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Playground swings: Too dangerous?
I was recently involved in planning a new play structure for my kids' public school. One afternoon the principal, someone from the San Francisco Unified School District, and I sat around looking through playground equipment catalogs, choosing monkey bars, climbing structures, and slides we liked.
Shutterstock/cabania
Accidents do happen on playground swings, but kids also have a lot of fun.
When I came across the swing section, I called out, "Let's get swings! The kids love them."
I got a look as if I'd come from another planet.
"Too dangerous," they both said.
I spent much of my youth on swings--mainly at Oak Meadow and Vasona Lake parks in Los Gatos where I grew up.
I'd pump my legs vigorously and get myself up as high as I possibly could and then leap out of the seat. Friends and I would have contests to see who could jump farther by marking our landing spots in the sand. We could play this game for hours.
I guess this might seem dangerous, but nobody ever got hurt.
But swings are out of favor these days, and this may be due to parents suing school districts and counties over their children's injuries.
Elementary school playgrounds in one West Virginia county are losing their swing sets in part because of lawsuits over injuries, according to the Herald Dispatch. Read More 'Playground swings: Too dangerous?' »
| September 02 2010 at 06:59 AM
Neighborhood community: Why it's important for kids
Some of our best childhood memories come from running around a neighborhood with a pack of kids, getting our hands dirty and scraping our knees. Are today's kids getting those same experiences? Does neighborhood community still exist?
Shutterstock/Sonya Etchison
Who are the people in your neighborhood? Kids need to know
We recently moved from the upper unit of a duplex into a house. I feel lucky for many reasons. We no longer live above someone, so the kids don't have to tiptoe about the house. We have two additional closets (though not more bedrooms). We have our very own garage and garden, and there's a park within walking distance.
But the best thing about our new house is the family with three kids who live two doors down from us.
My 7-year-old instantly hit it off with their oldest daughter and the two girls are now running in bare feet up and down the sidewalk between each others' houses. They're trading clothes, building forts with blankets, setting up elaborate tea parties for their dolls, and spending a lot of time outside in the backyard.
The play is free, spontaneous, and unscheduled. We don't put dates on the calendar or even pick up the phone. My kids simply knock on the neighbors' door, or their kids come charging up our front steps.
Right here in the big city of San Francisco, we're building community.
Shutterstock/Richard Thornton
Today's neighborhoods are quiet. Where are the kids?
The older my kids get the more I recognize the importance of neighborhood community. I've realized that our family could live in the biggest house on the prettiest street yet our life wouldn't be complete unless we knew our neighbors.
When we share conversation, bits of gossip, plums from our trees, and cups of sugar with our neighbors, life seems a little cozier and more comfortable. We feel less lonely, more at ease, and safer.
In fact, studies have shown that people who live in close-knit communities are statistically safer. They're less likely to be burglarized. They're more likely to get help if they tumble down a set of stairs, fall out of a tree, have a heart attack.
Safety is a huge plus, but what I'm really enjoying are the impromptu get-togethers. The other day some neighbors dropped by and four of us ended up sharing a bottle of wine. We had some other neighbors over for a last-minute barbecue. And then there are the play dates with the kids down the street.
In this hyperscheduled world in which we're raising kids--where ballet class is at 3 p.m. and then it's off to karate--there's something so refreshing about an unscheduled play date. Parents these days control every detail in their children's lives and it's liberating for a child to take the reins and make their own choice to knock on the neighbor's door, of course with a parent's permission. Could there be a better way for a child to learn independence?
In the 1970s, when the Sesame Street characters were singing "Who Are the People in Your Neighborhood?" the majority of Americans could answer the question posed in this song. I certainly could.
My parents knew who lived in every house lining my childhood street, and I can tell you the names of all the kids who I ran around with in a pack: Erika, Sander, Amy, Kenny, Donny, Tommy, Christina, Tyrene, and Ryan.
I grew up with these kids, exploring and discovering the world. We climbed trees, caught frogs, picked cattails, and made mud pies. We rode our bikes up and down the street, organized games of kick the can, and built tree houses and rope swings.
My neighborhood friends taught me that you get up when you skin your knee and that learning to ride a bike without hands takes practice. They taught me that you help your friend when she falls in the frog pond and you set up a lemonade stand when you want a new bicycle.
These were life lessons that came about in an unsupervised, unmanaged environment--and that I wouldn't have ever learned as easily through a lecture by mom.
Anirav/Dreamstime.com
When kids get together, they get their hands dirty. And that's a good thing.
But are kids learning these lessons today? Do they know the answer to the question, "Who are the people in your neighborhood?"
My parents still live on the same South Bay street, and they no longer know who lives in every house. Now they probably know only half the neighbors by name, maybe even less.
A recent study by Pew Internet found that 19 percent of people know the names of all the people who live close to them, while 24 percent know most. The remaining three-fifths of Americans know either some (29 percent) or none (28 percent) of their neighbors by name.
Read More 'Neighborhood community: Why it's important for kids' »| August 24 2010 at 09:03 AM
How do we teach kids independence in a fear-driven world?
