My brother who lives in California, USA, told me recently they’ve taken the swings out of their local park. Too dangerous, you see, so they’re banned. How do you outlaw swings? Really. Explain to me how you outlaw swings. If swings are so evil as to need to be outlawed (like genocide or rape) why didn’t the human race die out a million years ago when swinging through the trees was the way we got around? But while the human race may be subsisting in spite of them, the outlawing of swings is another sad chapter in the long slow demise of childhood.
Merry-go-rounds and striders (those Maypole like affairs with chains and handles hanging down for us to grasp, run full tilt, fling ourselves skyward, and twirl through the air suspended 5 or more feet off the ground – man, I loved those things!) began disappearing years ago. Then seesaws. Now it’s swings. Oh, and tag. That’s a no-no too. “None of that running about and tagging each other, kids. Someone’s going to get hurt. (More likely mamma’s willing to or the school board’s afraid of being sued!) And frogs, don’t touch them; they carry disease or they’re endangered (and heaven knows you can’t be trusted not to kill it!) And don’t climb that tree, you’ll fall, and …” There are those who take away or limit the very things kids do because they’re kids and then complain about how inactive kids are nowadays. No wonder kids are stuck in virtual reality; the overbearing, cowardly grown-ups have decided “real” reality’s too difficult for them to handle.
Don’t people realize that if we take swings away, they’ll just find something else to swing on? If kids aren’t allowed to play cops and robbers with toy guns they’ll just find something else to use as a weapon? (Their fingers if they have too!) If grown-ups don’t let kids catch frogs (or salamanders or slugs or any number of other creepy crawlers), they’ll never develop a sense of wonder and delight and responsibility for the littler fellows of the earth. We can preach caring for the earth all we want, but unless we let them actually touch it when they’re most fascinated by it, it will only become for them a dead concept, a thing of text and boredom. Who can really care about a thing, deep down and most passionately, and actually do what’s right for a thing, if they’ve never really come to know it? Who’s going to believe jumping off the roof can hurt, if they’ve never had the jarring, knee-grinding experience of jumping off the porch?
I know some kids who built their own seesaw from an ancient tree trunk and a 10 ‘ fence pole. They’re the kids who, when the swing broke, rigged up one of their own. They’ve built a two story wooden fort and sit on top of it throwing snowballs at one another in the winter and water balloons in the summer. They found a baby mouse and fed it every hour around the clock and raised it till its fur came in and it opened its eyes and could go out on its own. They’re also the kids who climb rocks in the creek and the trees in the park (often to dizzying heights) and as a jovial horde play capture the flag and soccer until dusk, without the benefit (?) of adult supervision. Are they dead yet? No. A few scrapes and bruises. I’m sure there will be the eventual broken bone. But they don’t run in the street, they don’t talk to strangers (unless they do it 5 or 10 to 1!), and they don’t need a bunch of overbearing grown-ups over-organizing their lives for them.
These kids are careful because the adults in their lives were watchful without panicking when they were small and have advised without dictating when they were older. As a result the kids have had enough smaller, painful experiences to know their own limitations and to develop a healthy respect for physics and the advice of the adults. They’re more enthusiastic about life and more cautious and more attentive to adults than their overly protected, controlled, and coddled compatriots are, those poor wraithlike children who have no respect for the real limitations of their abilities because they’ve never had the chance to experience them for themselves.
If you let kids try things when they’re fairly young they’re less likely to hurt themselves seriously when they’re older. (Little people are a lot closer to the ground so they’ve less distance to fall and, weighing less, are less affected by gravity!) The only way for kids to grow up well is for them to be allowed to try to manage for themselves (with only minimal adult engagement) the difficult or scary things that come across their paths. If not, when they get out on their own in the real world, where the knocks are harder and the boogey man is real, they’ll not only be resentful, they’ll either get eaten alive or become vicious* themselves.
Magdalen
© Magdalen Jago 2008
See the previous post “Despondency as Crabgrass: Fortitude (II)” for a discourse on the result of quashing childhood bravura.
Several good articles about playgrounds and the ridiculous over-regulation of recreation in the US: http://commongood.org/f-recreation.html
An article discussing the issue in the US and UK:
http://www.madisonrecord.com/arguments/210878-outlawing-fun—-have-our-courts-gone-too-far
Howard P. Chudacoff of Brown University has written about children’s play and grown-up intrusiveness. See “Children at Play: An American History”. (NYU Press, OCT 2008.)
“Adults don’t trust children the way they used to. They don’t trust children to play on their own or make their own way,” he said. “But the ways in which a child develops their self-esteem and cultivates their imagination often comes by doing things by himself or herself and keeping adults at a distance without interference.” Howard P. Chudacoff
*The word “vicious” has the sense of “full of spite, bitter, severe”, in use in this way from @ 1825. See www.etymonline.com for a more complete and fascinating history of the term.
[...] can read the rest of this blog post by going to the original source, here [...]