Free the children!

Here's something to chew on, via Mirabilis:

Ute Navidi, who heads a British children's charity called London Play, was walking along a Berlin street, on a break from an international conference, when she stopped to watch a group of primary schoolchildren in the schoolyard. She couldn't believe what she was seeing. "If this was London they would have called in search- and-rescue," says Navidi. "Or the health inspector would have come in and shut the place down." Young German kids were chopping wood with axes and mixing soups in a cauldron over an open flame. Children who looked like kindergarteners were manoeuvring kayaks on their own in a large pond while the adults chatted on the sidelines. The scene got Navidi worried -- and not for those kids. The risks the German children were learning to manage far surpassed anything schoolchildren in her city were doing.

In Britain, as in Canada, the U.S. and elsewhere, an overwhelming concern for safety -- along with a desire to safeguard against child-injury litigation -- has completely altered the landscape of kids' activities over the past 20 years. . .

But recently, a growing number of people have reached an epiphany similar to Navidi's: despite our best intentions to protect children, our actions have produced the opposite effect. Studies are showing that kids have become less capable, less self-reliant -- essentially, more vulnerable to harm. . .

And kids spend more time with parents -- eight hours more with their mothers and four more with fathers -- compared with 1981. The radius of play of the average nine-year-old has shrunk to one-ninth of what it was in 1970.

ADDENDUM: I wish we all had urban spaces like that described in Berlin. We do a pretty good job during summertime in taking our kids where they can run wildish, and in our Providence neighborhood the kids are allowed to play outdoors with an independence unusual for American children nowadays. Nonetheless, our playgrounds are pretty much like playgrounds everywhere, with not a cauldron or an axe to be seen. This article did provoke a flashback, however, to the scene c. 1963 in Seven Up (repeated in part in all the subsequent "Up" films) where the then-seven-year-olds are taken together to a London play park which by modern standards takes your breath away: not just the conventional playground hardware, but the piles of scrap wood with which some of the boys busily set to building a playhouse.

Posted by David on September 7, 2006 10:15 PM