Article: The Overprotected Kid (The Atlantic, April 2014)

[Originally posted on Facebook, 3 Oct 2015.]

A longish article, but really worth a close read!

1. "Free outdoor play"...three taboo words in Singapore's education landscape
2. I wouldn't mind calling myself a 'playworker'. Much sexier than 'experiential learning facilitator'...

Other excerpts:

1. "The idea was that kids should face what to them seem like “really dangerous risks” and then conquer them alone. That, (Lady Marjory Allen of Hurtwood) said, is what builds self-confidence and courage."
2. "Here’s the list of benefits for fire: “It can be a social experience to sit around with friends, make friends, to sing songs to dance around, to stare at, it can be a co-operative experience where everyone has jobs. It can be something to experiment with, to take risks, to test its properties, its heat, its power, to re-live our evolutionary past.” The risks? “Burns from fire or fire pit” and “children accidentally burning each other with flaming cardboard or wood.” In this case, the benefits win, because a playworker is always nearby, watching for impending accidents but otherwise letting the children figure out lessons about fire on their own."
3. “The name of the playground game will continue to be Russian roulette, with the child as unsuspecting victim,” [Theodora Briggs Sweeney] wrote in a 1979 paper published in Pediatrics."
4. Wrote a reader to the Chicago Tribune in 1985: "Do accidents happen anymore? …Can a mother take the risk of taking her young child up to the top of a tornado slide, with every good intention, and have an accident? Who is responsible for a child in a park, the park district or the parent? … Swings hit 1-year-old children in the head, I’m sure with dire consequences in some instances. Do we eliminate swings?"
5. "...park departments all over [the USA] began removing equipment newly considered dangerous, partly because they could not afford to be sued, especially now that a government handbook could be used by litigants as proof of standards that parks were failing to meet. In anticipation of lawsuits, insurance premiums skyrocketed... the cultural understanding of acceptable risk began to shift, such that any known risk became nearly synonymous with hazard."
6. "At the core of the safety obsession is a view of children that is the exact opposite of Lady Allen’s, “an idea that children are too fragile or unintelligent to assess the risk of any given situation,” argues Tim Gill, the author of No Fear, a critique of our risk-averse society. “Now our working assumption is that children cannot be trusted to find their way around tricky physical or social and emotional situations.”"
7. "Children, [Ellen Sandseter] 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. That scares them, but then they overcome the fear."
8. "Even today, growing up is a process of managing fears and learning to arrive at sound decisions. By engaging in risky play, children are effectively subjecting themselves to a form of exposure therapy, in which they force themselves to do the thing they’re afraid of in order to overcome their fear. But if they never go through that process, the fear can turn into a phobia."
9. "The advent of all these special surfaces for playgrounds has contributed very little, if anything at all, to the safety of children,” [David Ball] told me. Ball has found some evidence that long-bone injuries, which are far more common than head injuries, are actually increasing. The best theory for that is “risk compensation”—kids don’t worry as much about falling on rubber, so they’re not as careful, and end up hurting themselves more often. The problem, says Ball, is that “we have come to think of accidents as preventable and not a natural part of life.
10. "Failure to supervise has become, in fact, synonymous with failure to parent. The result is a “continuous and ultimately dramatic decline in children’s opportunities to play and explore in their own chosen ways,” writes Peter Gray, a psychologist at Boston College."
11. "In his essay, Gray highlights the work of Kyung-Hee Kim, an educational psychologist at the College of William and Mary and the author of the 2011 paper “The Creativity Crisis.” Kim has analyzed results from the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking and found that American children’s scores have declined steadily across the past decade or more. The data show that children have become: less emotionally expressive, less energetic, less talkative and verbally expressive, less humorous, less imaginative, less unconventional, less lively and passionate, less perceptive, less apt to connect seemingly irrelevant things, less synthesizing, and less likely to see things from a different angle. The largest drop, Kim noted, has been in the measure of “elaboration,” or the ability to take an idea and expand on it in a novel way."
12. "But the real cultural shift has to come from parents. There is a big difference between avoiding major hazards and making every decision with the primary goal of optimizing child safety (or enrichment, or happiness). We can no more create the perfect environment for our children than we can create perfect children. To believe otherwise is a delusion, and a harmful one; remind yourself of that every time the panic rises."