Absolutely. I also think it’s important for kids to learn from their mistakes a bit, and a skinned knee or a bloody lip is a good way to learn your limits. But we cocoon these kids in plastic safety gear, and they never learn those lessons.
Mind you, we had some really, really stupid things going on when I was a kid. For example - my school’s playground was embedded in concrete. We had monkey bars, a 9 foot slide, and other playground equipment with bleemin’ concrete under them. Idiotic. But here’s some real fun: In the winter, the concrete would freeze over when the snow melted. So now it was rock hard AND slippery. So what did we kids used to do? We’d being our sunday shoes to class - the ones with the hard soles, and we’d ‘skate’ around the playground area. Most fun of all? Going down the slide on your FEET (crouching), hitting the pavement, and seeing how far you could slide. This of course meant that we were climbing up a slide in ice-coated hard-soled shoes. There were injuries galore - the most serious I remember was a kid who was standing on the top of the slide when his feet went out from under him and he went over the side and fell nine feet onto the concrete. Ambulance took him away, and I don’t remember the outcome.
Of course, sometimes the ice at the bottom of the slide would wear out into a dry patch, and the first kid to discover that would go ass over teakettle on the concrete. Lots of chipped teeth and banged up noses.
But of course, now the schools have gone completely safety mad. There are no merry-go-rounds left in this city. The safety nazis got them all eliminated. likewise slides. Gone. Playgrounds aren’t even on grass any more - they’re built in sand pits (this one’s a good idea).
I understand the choking hazards. As DMark said, supersafe toys are best for you kids. The battle weapon though…WTF? It’s a plastic sword. So what if the kid gets a few bumps and bruises? It’s part of life. Heck, when I was a kid (which wasn’t long ago) most of us didn’t have plastic swords. Instead, we just found a few sticks lying around and used those. Oh great, now I sound old.
I don’t get the rocks under the equipment at the playgroud. It hurts just as much, if not more, to land on a pile of small rocks as it does to land on dirt or grass. One piece of equipment at my elementary school used to have pavement uderneath with rubber mats on top. They replaced that with rocks. I didn’t get this when I was 5, I don’t understand it now.
It is so depressing for me to go back to my old elementary school. They took away everything that wasn’t plastic or metal. All the wood is gone - we used to have climbing things with the wood, and most of the structures of the equipment like tire swings were wood. Oh yeah, they took the tires away too. And put wood chips under the new jungle gyms. We used to have a trolley at the top of the dirt hill - one of those things on a metal cord that you grabbed onto with both hands and slid down. You would have landed in the ditch, with snakes and barbed wire. grins They took that away when I was really young.
In July, 1969, I was four and a half years old. My Mom, then pregnant with my sister, took me to the park to swing. Dad had been coaching me on the proper swinging technique - extending legs and pointing toes going forward, and sitting up with bended knees as I swayed back.
On this particular day the lesson “took”, it made sense, I got it! Hands gripping the chains, I leaned back, then sat up, creating my own momentum.
It immediately occurred to me that with my hands up high, I couldn’t lean back very far and didn’t go very fast. So I lowered my hands on the next extension. Went faster. Mom was walking to the bench, her back to me, as I continued my experiment. I dropped my hands further and picked up more speed. Lowered them again and leaned back. Went faster still. With a sense of delight and mastery, I put my hands on the seat itself and leaned back.
I spent 8 days in the hospital with a fractured skull, three of them in a semi-coma.
I totally concur that we’ve gone a little crazy with over-protecting kids against a lot of toys that we had fun with as kids.
But that Pocket Rocket? Scares the shit out of me. Because not three days ago, I was tootling down my street a few blocks from my house, fortunately well within the 20-mph speed limit, when a kid no older than 8 on one of those mini-crotch rockets came zooming right at me out of nowhere as his father stood watching proudly down the street. The kid did slow down at the sight of me – but was so wobbly on the damn thing, swerving back and forth trying to control it, that I ended up crawling past him at about 1 mph so he couldn’t still manage to throw himself in front of my vehicle. I have never in my life come so close to leaning out the window and yelling at a parent for allowing his child to do something that unbelievably stupid and dangerous.
Those things are so low to the ground that had I not been driving very slowly (because we do have some young kids around who sometimes aren’t as well supervised as I would like), it’s very likely I simply would not have seen him until he was flattened under my tires. And I drive far slower than the majority of people who cruise up and down this street; that kid and his bike are a death statistic waiting to happen.
I am ready to urge my legislators to ban the damn things in this state. How many kids will have to die before they do?
