New Zealand school tossed its playground rules
news.nationalpost.com
news.nationalpost.com
In Spain we used to do way more dangerous things than those.
And it was risky, one of our friends died in the river jumping over a slippery stone and hitting his neck with a stone while falling backwards. I have to say he was pretty nuts and was in constant danger everywhere.
Another friend is in wheelchair after jumping badly from a big 20 meters high rock to the Mediterranean sea. We all jumped the rock. It was funny, but you need to know what you are doing.
But those are two cases over hundreds of people I knew well over my life.
We learned to do bunny hops and do jumps and go downhill. Skiing over rocks outside official circuit.
You leaned early on how to manage risks and how to say no when your friends want you into doing stupid things(or you are not skilled enough for the task). I really appreciate those memories(and continue doing risky things like BASE jumping).
I have to say that my friends doing risky things now that we are adults never had significant problems. They became experts managing risk and some of them even teach it.
So in my opinion total freedom has its drawbacks and is not a pie in the Sky, but it is worth it.
I went to school in the UK, Germany, Hong Kong, Chicago - mostly boarding school in the UK.
When I was a kid (5-13), our principal form of entertainment was "go outside, do whatever". This usually entailed building fortresses out of junk, which usually involved deep excavations, traps that could actually kill (sash weights suspended in a tree, with tripwires, anyone?), and construction high up fir trees with "found" supplies. We used to go boating (on this neat lake full of totally lethal floating islands of rotted vegetation), unattended, and nobody thought anything of us taking a pile of unexploded mortars from the school fireworks show and sticking them in a bonfire. 7 year olds. Smart enough to know to run like hell and lie behind a dip in the land.
People got hurt all the time, with everything from broken bones to cuts and grazes to the occasional airgun pellet in an unfortunate place. The school matron was a very busy woman.
Once a year, the school had an organised "paddock war", in which everyone would arm themselves with whatever they could lay their hands on (cricket bats, improvised clubs, slingshots, etc.), and go beat each other senseless. Not sure this is quite the same picture, but it was a very effective way to get the pent-up aggression of 250 7-13 year old boys out in a single sitting, and not something that would happen today.
The headmaster, an old submarine captain, used to take a group of the older (10+) boys out on a ramble into the woods, always to a new spot, and would then just either leave us there, with our task being to get all of us back unscathed, or play hunter-killer games. Retrospectively I have a feeling he was actually sneaking off to have a drink in the woods, but it was a great experience.
Every single person with whom I played at that school is an entrepreneur. Every single one takes risks, wins, loses, and while their weltanschauungs vary hugely, from liberal to authoritarian to conservative to socialist, there's a common thread of willingness to try anything - that anything can be done - so long as one is willing to attempt it.
The same school is now co-ed (no bad thing, but has been used as the "reason" for change) and has done away with the outdoor play, having replaced it with a sterile, monitored, playground.
And we wonder why people are increasingly sheltered and closeted, with increasingly small worlds, with increasingly small sets of symbols with which to associate, and increasingly small ranges of thought.
We took away childhood and replaced it with a life of infantilism.
That one is more about you and your selection of friends. Your whole generation is not composed of entrepreneurs although they all played freely.
Most of my generation did not play freely. I would go home from school holidays and attempt to muster neighbours/random local kids/friends into going for an explore/insane expedition into the local wasteland/abandoned buildings/woods/caves/whatever. Very few takers, and my mother got no end of "your child is a ne'er-do-well trying to lead my Johnny astray".
Humans are moving even stronger toward the K. People used to have many more children than they do now, and infant mortality was worse.
On top of that (for the child) taking a risk was worth it - if you didn't do really well, you did really badly.
These days things are more "even", a basic level of survival can be had easily, there is no reason to take big risks. The rewards for risk taking are more in terms of luxury than basic life.
Exiting the school gates to walk up the road (because the particular wall was unscalable, or there were dogs) was uncomfortable: "Ding-dong [at the front door of the neighbouring house]. Please Sir, may we have our ball back?" where a usually polite person would visit their back garden to return a football'.
And climbing on the roof of a Victorian structure where sand-brick was weathered sufficiently over a century of school children climbing up it to provide nice pockets and footholds.
Is this seriously not the case today? I'm only in my 30s...
Because of the way our healthcare system works, we cannot sue for personal injury here [1].
