For your own good!

Good article. They're also becoming selfish, lazy and entitled kids. You can't protect your children from everything. Like the article said, they have to learn personal responsibility by taking risks, failing and adapting.

We need to quit the coddling and start showing them what the real world is made of.
 
I hate how a large current that moves society along is fear. Fear of being sued, and fear of the unknown, being primary.
 
My kid has free roam basically. He knows where he is not allowed and sticks to it pretty well. I always have an eye on him but if he wants to go climb a tree or swing on the clothesline he can go hard.

With more crime etc people are getting paranoid about letting kids be kids.
 
Yeah. About what SP said, this article is suggesting that kids aren't learning to be active and fun/awesome because the risk being taken out of the equation. So the article is more about parenting. My parents were/are kind of safety freaks.
 
I grew up doing risky, sometimes dumb **** on a daily basis, and I never killed myself. I did exactly what they were talking about in the article. I learned how to manage risk and how to go about situations. It seems silly to relate climbing a tree to that, but it really does have that effect. Jeez, I maybe watched an hour a week of TV.
 
Those merry go rounds were scary. I remember being on them and I thought it was hilarious to spin until you could hang off the side and fly in mid air. One thing I learned early was that the bike and I are not friends. I slammed my face like 20 times, and my tricycle one spun out of control down this hill in Korea.

I heard recently they banned rolling down the hill at our state park. I guess they don't want people to vomit.

As for risk takers, I think it's sort of true, but then again, a lot of stuff on the playground are not exactly safe. I'm pretty sure a lot of parents when they were younger played on some of the equipments on the playground only to be injured by it and then when they have children, they probably already know the risks so they tell them not to. I mean if I had children, I probably wouldn't let them play with a bike down a hill only because of my own personal experience with it.
 
The tree climbing thing is what I noticed most - when I was little we could climb trees everywhere, but by third grade you couldn't climb at the park, couldn't climb at school, pretty much to climb a tree you had to be sneaky or find one in your own yard. So then we'd climb up on top of the monkey bars, and that was a no-no as well. Pretty much the only activity left by the time I was in fifth grade was four square.

My sister is younger than me and grew up in the "no climbing no running" era and she weighs almost 300lbs. At 16 she had already used knee braces and has back and ankle problems. America makes me sigh. Didn't it used to be like a standard to have had a broken arm by the time you were 12? Right of passage.
 
Ha.. well I have never broken a bone. That being said I had lacerations, sprains, bruises, and ruined clothing. We lived in a small town and spent most of the time running around in the woods. Things are different these days as I will not let my daughter have as much freedom as I had. But that is due to the loss of the small town atmosphere where everyone knew everyone and would reprimand and local kid they saw doing something bad or just stupid. They would protect and guard, at least to some extent, other kids in the town. That being said if my daughter wants to roll down a hill in a tire or climb a tree .... go for it. I will have the car started and the ER isnt that far away ;)
 
I fear raising my 3 kids with this type of crap going on. We are just going to get softer and softer as a nation.
 
Kids today suck.

I remember living in Germany, and I was 6 years old and I'd leave the house 7 in the morning with my bike and hang out with my friends, sometimes traveling miles away from our homes and we wouldn't come back till it started getting dark. And also playing cops and robbers in the apartment complex and all that other good fun stuff kids used to do. I used to get into so much trouble.

Kids today are ****ies. All they do is watch TV.
 
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