You realize the product would be perfectly safe if Daddy-O wasn’t a completely irresponsible boob allowing his far too young child to ride a powered vehicle in traffic. I had a gas powered dirt bike when I was 8, and knew damn well not to go in the road.
The same sort of nonsense can happen with a Big Wheel, if you don’t teach your kids to use it right.
On a vehicle designed to be ridden in the street? Not much chance the kid’s going to be riding that anywhere else any time soon. Yeah, Dad’s a boob. But it was as much the kid’s utter inability to control the thing that alarmed me as its frighteningly low profile.
The really serious damage is caused by how fast your body comes to a stop when it hits the ground. The idea behind the little pebbles (and wood chips) is that your body hits the pebbles and loses energy as you drive deeper into the pile. You decelerate over a longer distance. Rubber mats help prevent chipped teeth from small falls, but do not prevent broken legs from big falls, as they just don’t have enough flex room to provide a slow deceleration.
Of course, in practice it only takes a couple of years of non-maintenance for the pebbles to become embedded in tracked in dirt and form a nice ineffective dirt/pebble hardpack.
And regular dirt in a playground is usually packed as hard as concrete by all the feet pounding over it. Landing in dirt would be fine if you were landing in a nice well tilled garden.
I agree that playground safety has really gone overboard. Logical changes like using the pebble base is fine, but getting rid of teeter totters and merry-go-rounds? Gah. Kid that can’t survive Merry go rounds gonna have a reaaaall tough time in life. Now I will gloat as to how our local park still has the only merry go round in a 3 county area. HA!
Well, where did you use those roller skates? Outside. The carpet skates were designed to be used INDOORS, which, with all the hazards everywhere and the much more limited space, is arguably a lot more dangerous to skate in.
Goddamn safety Nazi’s {mutter, grumble}. Gotta love the quote: “Founder Edward M. Swartz and W.A.T.C.H. have fearlessly {bolding mine} exposed potentially dangerously toys to the general public.”
FEARLESSLY? Fearless of what? Hired assassins from the ruthless Mattell overlords who will stop at nothing to protect their market share? Hordes of frenzied 12 year olds, crazed with blood-lust after being denied their Pocket Rocket Miniature Motorcycles? {Sorry, Johnny, we were going to get you one, but, well, W.A.T.C.H have said they’re dangerous and we’re not to get one.} Sanctimonious grandstanding killjoys.
I managed to injure myself plenty when I was a kid just by falling out of trees {broken arm}, putting firecrackers in glass jars and attempting to screw the lid on really quickly {scratched cornea}, and skidding my old rat-bike {sans handle-grips} in gravel {Circular scar the size of a 50 cent piece on my thigh}. To quote Lance Murdoch, “Bones heal. Chicks dig scars.”
Remember when all the playground slides were made of metal and on a hot day you would burn your butt and legs sliding down this Burning Incline of Death screaming the entire way " Ow ow ow ow!" and then you would get off, run around and queue right up all over again with your friends who were burning their butts as well.
And the Merry Go Rounds that were Certain Arm & Leg Breakers if you should perchance have a bigger classmate with the strength of two orangutangs spin you and your entire class at Mach 97 and random bodies would fly off in the not-OSHA grass/mud near by.
Yeahhhhh, what a rush that was.
Good times.
The funny thing is, now all the playgrounds have eliminated seesaws and hot metal slides and those cool animals on springs and merry-go-rounds and all…
but when I was a kid, the only serious injuries I knew of that happened on playground eqipment were on the swings. Playgrounds still have swings. :smack:
Actually, I can’t think of any kids I knew as a child who broke their arms on anything but jumping off the damned swings. Except one who jumped off the roof, which is your natural selection right there.
Well admittedly, it’s easier than toilet training. After the second or third demonstration, they’re ready to solo. Then you just get the feeling of pride as they smash the balls as hard as they can.
I can’t believe I made it through this entire thread without running into the other room to duct tape my kid inside of a cubic assload of foam. :eek:
Falling nine feet on frozen concrete?! Fractured skull from the swingset? AAAIIEEE!!!
I took care of a 10 year old girl several months ago (i’m a pediatric nurse), who, after months and months of begging for one, got in an accident the very day she got one. The driver of a car couldn’t see her. She was being supervised by parents too.
/rant/I’ve lost count of the messed up kids I’ve seen and the dumb-ass parents who let their kids ride shit like this. Hey! Wait until they’re fucking OLDER! Because they may not get any older if you let them ride this crap! \end rant\