sign kids up for classes pretty cheaply ($25 for 8 classes!). The pool has a high dive. When I first saw it, my inital thought really was "Hmm…don't see that too much anymore." Then I found it weird that this is the case.
I do what I can to get my daughter (and soon my son) to get exercise, even if it is just tumbling in the living room. I hate exercising, but I honestly can't wait for her to be a bit older and can get her to do "exercise" with me. It's funny to watch her try to do a push up or sit up right now.
-Joshua
What has happened in this world is a sad, sad thing. Back (wa-a-a-ay back) in MY day, we played outside regardless of the weather, and were allowed to go pretty much anywhere, as long as we were home by supper (and then again after supper, in the summer, we had to be home before dark.)
I am convinced that within another generation, children will think of the great outdoors as something to be feared and avoided at all cost. Which makes me even sadder.
So true! When I was growing up, all of the kids in the neighborhood would run around outside all day long. We'd run or bike from my house to my friend's to another friend's house. We'd walk to school and back. Part of the fun of being a kid was exploring the outdoors around you, seeing what tree would be good for a fort and climbing hills.
I don't have any kids yet, but I can't imagine letting my children run around like that nowadays. I also can't imagine a childhood where you can't just be kids–no grown-ups allowed. That's a the dilemma.
Interesting post. I believe that sometimes you just have to let kids go outside, frolic around, and have fun. Accidents will happen, but this is just part of growing up. Accidents will continue to happen all throughout life, but we grow from them. It's so important to get kids exercising, and outside exercising, and playgrounds in particular are a fun way to encourage this.
We have definitely become wossified!! I guess it happened slowly. When we were kids, most of us got through it OK. I don't know, is it really that different a world, or did we make it that way? Too many lawyers, maybe, with too many lawsuits?
dragonmamma/naomi!
Jealous, jealous, jealous!!!
I love living in the country. Safety is not my major concern when I send my kids outside; it's weather a stray dog might step over our property line, sending my kids into a dog phobia hysteria. (We had a bad experience.) Parks have sand or wood chips, people are safe and friendly, and I know all my neighbors.
Did you read the recent article in TIME about 'free-range parenting?' I'd like to think I fall in this category, because I am what many parents nowadays would call 'negligent' (as in, no shopping cart covers, let her roll on the floor in the food court, and wipe blood off rather than rush to the ER for stitches). But there are certain guidelines that make a parent negligent vs a good parent. I wouldn't let my daughter play outside alone, as we also have no fences, no sidewalks, tons of cars doing 50 in the 25 zone out front, and retaining walls holding up the hills (a fall from which would certainly result in some sort of broken bone).
Luckily her daycare has the kids outside most of the time on fair weather days, and they have a safe fenced-in area. I try to schedule swim lessons and we do a couple trips to playgrounds and the mall playground in the evenings or on weekends each week, but it is tricky trying to have an active child without a safe environment just outside the front door. I do remember playing outside all day with my friends, and I've heard stories of the cops searching for me several times because I disappeared in the cornfields or someone else's basement. Even though I survived, I think there still could have been more parental supervision back then…
Isn't parenting about trudging forward blindly, doing the best you can?
The psychologist Piaget said that, "play is the work of the child." It is a shame that videogames and tv are ways to babysit kids… not only is it contributing to lack of physical activity, its taking away from socialization with other children.
Both my parents worked and thankfully they enrolled me and my sister in a day care center that required playing outside twice a day…if it was raining they had a gym and we would play basketball or 4-square (i loved that game)…during the summer we walked almost a mile to the local pool and had free range to do swim and play for a few hours.
I know it was expensive for that particular day care center. But hopefully working parents can find a center or person within their price range that would offer the same amount of running around (not to mention the exhausted parents wont have to have their children be overly hyper right before bed)…there should also be a rule against the tv being on during the day in such settings…my center only turned it on around 5 (fresh prince of bel air)right before we were picked up for the day.
Read Free Range Kids by Lenore Skenazy, or at least subscribe to the blog! She does a great job of countering the (non-traffic-related) fears out there with real statistics about the likelihood of any of these horrible things happening. Spoiler alert: nothing is more dangerous than driving your kids around in a car.
On the street safety/responsibility front, she does a great job of helping us to remember what we felt like at those ages, and encouraging parents to figure out our kids' levels of confidence and responsibility. An example that I think she gives (or I might be making this up) is how to teach your kid to cross the street. First you model the behavior for several years, holding hands. Then you have the child lead, and test their judgement on when they think it's safe to cross, still holding their hand and maintaining veto power. Then you cross side by side and so on.
After reading this book, my boyfriend and I have been trying to sear into our memories how we felt at certain ages, what we could and did handle. For example, I started babysitting with a parent present at 8, with a parent in the neighborhood and reachable at 10, and on my own at 12. When I see a 12 year old now, I think she looks so little and helpless, but when I remember how I felt at 12, I think I was more than qualified as a caretaker. Sure, there were situations I couldn't handle on my own (and there still are at 22 and probably always will be), but I knew when and who I needed to ask for help. I'm trying to cement those memories before I have a little one and my first, second, and third instincts are to bubble wrap them.
Having kids with special needs makes this issue especially difficult. By the time I was my daughter's age (6), I was out riding my bike by myself or with my friends all over the neighborhood. But, like you say, we had sidewalks, backyards, and adults who looked out for ALL the kids, not just their own. (These days you can't even push another kid on a swing without their parent screeching at you.)
Needless, to say, my kids need constant supervision. I'd like to think we still keep them pretty active, but not as active as we were. And at my daughter's school, there are no swings, no slides, no see-saws. Just one climbing structure and a whole lotta empty space. It's really sad.