Tune into KALW 91.7 FM today, Monday, at 7 p.m. SFGate's parenting blogger Amy Graff will be a guest on the station's City Visions program to talk about worried parents and the loss of childhood freedom.
Shutterstock/Cheryl Casey
Kids used to climb trees. Now they're climbing the walls inside their homes.
My 7-year-old daughter, Paris, spent a week with her grandparents this summer in the tiny coastal town of Gearhart, Ore.
If you ask Paris what her favorite thing was about the trip, she won't tell you the about the root beer floats she and her grandfather enjoyed nightly, nor about the festive parade that passed through town on the Fourth of July. She won't tell you about getting her first-ever pair of Crocs (something I refused to buy her), nor about learning to ride a bike without training wheels.
Rather she'll tell you about going to the store with her 7-year-old friend Annabelle. She'll tell you that she and her friend walked six blocks all by themselves to the corner grocery store where they spent their pocket change on candy.
When my daughter returned from her vacation and told me this, her eyes grew big and excited and she started jumping up and down and flapping her hands. This was the sort of sheer joy a parent almost only witnesses on Christmas morning. And it wasn't the candy that made her so happy. It was the fact that she had done something without an adult standing on the sidelines watching.
"Mommy, there were no adults," she told me. "It was just us. Can you believe that? We were alone. We walked six blocks. Yes, six blocks all by ourselves. It was so much fun, Mommy. We were alone, yes, alone."
I practically cried when my daughter told me this--not because I disapproved of her walking to the store with a girl named Annabelle who I've never even met. I nearly cried because I realized my daughter is deprived of freedom. She's growing up in a fear-driven world where an adult has to watch every move she makes. She's rarely allowed to step outside an adult's eyesight unless she's locked up inside her own house. If I had been there in Gearhart with my daughter, I probably wouldn't have allowed her to walk those six blocks.
The world my children are growing up in is so different from the world I grew up in. I spent my summers barefoot running freely around the neighborhood with a pack of kids. We rode our bikes, climbed trees, and caught crawdads and frogs--all without our parents anywhere in sight. A lot of the time we didn't even have our shirts on.
We learned to endure pain when we crashed our bikes. We learned to solve problems when our friends got stuck in trees. We learned to overcome fear--and run really fast--when the neighborhood Doberman chased after us.
My daughter has hardly had her shoes off outside this summer. On a recent trip to Tahoe we walked about 100 yards from our hotel room to the beach, and she cried because the rocks were hurting her soft, sensitive feet. And then I looked around and all the kids were wearing water shoes, Crocs or Keens or some sort of modernized Teva. I grew up at lakes and beaches and never wore a water shoe. My parents were never afraid about me stepping on a piece of glass. My feet were calloused and I was proud of it.
My friends and I used to spend our summer evenings out on the cool, grassy lawn, gulping down tall glasses of homemade lemonade and picking at our calloused feet and determining whose were tougher.
I grew up in the suburbs, and I'm raising my daughter in San Francisco, so you might argue that I keep her on a short leash because we live amidst drug dealers and gangs while the kids in the burbs are in a safety zone. Wrong: The parents in the suburbs seem to be equally protective.
When I return to my South Bay childhood home there are kids riding their bikes and running around in the street. But things aren't the same. Their moms are often supervising or popping outside every 15 minutes to scream something such as "Come here, I need to put more sunscreen on you." And the kids are forbidden from hiking through the "canyon" by themselves, a woodsy, undeveloped area where I picked cattails, looked for jack rabbits, and caught so much poison oak as a child that I eventually become immune to it.
And none of these kids walk to school. Their parents drive them.
When I was in the second grade, I started walking home from school. After the final bell rang, my spindly 8-year-old legs carried me two miles from Daves Avenue Elementary School to my home where my mom was waiting for me. I walked with a group of kids: Carol, Amy, Christina, Kenny. Along the way we collected sticks and rocks, blew the fuzz off dandelions, and stuffed our pockets with roly-polies.
On these walks, I learned to hop over King Snakes basking in the sun. I learned how to ask strangers gardening in their front yards if I could pick cherries from their trees. I gained independence, confidence, and basic survival skills.
My daughter is 6-years-old and I'm almost certain that she won't be walking home from her San Francisco public school or taking the bus alone in two years. For one thing, we live nearly four miles from school. For another, a school bus doesn't stop anywhere near our house. What about Muni? Can you imagine the comments I would get from other parents if I put my daughter on the J train at age 7? Our family would certainly make the front page.
Rather I'm hoping that maybe by fifth grade or middle school I can give her a kiss goodbye at the train stop--not because I'm eager to shove her out the door but because I want her to learn to get around on her own.
I have been inspired by Lenore Skenazy, a Manhattan mom and author of the book Free Range Kids, who made newspaper headlines when she sent her son on the New York subway at age 9 in April 2008. In a column for the New York Sun, she wrote, "Was I worried? Yes, a tinge. But it didn't strike me as that daring, either. Isn't New York as safe now as it was in 1963? It's not like we're living in downtown Baghdad."
