It seems that as time goes on we were living more and more haphazardly back in the day.
A safety article at work titled “Getting Ready for Fall” advised that children should not play in piles of leaves unless they were under close adult supervision because they “may be injured by hazards hidden in or under a leaf pile.” WTF? Did they pile the leaves on live WWII mortars that were lying in the yard? Did someone through used needles in it? When I was a kid we were just sure we didn’t pile them on dog crap and then jumped from the tree. I’m planning on doing the same with my kids.
Last winter the radio advised that kids wear helmets when sledding. My safety plan was to make sure there weren’t any trees nearby. I recall the most fun part was bailing out of the sled just so you could somersault the rest of the way down the hill.
Am I being too reckless in regards to my kid’s safety and don’t realize it?
Is anyone else finding out that by today’s standards they were defying death with every activity?
Back in the day when Mother stayed at home and Dad wore hats, a couple might have 5 or more kids. If you lost one or two to dangerous fun then the others learned a good lesson. Nowdays, with couples having fewer children and more of those children growing up to be lawyers, it’s gotten to the point that it takes real effort and ingenuity for kids to recklessly kill themselves.
I’m not sure if this is just my perspective, but this all seems to have started in about 1980. Shortly after that I noticed that everything kids had was made out of brightly colored plastic. That was also the first time I noticed cops being around when schools let out. It was a different world than the one I grew up in.
You would enjoy reading the work of Lenore Skenazy. She famously put her 9-year-old son on the NYC subwayto get home on his own. Because he really, really wanted to do it. She wrote a book called Free Range Kids, and the link above is to her web site with the same name.
The world hasn’t changed. Kids haven’t changed. But for some reason parents have gotten completely neurotic.
The more affluent the society, the more it fosters an ideology which refuses to accept simple misfortune. Once it has eliminated disease in the water supply, power failures, bedbugs, etc., accidents can no longer occur without there being some kind of agency we can attach to them. So the kid cannot just get bumped by something in the pile of leaves–he must have been injured because of an unsafe condition, to which we can attribute some kind of negligence or errant action.
The result is a not just an extremely litigious society, but one that is terrified because it persists to terrify itself with the unlimited possibilities of misfortune–of bad luck, really. Things that have simply always happened as a matter of course–things that will continue to happen–(child molesters, pot holes, tainted food)–become less and less acts of God and more and more objects of new legislation, new parental safety measures, ever more security devices for sale on the market, and more and more news at 11:00 in search of someone to blame.
I don’t have an issue with wearing helmets while sledding - it’s a sensible precaution, and doesn’t affect a kid’s enjoyment of the activity. The leaves thing is stupid, though.
A lot of it is that information of all kinds is more available, faster - almost instant - and more comprehensive (meaning, stuff outside your little village). So when one kid smashes in his skull while sledding, for example, it’s not just that one family that knows. Instead, it makes it into news reports, etc. and a whole bunch of parents get concerned. The doctor who worked the ER shift trying to save the kid might go to an Internet message board to vent about kids not wearing helmets while sledding, and suddenly, parents half a world away are reading it and getting concerned.
Heh. We were helping my 5 year old girl climb a tree in the park the other day. “But what if I fall?” she asked.
“Then it’ll hurt. And you get to try again,” I said.
The looks from the other moms were priceless. You’d have thought I was dangling her by her ankles over a vat of molten lava. I seriously expected them to start whipping out their cell phones and dial 911.
She climbed the tree, by the way. Had a great time and a couple of scratches on her legs.
It’s not just kids. After whatshername died in a skiing accident in Quebec last year the powers that be are considering mandatory helmet laws for ski resorts, both in Quebec and in Ontario too.
Skiing with a helmet on would be like screwing with a condom on: fun, but not quite the same.
In my day, no-one wore bicycle helmets. I remember when they first came into general use - you were considered a total wuss if you wore one.
I would have laughed if anyone made me wear a helmet sledding as a kid - but then, I also cracked my head open sledding as a kid, and nearly died: to this day, thirty years later, I get occasional dizzy spells, allegedly from the crap I knocked into my inner ear. Maybe wearing a helmet wasn’t such a bad notion.
I was going to say the same thing about sledding with a helmet. I grew up in Ohio. (And my dad raced motorcycles and the whole family rode, so we ALL had helmets.) We didn’t even wear helmets to ride our bikes. :eek: I know right. And our parents gave us sharp knives and sent us out to play in traffic. Barefoot. In the snow. :rolleyes:
Now get off my damn lawn.
I don’t have children, and I’d like to think that, if I did, I wouldn’t succumb to the peer pressure to become a helicopter mommy. But I bet a lot of parents these days have to worry about some busybody Muffy reporting them to child protective services for letting their kid climb a tree or go sledding without a helmet or whatever.
I remember when my sister’s kids were little, she was trying to get them to eat broccoli and cauliflower. Finally, she told them that broccoli is like trees and cauliflower is like flowers. They thought that was pretty cool, so the gobbled up their veggies. Months later, CPS shows up at my sister’s doorstep to investigate her for abuse. She was all :dubious: hruh? They said they had a report that she forced her children to eat “trees and sticks”. :smack: Finally figured out that her youngest was waxing poetic about how cool it is that Mommy makes them eat trees and flowers… to the babysitter, who could have been the only possible person who might have reported my sister.
You can’t even get clever with your kids to trick them into eating vegetables. How are they supposed to enjoy helmet-free sledding?
Thing is, stuff like bike helmets and improved playground equipment does save lives and cut down on crippling injuries.
The problem is where to draw the cost/benefit line. If we can save 1 life a decade by policing how kids jump into leaves, is it worth it? Doubtful. 10 kids a year? Possibly. But how do we know and who decides?
QtM, who remembers the kid who fell off the slide at school onto the concrete, injured his spine, and died a few years later of pneumonia due to inability to breath deeply enough on his own.
The world has changed, in a sneaky and subtle way:
Kids nowadays are planned. Birth control* lets women (and to a lesser degree, men) decide if and when to have children. What was once a semi-random gift from your deity-of-choice has become something that is solely yours. Parents have become more crazy, but maybe it’s understandable. They can’t write it off to the will of deity-of-choice if anything happens to the child to make it less than perfect. It’s totally the parents’ responsibility/fault if anything happens. Trying to control the somewhat unpredictable actions of a ten year old boy might make me crazy too.
Or maybe there’s just too much made of this kind of stuff in the news. The perfectly reasonable parents who make their kids wear bike helmets, but still let them play outside and have skateboards are not the parents who make the news.
*I am completely, insanely in favor of birth control.
WTF? Did they pile the leaves on live WWII mortars that were lying in the yard? Did someone through used needles in it? When I was a kid we were just sure we didn’t pile them on dog crap and then jumped from the tree. I’m planning on doing the same with my kids.