>Because of the wide range of help available from ACC after an injury, you can’t sue for personal injury in New Zealand, except for exemplary damages. This applies to overseas tourists too.
[1] http://www.acc.co.nz/about-acc/overview-of-acc/introduction-...
I know of friends in the US who don't go mountain biking etc. because they're between jobs and can't afford the potential hospital bills. That is simply sad.
(I do think it's a pretty good system however)
I'd much rather pay $400 a year.
One of the negatives is that when you're in need of an operation but it's not immediately life threatening you're prioritised and end up on a wait list which could be several years long.
A bit off topic, but there are definitely good and bad aspects to both systems.
http://www.acc.co.nz/about-acc/levies/current-years-levy-rat...
I did all sorts of crazy stuff growing up. I'm thankful I had parents who gave me a large radius to roam and didn't freak out (too much) when they had to drive me to the emergency room on occasion. The radius for which kids are allowed to play outside has been shrinking dramatically over the past few years. Humans are notoriously bad at risk assessment. We're more worried about child abductions than childhood obesity. Statistically speaking, only one of those is a real issue today.
Besides, is there a time line for the Swanson Primary School story? The article I linked to mentions this as an experiment conducted in 2011. If this is true, I would love to know how it has progressed since.
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/03/hey-pare...
We might accept a few more phobias in our children in exchange for fewer injuries. But the final irony is that our close attention to safety has not in fact made a tremendous difference in the number of accidents children have. According to the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, which monitors hospital visits, the frequency of emergency-room visits related to playground equipment, including home equipment, in 1980 was 156,000, or one visit per 1,452 Americans. In 2012, it was 271,475, or one per 1,156 Americans.
EDIT: it's actually a 25% increase as ebrenes correctly pointed out. Server me right for trying to do math early in the morning...
Assuming a fixed population size of 1 million, given the 1980 prevalence of injuries you'd expect about ~689 injuries. With the 2012 prevalence of injuries you'd expect about ~865 injuries. So it's actually an increase, not a drop.
I might be totally wrong in using this analogy, but just because it's statistically unlikely that I will die in a fire doesn't mean I will tempt fate and use fire recklessly in my home.
Quit talking nonsense. A young boy got abducted mere blocks from where I live not more than 3 years ago. Those parents would give anything to have an obese kid right now.
Asking parents to make decisions based on the aggregate damage child obesity does to society rather than the acute damage an abduction does to their family is ridiculous.
115 children out of ~74 million in the US. I understand it's a highly emotional and tragic experience when it happens, but statistically speaking, the odds of your child being kidnapped are roughly the same as them being struck by lightning. Part of the problem is the amplification effect of modern media. Kidnappings are sensational stories and we have a very human and empathetic reaction to them. Public perception would indicate that the odds of an child abduction are way higher than they really are. The biggest risk to your kids being abducted is one you probably don't want to admit -- around 200,000 children/year are abducted by a family member. Another 58,000 by people they know. Restricting your child from playing outside probably won't do much to help those far larger threats to their safety. I know it's an emotionally charged subject, especially for people who have been directly effected by it, but when you look at it rationally, the numbers speak for themselves.
We're scared of the wrong things.
I understand that stranger abduction is a rare occurrence. What I don't buy is the approach of divorcing that statistic from the "parental overprotectionism" that so many of you decry. Yes, kidnappings are probably trending down (I don't know for sure...I can't find any statistics other than from 1999) at the same time that parental protectionism is trending up. Isn't that the whole point?
> The biggest risk to your kids being abducted is one you probably don't want to admit -- around 200,000 children/year are abducted by a family member.
I don't mind admitting that at all. I just don't see what it has to do with my argument (which might be admittedly difficult to read now since it doesn't fall in line with the HN hive mind).
No longer are swings and see-saws available! Instead, you get a padded piece of artificial plas-floor with a carefully rounded (so when your kid falls on it, they won't bleed - just pass out), mid-height (so you can't claim you didn't see it, but it's not high enough to fall off) not-thing (so you can claim it was custom designed for safety) in funkified ultra-hue (so it's easy to see and you can't claim it was a dangerous obstruction when your kid falls over it and knocks their teeth out).
As a result, we are failing to teach our children to cope with the real world.
If you don't know what it feels like to fly down a ice covered hill on a piece of plastic, hit a jump, and run smack into another kid, you did not have a proper Canadian childhood.