I don't have any kids and probably won't for a few years, but I hope when I do that I will be willing to let them take risks and have raised them and set examples so that I trust their judgement. I know, at least intellectually, the world isn't more dangerous today than it was when I was growing up, and I hope I let my kids have the same freedoms my parents granted me when I earned them.
One of my biggest fears when I imagine making the decision of letting a child walk to the other side of the neighborhood alone or play in the yard is other, well-meaning adults. Reading about cases where parents let their middle schoolers go to the mall with their little siblings ending up in court for child neglect and child abandonment is chilling. What a nightmare for the whole family! It seems like you don't just have to overcome your own fears of your children being hurt these days–you also have to prove they are 100% completely safe (impossible with anything) to anyone who might see them or hear about your decision.
I totally struggle with this. I am all for playgrounds and high dives, but I do not feel comfortable with my kids being unattended. Yet as a kid, we were out exploring the woods all day and then after dinner playing flashlight tag or something all over the neighborhood. I think there is a difference between being cautious and being crazy.
Plus I am also a big advocate of survival of the fittest. And I can say this because my children have had their share of accidents. When my daughter fell from the monkey bars and broke her elbow I did not blame faulty equipment. I told her she better get back up there and practice to gain some strength. After the cast was off of course! I think parents baby their kids sometimes and then kids are afraid to be physical themselves. So I would push my kids to try the high dive as long as I am standing right there and if they do a belly flow, well, try again.
The second biggest perk of being a military family (the first being health insurance) is being able to raise my kids "free range" on a military base. My kids are able to have a childhood that is more old school–but not quite as free and active as my own, in Australia.
Living on base means living in a jumbo-sized gated community with armed guards. I don't fear that my kids will be abducted by a stranger. For the most part, military members tend to drive very slowly in the residential areas and neighborhoods have sidewalks. Some bases are better than others for children. Our last base was on a wildlife preserve in California. The back of our house faced the wilderness (complete with coyotes and rattlesnakes!) and my kids were able to build a real fort in the woods. My heart soared with joy over this. Growing up in Australia we were taught how to deal with deadly snakes, crocs, spiders, sharks, undercurrents and jellyfish. It was assumed that we would encounter these dangers at some point and parents would be considered neglectful if they had not equipped their kids with the appropriate survival techniques. Swimming classes were a mandatory part of the curriculum, and we still had recess!
On the other hand, despite being a more free-range parent, I will forever feel pulled in two directions as long as my kids are alive. Last year one of my sons was caught jumping off of a basketball hoop and the roof of an abandoned house with his friends. One of them broke their wrist. This is the same kid I witnessed standing, balancing by just his feet on the top bar of his bike as it was going a very fast rate of speed. We have been to the ER many times for this child who will be driving in 2 years–lump in throat, hairs on back of neck raised. I still let him go on an adventure camp this summer with caving and cliff diving in Wales but I was oh-so-relieved when he came back in one piece.
Also, dragonmama, I too am so jealous. Thank you for sharing, I almost feel like I was there.
Bubble wrapped my 2 and proud of it. They had a nanny during the day to watch them play both indoors and out and then after work we would take them out to the court to play with all the other kids in the neighborhood. They ran around, rode bikes, we drew cities with sidewalk chalk, spent our weekends at the poo, …
When we moved out to the country, things got tougher. I did not let them ride their bikes without us because of the windy roads, no sidewalks and crazy drivers but just rode with them. They were only allowed to play outside without us if I could see them from a window (we live in Northern Virgina and moved out to the country just after the DC sniper so I got even more paranoid). We did support any sport they wanted to try (both with equipment and our time coaching and team parenting) – we tried ice hockey, squash, soccer, gymnastics, field hockey, tennis, volleyball, swimming, basketball, softball, rock climbing, target shooting, lacrosse and I am sure I am missing a few. I have the garage full of equipment to prove it and ultimately they found sports they loved and were good at.
To keep them active now, we limit TV (which isn't hard given how little free time they have), they both play sports year round and we do active things together (hiking, biking, canoeing). They see my husband and I working out so they even do weights once in a while.
Over protective – I have been called that – but I think we have been a good example for them – you can't just tell them to be active, you need to be active with them and without them (that whole actions speak louder than words thing).
VaMomof2 – I'd have loved to have a parent to do all that with when I was a kid – I'm jealous 🙂
And I think you're right – children pick up on what parents do more than what they say. What a wonderful example you're setting.
My brothers thought the cat could fly. They dropped it out the (2nd floor) window to see. After the second time they did that, the cat got fed up and moved down a few houses to live with the neighbors.
Moral: little kids. Don't trust 'em.
Did you see The Onion today?
New Study Reveals Most Children Unrepentant Sociopaths:
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/new_study_reveals_most_children
My kids are now 18, 20, 22 and 24 but they grew up in a small town here in PA. I didn't have any qualms about letting them go outside to play by themselves – our neighbors were mostly my husband's family (great aunts & uncles) with a few "strangers" mixed in. We had no sidewalks so they rode their bikes on the street in front of our house. They would play in our yard, garage and great grandma's yard. They knew where they were allowed to be or how far they could travel from the house. There were very few children within our block but they had each other to play with and they grew up with great imaginations because we didn't have a TV for them to sit in front of.
We took a boy in for 10 weeks that wasn't from this area and he grew up with video games and TV. He didn't know how to entertain himself without these things. He didn't know how to play outside which to me is a shame.
Yes, today there is more of a fear of pedophiles but I believe there can still be a balance of allowing kids the freedoms of being kids, it just has to be up to the parent to help find or create that balance.
I think it is a serious problem nowadays knowing what to do for the best and being a good parent. I think the secret is just to be sensible and not obsessive about safety.