Yep.
I don't want to start over with midnight feedings and lack of sleep and breastfeeding, or chasing toddlers around all day. Egads. I never want to do that again, thanks. I'd like to start over from when my kids were five, maybe six.
I just read "Hey! Parents, Leave Those Kids Alone" by Hanna Rosin in The Atlantic (April 2014).
She features a playground in Wales called "The Land." It looks like a junkyard where kids play with fire. Literally. Check out the video in the article. My daughter, the future lawyer, asked, "Is this place insured?"
Back in the 1970s when I was growing up, kids had more freedom to explore and take risks than kids do today. We didn't have quite as much freedom as the kids in the video, but we had significantly more than my kids. One parent interviewed for the article estimated that his child was probably unsupervised for maybe 10 minutes in his child's first ten years of life. My kids are probably more in the two hour range of total time unsupervised before age 10. And I am not talking about the countless times they were in the backyard and I was in the house cooking dinner, a shout away from helping them in case of disaster.
Back in the 1970s when I was growing up, kids had more freedom to explore and take risks than kids do today. We didn't have quite as much freedom as the kids in the video, but we had significantly more than my kids. One parent interviewed for the article estimated that his child was probably unsupervised for maybe 10 minutes in his child's first ten years of life. My kids are probably more in the two hour range of total time unsupervised before age 10. And I am not talking about the countless times they were in the backyard and I was in the house cooking dinner, a shout away from helping them in case of disaster.
How many minutes were you unsupervised before you were ten? I can't count that high. It would add up to days or weeks, or maybe even months. I was dropped off at the community center for dance classes on Saturday morning and given a quarter to call when it was time for my parents to pick me up in the afternoon. I had three classes over the course of six hours. When I wasn't in class, I would roam around the community center with the other girls. My parents gave me $2 in coins and I ate tons of crap out of the vending machine. My favorite candy bar was the Whatchamacallit. When I was in second grade, I was riding my bike around the neighborhood. I saw groups of boys playing unorganized baseball in the school parking lot. After school, kids would walk around the neighborhood and find someone to play with. My brother and I roamed the Disney World campus alone when I was in seventh grade and he was in fifth. We were gone for hours, riding a boat from Fort Wilderness and then catching the monorail at the Contemporary Hotel. I was a full fledged babysitter when I was 12. I earned enough money to pay for a field trip to France in middle school. Twice.
How is this constant supervision good for kids? Does it help them develop into strong, independent and resilient adults? Probably not. According to the article, Millennials have greater rates of depression, narcissism and a lack of empathy, and more college kids are taking psychiatric medication. Kids' test scores on the Torrence Tests of Creative Thinking have declined across the past decade.
I need a minute to get over my depression. I'll be back.
So what do kids need? According to the article, Ellen Sandseter, an early education professor, says kids "have a sensory need to taste danger and excitement; this doesn't mean that what they do has to actually be dangerous, only that the feel they are taking great risk. That scares them, but then they overcome the fear." (p. 80, April 2014.) She says there are six types of risky play.
- Exploring Heights. Let kids climb trees. Daughter is taking rock climbing classes.
- Handling Dangerous Tools. Thank you, UW Summer Day Camp, for teaching the Boy how to use a hot glue gun. And John taught the Boy to wax the skis today.
- Being Near Dangerous Elements. This means large bodies of water, like an ocean, or near fire.
- Rough-and-Tumble Play. I totally fail at letting my kids do this.
- Speed. Cycling and Skiing at speeds that feel too fast. This one is done. Check.
- Exploring on one's own. I let the kids walk the dog around the neighborhood. Once, Daughter wore her slinky Halloween costume down to UW. I found out where she went when I checked my phone's "Map My Walk" app. This was before she had her own phone.
I started thinking about point 3 and fire. When I was a kid, we used to go camping almost every weekend in the summer. Every camping trip, we had a fire. While my parents were setting up the site, my brother and I would look for kindling. Once everything was set up, my parents got firewood and my mom started the fire. On a YMCA Indian Princess campout when I was six, I put a hot marshmallow roasting stick near my mouth. I had a blister on my upper lip for a week. I still have a tiny scar.
And not all of the efforts to keep kids safe have been horrible. My husband is a pediatrician who frequently witnesses freakish accidents that can happen to kids, and as a result, he tends to be pretty strict when it comes to safety. Seat belts and car seats have protected kids much better than when I was kid. I remember going to the library as a kid. My mom or some other mom would pack six or seven kids in a car, two in the front seat and four or five in the back, squashed on top of each other and sitting on each others laps, no one wearing a seat belt. One drunk guy running a red light could have sent us all flying.
As I read this list, I begin to wonder. Sometimes it is hard to be the trail-blazer letting your kids back into the woods by themselves, when no other parent is letting their kid do the same. Perhaps I am more fearful of Lord of the Flies type behavior where the kids hurt each other than I am of them getting lost or hassled by a stranger. While I certainly wish my kids were a little more free-range, maybe I am not as lame as I think I am. I should write about my adrenaline junkie husband and our trip to Whistler last summer. Zip lining across the Fitzsimmons Creek at some ungodly height on a line that was more than a mile long was one of our adventures. Mountain biking down a real mountain, where you had to gear up with a motorcycle type helmet with stormtrooper gear. White water rafting. And climbing the Grouse Grind. All of these activities came with multi-page safety disclosures and release agreements. I have to admit I would have been happier biking along a trail or canoeing. Oh well. I suppose that is why there are fathers. Thanks, Jack, for keeping the kids on the edge.
And not all of the efforts to keep kids safe have been horrible. My husband is a pediatrician who frequently witnesses freakish accidents that can happen to kids, and as a result, he tends to be pretty strict when it comes to safety. Seat belts and car seats have protected kids much better than when I was kid. I remember going to the library as a kid. My mom or some other mom would pack six or seven kids in a car, two in the front seat and four or five in the back, squashed on top of each other and sitting on each others laps, no one wearing a seat belt. One drunk guy running a red light could have sent us all flying.
As I read this list, I begin to wonder. Sometimes it is hard to be the trail-blazer letting your kids back into the woods by themselves, when no other parent is letting their kid do the same. Perhaps I am more fearful of Lord of the Flies type behavior where the kids hurt each other than I am of them getting lost or hassled by a stranger. While I certainly wish my kids were a little more free-range, maybe I am not as lame as I think I am. I should write about my adrenaline junkie husband and our trip to Whistler last summer. Zip lining across the Fitzsimmons Creek at some ungodly height on a line that was more than a mile long was one of our adventures. Mountain biking down a real mountain, where you had to gear up with a motorcycle type helmet with stormtrooper gear. White water rafting. And climbing the Grouse Grind. All of these activities came with multi-page safety disclosures and release agreements. I have to admit I would have been happier biking along a trail or canoeing. Oh well. I suppose that is why there are fathers. Thanks, Jack, for keeping the kids on the edge.
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| Full squish mountain biking |
But I did get them a dog. I should get some points for that.
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