cross-posted from: https://feddit.dk/post/9969468
From the article:
Risky play is associated with greater resilience, self-confidence, problem-solving and social skills such as cooperation, negotiation and empathy, according to studies by Sandseter and others. When a study in Leuven, Belgium, gave four- and six-year-olds just two hours a week of opportunities for risky play over the course of three months, their risk-assessment skills improved compared with those of children in a control group2. In this study, the risky play took place at school, in a gym class and in the classroom.
It’s not just riskier play. It’s independence as a whole. Look at how many people let their young children go to school or the park or a friend’s house on their own. Ours appears to be the most independent in the classroom - and by a good margin. That shouldn’t be the case.
I don’t want to raise someone that needs their hand held through their day. The skills we impart in the single digit years will last a lifetime. They ought to be versatile.
You want kids to take risks while playing? OK then, make it so that the medical bills don’t bankrupt whole families.
Over the past two decades, research has emerged showing that opportunities for risky play are crucial for healthy physical, mental and emotional development. Children need these opportunities to develop spatial awareness, coordination, tolerance of uncertainty and confidence.
Uh, i thought this was common sense?
Being a millenial, I grew up with overbearing parents. I distinctly remember in 90s and 00s of pearl clutching moral outrage on video games and cartoons. Fast forward twenty to thirty years later, boomers accuse millenials of snowflakes. Whenever I hear that, I asked them “who raised us?”
To be fair, boomers experienced the media sensation of serial killers and spiked crime rate in the 70s and 80s and are understandably wary of their own kids going out. Going on a tangent here, this is why the nostalgia on the 80s is ridiculous because people back then complain of crime (hello, how many times big cities like Detroit and New York depicted as dystopian in the 80’s???)
Tell that to legislators who read this and say “lol no let’s buy more testing” and district leaders add more time requirements for weekly staff meetings where principals reread a bulletin for two hours straight, rather than let a kid get anything but recycled air in a building
Kinda makes sense, right? You learn a lot by making mistakes.
Especially when the mistakes hurt. I was a kid in the '80s when this was practiced.
All the stuff I played on now has softfall padding under it, the giant slide has had a dirt bill built up under it so kids can’t fall off the ladder; the high up stuff was removed
Me and my friends would climb to the high cubby house and feel very daring. I think it was 10m up. There were three of them with the lowest being maybe 5m up - parents couldn’t reach it.
We were not daring enough to try the Tarzan swing - a circle of tiered seats rising in the arc of the rope that hung above the centre, so you could take the rope to any point on the tiers and swing from there. I think there was a knot in the bottom of the rope, but the older boys swung with their feet loose, hanging on Tarzan style. That was the only one they pulled out during the '80s. Everything else survived to the late '90s
Especially when the mistakes hurt. I was a kid in the '80s when this was practiced.
The more important lesson is that the pain stops. Some consequences aren’t as bad as you imagine them to be.
I was really astonished when some parents took a knife away from their kid after he had cut themselves. He already learned the lesson! Let him reinforce it!
I made many mistakes as a parent. But I’m very proud of my kids standing up for themselves or others even against adult authority figures. And they are not afraid of telling me about the stupid stuff they did with their friends. The friends’ parents never even suspect the stuff. So we must’ve done something right.
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I played with lawn darts
Basically they’re saying to use those childhood invulnerability powers while you have bad knees
While you the the powers, before you have bad knees, yes.
I think I got a lot out of being a boy scout (not going to go into all of the very valid criticisms of the organization)
I spent a lot of time out in the woods with other kids, making mistakes, getting hurt, patching ourselves back up, making and executing plans, solving problems organizing, teaching and learning from those other kids, with relatively little adult oversight. The adult leaders were there if we needed them, they’d round us up and point us in the right direction when it was called for, but by and large they mostly just kind of told us what needed to be done and sent us on our way.
Part of the underlying philosophy of scouting is boys (or I guess kids now that they allow girls, which I’m fully in support of) teaching and leading other kids.
My circle of friends includes a lot of eagle scouts and guys who didn’t quite make eagle but were still very much a part of the program, both from my own troop and from other troops. They are, overall, some of the most well-rounded and competent people I know, the ones who always have some idea what to do in a given situation and can figure out the parts they don’t know on the fly.
You can probably quibble over whether we learned to be that way because we were in scouts, or if we gravitated towards scouts because we were already inclined to be that sort of person. I tend to think it’s a mix of both, but leaning slightly more towards the former.
I won’t say that scouting is necessary the program for everyone, or that all kids necessarily even need some kind of official structured program to develop that kind of resilience, but I do think all kids would probably benefit from some sort of safe environment where they’re able to run a little wild, make their own decisions, make mistakes and figure out how to fix them, etc.
When I was a scout we put lighter fluid in a coffee can, lit it, and kicked it around the forest. But at least we all learned how to stomp out a fire. We learned a lot of good stuff too. One time I got genuinely lost with my friend. We figured it out together. Things would terrify parents but we learned a lot through our independence.
Oh yeah. I was fortunate, my boyscout experience included zero diddling and zero religion of any kind. Any religious merit badges were reduced to a discussion on possibilities of religion, and a hand wave sign off.
I gained much of the learning you did, but I acknowledge some others had vastly worse experiences.
We 80’s kids know the benefits of risky play well.
Yeah, was so great to get routinely picked up and thrown down the stairs as a kid. Really helped me become the cold, calloused, untrusting man I am today
Prepared for the modern world
/s, but actually
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lol no.
if you’re a 12 year old today, and you do literally anything, it won’t have a positive outcome.
Talk to the girl you like? Believe it or not, you’re an alpha-toxic male and probably a pedophile.
Go in the woods to play? Believe it or not, but the ground is full of worms and you’ll probably catch infections. The worms are going to crawl out of your eyeballs, btw.
Eager to do homework? Now that’s my good boy. Just remember to do homework from 17:00-19:00, then have an hour dinner with us, and then go straight to bed. Don’t you dare to have fun in between.
Talk to the girl you like? Believe it or not, you’re an alpha-toxic male and probably a pedophile.
Somehow I’ve never seen any real person face this issue, but I sure hear a lot about it from incels.
I just read a case where this group of young college kids (18+) lured this army guy (around 22 I think) to their campus using a dating app. They mobbed him, chase him to his car calling him a pedo, and tried to kidnap him. He called the cops and I think 6 of them were arrested. They went to this catholic college and I’ll try to find the story later. This students claimed they were doing the “To catch a…” trend so it does happen.
So one group of college kids did this, they were arrested, and that proves it’s a common occurrence for young kids?
Found the story. I’m not saying that it happens to young kids but it does happen. You also didn’t have anything about kids in the quote so I just assumed you meant anyone.
Since GP was explicitly talking about things happening to a 12 year old, your example is just not relevant.
Even if we were talking about everyone, it’s not relevant. You can find some story about something happening to anyone - doesn’t mean it’s something that “happens to people”.
To be fair especially on that second accusation it probably depends how old “that girl you like” is
Obviously, since being a pedophile literally depends on that.
I too like to get angry at scenarios I’ve made up in my head.
