Where Do the Children Play?

At 3:00 each day I walk to the door of my daughter's classroom. School is over, but Mary and the other children are sitting at their desks. When the teacher sees me coming, he calls Mary to come to the door and hands her over into my care. All the other children and parents are going through the same routine, and none of them considers it at all unusual. You can't just fling open the schoolroom doors at 3:00 and have the children run out into the world unsupervised, can you? After all, these children are only in the third grade.

Things were very different when I was a kid. My younger sister walked home from her school in Raleigh each day, crossing Six Forks Road and then Millbrook, which were busy four-lane streets even back then. My sister did not make this walk alone—accompanying her was our first-grade little brother. But my sister was in charge. After all, she was in the third grade.

So our assumptions about third graders in 2003 are completely different from the assumptions in 1977. What changed?

Obviously, one thing that has changed is the legal environment. If a child gets hurt at a school, or on private property, someone gets sued for millions of dollars—so we need to restrict them for our own protection. Is that really the issue? Have we gotten so cynical that we are willing to turn children's lives upside-down for insurance reasons? If that really is the only change, we need to figure out how to change it back.

On the other hand, maybe the change is not just legal. Everyone tells me that the world is a more dangerous place than it used to be, especially for children. But no one has offered me even a scrap of evidence to support this idea, and all the statistics I can find suggest the opposite. Child death rates in North Carolina have been steadily declining for years. The world is not more dangerous: it's our attitudes that have changed.

But OK, all legal and statistical issues aside...if things have changed, haven't they changed for the better? Sure, children are less independent now, more restricted. Maybe they're growing up a little more fearful and suspicious. But our new safety consciousness literally saves children's lives, and isn't that worth any price?

It sounds really good when you say it. "Saving even one child is worth any price." If you really believe that, you'll love this: children should not be allowed to ride bikes, roller skates, ice skates, scooters, or skateboards. They should not be allowed to swim or jump on trampolines. Most importantly, they should not be in cars under any circumstances. After all, with all our child-proof doors, windows that won't open all the way, and properly utilized modern child safety seats, motor vehicle crashes are still by far the leading cause of death in children of every age. Let's just keep the kids at home until they're, say, 12 years old. They certainly don't need to be taking all these potentially fatal rides to enjoy trivial pleasures like movies, playgrounds, or libraries. When we go shopping, we can hire a baby-sitter. We might consider allowing them to ride to school, but even there, a neighborhood or home-based school would be a lot safer.

Some people might consider these measures extreme, but such changes would undoubtedly save children's lives. Let me make that really clear—if we all made those changes, real, adorable, beloved children would live, children who would otherwise die. Isn't that what we all want? Didn't we just agree that was worth any sacrifice?

Here's my point: as heartless as it sounds, it all comes down to math. Many of our decisions involve weighing quality of life against mathematical probability of death or serious injury. If the possibility of harm is slim enough, we take the risk—it's worth the risk—even though, once we all take the risk, it means that somewhere in our country of 250 million people, real children will in fact die. The alternative is raising our children in a bubble.

So we weigh the trade-offs. We use child safety seats in the car and sunblock at the pool. We look both ways before crossing the street, and get rid of asbestos in the school walls. All good. But in a lot of cases, I think we've gone much too far toward that bubble. I say, let the children out at 3:00, to play in the playground and wait for their parents. Let them dive off the diving board, or form a chain of five kids all holding onto each other's backs as they zoom down the slide into the swimming pool. Let them walk in the woods all day and not come home until dinner is almost cold.

It's a tough choice to make, and it might even be scary at first, but please—do it for the children.

by A.A.Milne

Where am I going? I don't quite know. Down to the stream where the king-cups grow— Up on the hill where the pine-trees blow— Anywhere, anywhere. I don't know. Where am I going? The clouds sail by. Little ones, baby ones, over the sky. Where am I going? The shadows pass. Little ones, baby ones, over the grass. If you were a cloud, and sailed up there, You'd sail on water as blue as air, And you'd see me here in the fields and say: "Doesn't the sky look green today?" Where am I going? The high rooks call: "It's awful fun to be born at all." Where am I going? The ring-doves coo: "We do have beautiful things to do." If you were a bird, and lived on high, You'd lean on the wind when the wind came by, You'd say to the wind when it took you away: "That's where I wanted to go today!" Where am I going? I don't quite know. What does it matter where people go? Down to the wood where the blue-bells grow— Anywhere, anywhere. I don't know.

