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How to be a risk taker AND know your limits
I watched an interesting segment on 60 minutes last night about school children.
I expect that NZ is in a much better situation than some countries (After hearing a American friend of mums delighting over the fact the term ‘playgrounds’ in NZ still seems to refer to a place where people PLAY rather than sit in boredom on things that are so safe they numb your brain just to see)… But we’re not that great.
Most of my generation remembers the good old days when split lips, broken legs and bruised knees were a part of our daily routine. Yes it hurt when you fell off those metal bars, but boy was it fun to hang upside down on them. These days, there is hardly a metal bar in sight. It’s the same with all children’s toys these days. We used to give a kid a metal ‘jungle gym’ or some lego blocks and leave them to it. Now we only offer them toys and playgrounds that we have made so thoroughly safe and specked to such a high degree that they literally only have ONE purpose. And that purpose loses your interest after about 2.5 minutes.
The theory of this woman was that children should be allowed to get hurt, but not broken. And by broken, she means permanently damaged. Allowing a child to hurt themselves teaches them an important lesson about knowing their limits while taking risks.
Unfortunately, you can’t avoid all risks and sometimes, when you relax on the safety front, kids do get permanently broken or even killed.
Which left me asking the following questions:
Do we cotton wool ourselves to the extreme in order to stay alive the longest, or do we remove the cotton wool and really LIVE?
What is going to happen to a generation of children who have not been left to explore the limits of what they can do and try to push beyond them? My mum tells me stories of the linkage between learning to crawl and having legible handwriting and there are plenty more examples of necessary developments we have to make in order to ensure other things go well in the future. Our brains simply are not MEANT to be protected while they grow. They are meant to grow freely.
How can we create this ideal world where all children have the ability to play to their limits within reason? Is this more or less important than the fact that some children get sent to school without lunch? Given that we have a limit on funds, is it best to tackle the ‘hierarchy of needs’ on order or is missing one of these vital ‘high level’ needs going to make the entire system crumble?
Is attacking this a ‘nice to have’ or a fundamental to ensuring that our next batch of children grow up as the innovative risk takers we need them to be in order for our country to move further away from farming and into the ‘knowledge economy’?
September 16th, 2008 at 5:48 pm
I dunno, I think kids should play outside more, be less scared of strangers and use their imagination and play with each other more.
My friend Rissa was bobbing around in the lagoon outside their house at the age of 4 - much to her mums concern - but rissa was happy as larry swimming around.
:D
September 16th, 2008 at 7:17 pm
I’m certainly against the cotton wool. But then you’d expect that — I ride a motorcycle in Wellington traffic every day and fly sometimes hundreds of km in a tiny aeroplane that doesn’t even have an engine.
Growing up on a farm helped a lot. I started “driving” tractors (steering around a paddock in low gear while dad was on the trailer on the back scattering bales of hay, with a bit of string attached to the engine stop knob just in case) at 5 or 6, and by 12 was entirely capable of being given instructions such as “take the post driver off the Leyland and put the hay mower on and go around to the Smith’s and mow the 3rd paddock on the right”.
September 16th, 2008 at 9:08 pm
Well now the fact I have terrible hand writing all makes sense! Blame it on mum for limiting my crawling..? Or perhaps my two big sisters!
I’m also against the cotton woolness. Let them experiment while their bodies are built to bounce and repair quickly - and while they are still so close to the ground!
People complain kids spend too much time in front of the TV and playing with video games… then go and restrict outside activities more and more! I can easily imagine what kind of adults a lot of these kids will turn out to be like….
September 17th, 2008 at 11:27 am
Brooke and I actually discussed your handwriting and were excited that we now know WHY its so bad :)
I can’t really say much more on the subject - my mum still shakes when she remembers the time I ran across a 4 lane highway in the US when I was 4… Never been too good at knowing my limits ;)
September 23rd, 2008 at 2:10 pm
My parents were always pretty good with letting me hit my limit, although my mother actually cried when I jumped off a 4 story building into a ninja roll at the age of 6.
I was born at a time long after the rest of you and grew up during the period where good playgrounds were being knocked down with the multicoloured low level monstrosities replacing them. I think that children just need to be encouraged to use their imaginations while playing and then they won’t even require the playgrounds. I learnt that a tall tree can be the mast of a ship, a roof can be a helipad of a high-rise building and an umbrella can be a parachute while playing at a school that didn’t allow you to climb a tree, get on the roofs or bring the deadly weapon that is the umbrella. I think I turned out ok.
I think the cotton wool is bad and gets in the way of childrens development, but only if it extends to the home. Then again I was bought up learning my limits (or that I have none) and have had 3 concussions this year alone… So maybe we just have to convince kids the limits are closer than they actually are? Maybe we convince them that we aren’t indestructible up until the age of 30?