It doesn't take many such parents - you could have a hundred kids and only a couple of parents like this - and you too would be using this super-safe stuff. The other parents could be fine with skinned knees and bruises, but you may as well save your time dealing with the angry parents so you can do the rest of your job.
Disclaimer: I am not a parent
[1] E.g. a local spot where kids would jump from a rock ledge into water. Council concerned about liability put up a 6' fence. So now kids jump from an unstable footing at a greater height - but hey, the council can avoid liability.
What upsets me is that more often than not, the answer to "Why the hell did I say that?" is not the children's safety, it's that it's what I'm expected to say or that I want to look responsible around other teachers or parents.
The fact is, a principal is in a far better position than a teacher to change a school's culture, and indeed, a cultural shift is what is necessary for kids to have greater freedom on playgrounds. As a teacher, I have to weigh not only what I value (kids' freedom and developing understanding of social/physical interactions) but also what the school (administration and other teachers) and parents value.
All of this was done with materials to hand, not safety-certified foam and plastic, although many of the tires were glued fast together for greater structural support. Nobody batted an eyelash. Nobody complained. This was the 1980s, which I still think of as being not that long ago, but compared to today we had it much better off. Just to be certain, and doubtful that something as wonderful as TireTown would be permitted by today's standards, I checked the satellite images of my old elementary school.
All the tire structures -- completely gone. And the playground area seems a lot smaller than I remembered it...
All manner of unstable bridges, and tunnels and swings and things. Every so often they'd bring the kids out to paint designs on the fort. My favorite were the ones kids painted in the very adult inaccessible tunnel system made out of reused palette wood. It was rare to come home from a day of playing on it without a splinter of a bruise or something.
The most awesome piece of a 4 story steel rocket ship. It was incredibly tall and once you got up in the top you could rally some friends together to coordinate shaking it and make some of the other kids cry from fear it would topple over. There was also a huge geodesic dome made out of steel piping (and a couple other various lattice like steel tube structures) that were pretty easy to climb wrong and get hurt on. A couple of the structures were maybe 10-12' tall and made of recycled telephone poles, so you leave the playground with a little tar or whatever they treat the wood with. If you climbed to the top, there was usually a comfortable platform or something to rest on.
Any day of the week in summer you could go and there would be hundreds of kids climbing and fighting and fantasizing and falling all over that structure.
Today the playground has a small slide and a small set of very safe and boring, very generic, equipment. I've driven by it quite a few times and have yet to see even a single child on it.
edit oh and I almost forgot. In one neighborhood, our playground was literally made out of molded concrete. It looked almost exactly like this set.
http://www.synthetrix.com/mpe/swisschs.jpg
And it was awesome. Since it was so durable, you didn't feel bad scratching it with rocks or throwing rocks at it. It was rough surfaced too so you didn't want to be too tough with it. And if you fell, it was right onto concrete surface. All the interesting geometries and surfaces made kicking balls, or dropping balls and frisbees and things into the concrete tubes loads of fun.
When I was 8, my dad and I built a wood + iron motorised go-kart, and then I drove it all around ours (and the next-door neighbours) property. I crashed hard, broke my arm... and it was awesome. I'm still into high-octane risk-taking fun (I'm currently working getting my solo jump license yay), but I do it as safely as possible.
I think learning risk-management is a key thing that kids are missing. I was lucky to have parents that pushed me out of my comfort zone into doing cool stuff (I trained in Taekwondo for 12 years, including 6 months in Busan, South Korea, and got my 16 year old ass kicked for the entire 6 months) -- my brothers also have grown up well adjusted to dealing with risk and excitement and danger. But others I know in my generation and below are afraid of risk, afraid of danger, and I think that's a shame...
I agree completely. Call it 'common sense', 'street smarts,' whatever. It's having the nous to think through what you're about to do and judge whether you're at risk of ending up in trouble, and it starts with learning the hard way that the branch you're about to stand on to climb up the tree is woefully rotted and is about to give way under you. You can't teach this stuff in classrooms, either. It's really something that has to be learned through running across a slippery piece of ground and falling over.
I still remember back when I was 6, I was playing soccer in the school grounds with other kids at lunchtime and went to slide tackle some kid. Turns out he jumped, and I didn't realise until it was too late that there were big wooden plank hurdles right behind him. I slid into them and split my eyebrow open pretty decently (I still have a patch of no eyebrow from the scar, 2 decades later).