This is my first essay on this topic; click here for the second, which I think is better developed in some ways.

i agree with you except i think what has changed is a greater intolerance of anxiety, and so a greater need for the illusion of control. wny has that happened? i think there are a lot of reasons—and perhaps one of the small ones has to do with the amount of information we get daily even if we're not trying, and for whatever reasons most of that information is about awful stuff although there's an awful lot wonderful going on. small example of this: i occassionally (too occassionally but that's another subject) work out at a gym; there are televison screens up front; i don't hook up to them but i can't help seeing them, and on any given day i can predict taht there are disasters showing. anyway, as you know, i think the internal and external are very connected; the way we handle the internal which is perhaps what you call spiritual. i t's a part of our view of being human, isn't it, and how much of that we think we can control, rather than becoming capable of experiencing and handling well, growing and learning from the uneasiness that some stimuli provoke. anyway i promise i won't go on for so long about every essay i read, and don't dare take me off your list because you fear i will; that would be an unfair effort at control.

The thing is, I think that frantic desire to maintain control, and the illusion that you can do it, are core parts of the human condition. The Romans had a ton of it. But we have taken it to a new level, perhaps because we really can control so much more. I have a cold, but I'm controlling the symptoms. It's 98 degrees outside, but I'm controlling that in my house. Mosquitoes, sunburn, mental depression, laziness, obesity, maternal-death-in-childbirth and ring-around-the-collar are all troubles to be tackled, fixed, and done away with. Isn't it galling to know that people still die, like animals? Anyway, I think that's part of it. I don't know all of it. But I know it is terrifying to me to see how children are raised.

i think it's way more than death that we're terrified of. "controlling depression" sort of numbing the system down which is what a lot of those drugs do is very different than dealing with unexplained sadness, feelings of loss etc. we don't like that kind of stuff.

Next year Nathan has to walk to school because our town is instituting bus fees so we will have to see about him eventually walking to school by himself. That will be my version of the NYC adventure. Ha! Small steps, Kenny, small steps.

The thing that always gets me, Anne, is that our generation grew up without these sorts of insane restrictions. When I suggest that a kid could possibly ride a tricycle without a helmet, the parents who look at me like I'm crazy invariably grew up riding shotgun on their fathers' motorcycles without helmets. They think it's impossible, but they remember it. What happens when these kids grow up, not remembering any other world? They really will find it unimaginable that a kid could be allowed out of eyeshot before he's 18, since they never were. And so it just keeps getting worse.

I thought you would like this after reading one of your essays.

Those Born 1920-1979

TO ALL THE KIDS WHO SURVIVED the 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s!!

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they were pregnant.

They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn't get tested for diabetes.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets, not to mention the risks we took hitchhiking.

As infants & children, we would ride in cars with no car seats, booster seats, seat belts or air bags.

Riding in the back of a pick up on a warm day was always a special treat.

We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle.

We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this.

We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank Kool-aid made with sugar, but we weren't overweight because,

WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.

No one was able to reach us all day. And we were O.K.

We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.

We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents.

We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.

We were given BB guns for our 10th birthdays, made up games with sticks and tennis balls and, although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes.

We rode bikes or walked to a friend's house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just walked in and talked to them!

Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment.

If YOU are one of them, CONGRATULATIONS!

You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated so much of our lives for our own good.

Second, as I wrote above, the parents who give me those "You can't possibly allow children to do that!" look all the time, actually remember when children did that all the time. When the current generation grows up, they will have no such memories. They will really believe that no one could ever possibly do that.

"When you see your two-and-a-half year-old on a climbing frame your heart is in your mouth and that is normal but I think most parents realise that at some point their children have to take physical risks; most recognise the benefits of learning through play. We can be overprotective but it is impossible to wrap children in cotton wool."

What can I say? Keep saying it loudly and in every forum you get. And thank heavens I live in the woods. I hope my kids know every square inch of those woods by the time they are teenagers.

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