When the school first aid room called my mum to have her come and get me, she told them that she was busy at work and I'd have to wait a bit. She knew I was alive and not going to get any worse and so knew it wasn't an emergency. Kids get hurt, it's what happens.
The other cool thing was that we had quite a bit of bushland on the school grounds and the children were allowed to play in it. We ended up forming fiefdoms and building forts and having little mock wars. It is fascinating to look back at because on top of the flagrant OH&S issues it'd raise (kids stabbing and beating each other with sticks), there was a huge political aspect to it all. Every year, you'd work out which teacher had a classroom clock that was slightly ahead of the rest, and therefore would get out to lunch slightly sooner. Those kids would be super valuable as they'd be able to run to the forts and protect their own / sabotage others freely, before the reinforcements arrived. There was serious negotiation and political power play going on amongst kids and it would've no doubt made a bunch of child development PhDs happy had they known about it.
It's hard to quantify, but I am sure that the exposure to this sort of playground environment had undoubtably a huge role in my upbringing and subsequent approach to risk and risk management in life. As such, I've been fascinated by the OP's study for a bit now and I am really glad it's being done. A lot of people talk about the problems with bubble-wrapping children these days and it's going to be good to see if it is an actual phenomenon instead of just rose-coloured reminiscence.
It seems like the wager the west has generally accepted is that we aren't willing to accept the the gains from 'risky' play compared with the small chance of tragedy.
Here in New Zealand, you can't sue for personal injury, each school sets its own rules via a parent-controlled school Board and parents have quite a bit of discretion about where their kids go to school. If a school has deficient processes when injuries occur, parents will walk.
I think the sue for visible problems approach is one of your bigger problems in the USA. And in your current society until someone can sue for making Playstation more acceptable than Playtime I don't see any easy solutions.
All these rules didn't exist when I was a kid in the '80s... http://thestir.cafemom.com/big_kid/165499/21_things_80s_kids...
I always assumed that in the US it was because of the litigious nature and never stopped to consider the fact that if your kid breaks their arm it's $10k for the parents to fix it. Thinking about it from the healthcare point of view is amazing.
This is a very interesting article but is the administrator being serious when he talked about boxing matches? My American English parses that to mean throwing punches actual physical contact between fists and the body. Surely that is a bad idea?
Hell, we used to have stick fights and beat each other with sticks, or play full contact football without any gear.
We used to also climb all over parking structures, up and down trees, construction sites, ditches, rain water drains.
One thing you learn from punching around with your buddies is the unwritten agreement of fairness. You only punch or slap as hard as you want to get punched or slapped. The golden rule works both ways!
I thought I grew up in a pretty overly coddled time. Are things really this bad?
The point is to get away from the cotton wool or 'Helicopter Parenting' model. If we don't allow kids to do the risky stuff then they don't until they reach adolescence. I am firmly of the opinion we have to get them doing it while they are young; while they still listen to us (parents, adults, etc) and while they are small and less strong.
When we wrap them in cotton wool they reach adolescence with no understanding of risk but plenty of testosterone. Then they start to experiment without years of experience in informal risk assessment.
I have also read of a school that is achieving higher academic results by encouraging Bullrush. Think rugby without a ball - tackling, running, dodging, actual physical contact (or American Football but without the stopping and without any pads, etc.)
We didn't have boxing, but teachers realised pretty early on that boys were going to play tackle rugby at lunch time, since from about grade 6 onwards it was offered as an extracurricular sport. The idea was that the kids and teachers reached an agreement that they'd let us play it if a teacher (usally one of the coaches of the school teams) was present to referee it and make sure we did it safely. It was a pretty good, common-sense solution to something that was going to happen anyway, so they instead went with risk-minimisation.
He wouldn't allow girls to duke it out though.
I would not want to observe kids boxing (ouside a boxing sports club). Hit the throat. Bad day.
Everything fight I've seen between two willing participants (not bullying) is that it isn't really very dangerous. I'm 36 and I still love to spar. I do it with boxing headgear, a mouthpiece and gloves now, but when I was young my friends and I always used to fight for fun with no gear. Sometimes it was fists only. Sometimes grappling, kicks, punches. Sometimes it was with hockey sticks. The worst that ever happened was a few bloody knuckles, busted lips or black eyes. When friends or brothers are fighting you know that you should stop if you punch someone in the throat or drop them in any other manner.
The problem is giving students freedom is often thought of as synonymous to allowing more violent behavior to take place. When rules are put in place to protect victims that is understandable, but most rules instead decide that students should not be allowed to voluntarily choose to do things adults think are unsafe. Honestly, I hope we can break that belief.
The school had a large pond, with geese (that would chase and bite you if you got too near), and a school cow that would wander around keeping the grass trimmed.
Next to the school was an huge piece of land we used to call the quarry. It was an developed piece of land that had hills with trees and bushes growing all over. I'm sure there were snakes around, there were definitely plenty of large ant hills, and other small critters. Usually once a week our class would tramp over there, and play tag.
People would get scratched up running through a bush or fall over and skin a knee. But that was part and parcel of the experience. I think I recall someone breaking an arm or getting a knock to the head when they tripped over something - that was treated appropriately by the teacher.
I remember going on a week (or two?) school camping trip up to Queensland; at one spot we found a natural spring pool for swimming and a small waterfall (maybe 5-10 meters high? scarily high for me anyway) - everyone took turns jumping off the waterfall into the pool.
Nowdays I look at what schoolkids get to do, and it's none of that stuff. Climb a tree? no way, you might fall and hurt yourself. So what, it's part of living and learning.
The general feeling of a lot of traceurs is that not only do padded floors and crash mats not keep you safe, but that training only in 'safe' environments makes you dangerously complacent. Soft landings disguise lots of dangerous habits and it only takes an awkward angle or a turned ankle to turn that into a broken bone. Anecdotally, my only parkour injury occurred in NYC where (thanks to the wonderfully friendly NY police) I spent a few months only training indoors in a padded gym.
But it's different from just letting kids run amok. A parkour class actively teaches you the progressions, how to safely bail etc. Not sure I want to remove all the rules. But I definitely agree that kids should be exposed to dangerous situations.
Personally I do not wear a bike helmet, however, if some of my former mountain bike friends called up and took me out riding all day on trails I did not know then I would find a helmet and make sure it was properly fitted to my head. So I am not absolutist when it comes to helmets.
As it happens I have sold thousands of helmets and fitted a few hundred for people. Along the way I read the instructions and you do need helmets to fit properly, i.e. with the straps tight. I have also noticed that most cyclists including those in the peleton ride along with the straps somewhat less tight than they should be. Hence I suggest that rather than have helmet debates with people you helpfully point out to them that (if they are wearing a helmet) that the straps are dangerously done up. Point out to them that they could get strangled by their helmet in an accident if, due to the straps not being very tight, the helmet slips back. Assist them in getting their helmet setup properly, by which time they should not be able to move their jaw and give you any more lip :-)
Banning kids from riding bikes around cars? I can understand why that's considered a bit too overprotective, but helmets to me seem like a common-sense method of resolving a significant risk with insignificant inconvenience.
Other than that - let 'em at it!
From training wheels to full-speed downhill riding should only take 6 months. You want to encourage helmet wearing as a habit before that progression occurs.
My child had a very large crash that occured because he went down a hill and got confused as to which side of the bike the brake was on, because he was riding an unfamiliar bike. He had ridden down that hill many times. He crashed heavily at a high speed, enough to knock a tooth out and lost a lot of skin on his face, elbows, hands and knees. The helmet had serious damage and had to be thrown away. I don't want to think what would have happened had there been no helmet. He was 4 at the time.
I let them ride down hills to get used to the speed as part of learning, so that when they do get older they don't make bad mistakes. I also ride on the road with them to develop their traffic awareness. But helmets are a vital part of that.
I had several high speed crashes on my bike during school years. It was only luck that meant I didn't hit my head hard.
Please start making them wear helmets.
My younger brother came home from primary school (elementary school) last year with a playground "Rule Sheet" -- You should have seen the response to ridiculous rules such as "Children can climb trees as long as they have one foot on the ground at all times." -- Even though the trees mentioned are less than 3-4 metres high.
It is a hard thing to manage just due to so many parents and their different styles of parenting but I do think a medium can be reached.
Anecdotal story. As a kid playing in the street I ended up under a moving car. The only reason I'm alive is somebody alerted the driver in time. We don't notice rare accident deaths, but we do notice pervasive safety measures (don't play on the road even in a culdesac anyone?)
Reminds me of the town in the Netherlands that took out all its street signs and traffic lights.
I have to wonder, as regulations and laws and state surveillance increase, does our ability to control ourselves atrophy?