While some parents these days believe their kids are growing up in a scary world, Skenazy argues that raising children in the United States now isn't more dangerous than it was when today's generation of parents were young. "Crime today is basically where it was at in the 1970s," she says. "And we're assuming kids can't do the same things we did ourselves as kids. This doesn't make sense."
Skenazy is an advocate for kids riding solo on public transit and she also believes children should walk to school. Her son started walking a mile to school with a friend when he was in the fourth grade. "They stop at the deli for something to eat--usually some chocolate, something unhealthy," says Skenazy, who lives near the Empire State Building. "And they even stop to play at the park. My son loves it."
How can we give our kids freedom when our society doesn't support it?
Since my daughter's adventure with Annabelle I've been trying to give my children more freedom, but it's sad because it's forced and only available in small, practically pathetic doses.
At the Noe Valley farmer's market, they walked alone about 50 yards by themselves to buy honey sticks. They walked about 20 yards to see if the next-door neighbor kids could play. And they spent this last weekend climbing huge piles of rocks down the hill from our campsite at Grover Hot Springs in the eastern Sierra.
But loosening the leash isn't easy when most people think a child on her own is a target for kidnappers.
My girlfriend, Vero, and I recently took our kids to dinner at a noodle place in Japantown for dinner. After the kids slurped up their bowls of ramen, they started to have sword fights with their chopsticks. Vero and I decided they needed to move around. We gave them permission to walk to the Kinokuniya book and toy store by themselves. We could see the inside of the store from where we sat, only 20 yards away.
The kids excitedely ran out of the restaurant and across the mall right past a security guard who immediately started looking around for adults attached to the kids. He approached my 5-year-old son, "Where are your parents?" My son pointed to the restaurant.
We smiled sheepishly and waved.
The security guard marched into the restaurant and scolded us as if we were little children.
"You should never turn your back on your kids," he said. "Someone could come and snatch them."
I have to disagree. I'm learning that you need to give your kids freedom or they'll never have the skills nor the confidence they need to explore the world safely.
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| August 02 2010 at 11:59 AM
Dangerous things (parents should let their kids do)
Play with a pocket knife. Break glass. Throw things from a moving car. Drive a nail. Find a beehive. Glue your fingers together with superglue.
Gever Tulley
Many parents would forbid their kids from doing these activities. They'd keep the superglue locked in a box where little fingers could never find it.
But Gever Tulley thinks these are exactly the sorts of things children should be doing (with adult guidance and supervision, of course). From these "dangerous" experiences, Tulley says, children learn how the world works. They learn about safety and how to assess risk. They gain responsibility.
Tulley feels so strongly that children should have the opportunity to discover the world that he wrote a book with his wife, Julie Spiegler. Released last month, "50 Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do)" features easy-to-follow instructions for "dangerous" activities parents can do with their kids such as licking a battery, which is a great activity because the little jolt you'll feel leads in to a lesson about shock and electric currents.
"It's a guidebook for overprotective parents," says Tulley, who lives with his wife in Montara, just north of Half Moon Bay. "It will help them think more rationally about danger and risk. And it's also a source book for adventurous parents who are looking for new things to do with their kids."
Tulley got the idea to write the book through his work at the Tinkering School, a sleep-over camp for kids that he founded in 2002. In the summer, 16 lucky kids get to build stuff on a farm owned by the University of California in Half Moon Bay. They do all sorts of dangerous things, pounding nails, bending wires, playing with electricity.
Kids having fun in one of their creations at the Tinkering School.
"We're sort of famous for the roller-coaster we built the first year," Tulley says. "We used 120 feet of track and on the last day of camp parents and kids rode in it. We have built sailboats, cars, a hang glider."
Tulley is opening schools in Seattle and Baltimore. He has also heard from people in Dubai and Belgium who want to open Tinkering Schools. Last year, he left his job at Adobe to focus on the school and the book.
Tulley also got inspiration from his childhood growing up in Mendocino. He and his big brother were free to explore their environment and invent their own projects in the wide-open rural environs.
Tulley worries that today's parents don't give their children enough freedom. He recently had a conversation with a mother who wouldn't allow her child to ride his bike on the street in front of their home in the suburbs. The mom drove her son to a "safe" empty parking lot on weekends where he could ride.
"Kids needs to experience that sense of freedom and entitlement you get when you leave the driveway on your bike and go on an adventure," Tulley says. "Today's parents are propagating this fear-based culture where they scold each other for letting their kids do dangerous things."
5 dangerous things you can do at home with your kids
Here's a sampling of a few "dangerous" things Tulley recommends parents let their children try. Of course, he means with appropriate adult supervision and instruction. The idea is that through these experiences parents will be given the opportunity to teach their children about safety--so kids don't sneak off later in life and experiment with things in an unsafe way, i.e., light the neighbor's house on fire.
1) Play with fire. "Learning to control one of the most elemental forces in nature is a pivotal moment in any child's personal history," says Tulley. "It's the first time we get control of one of these mysterious things. And the open pit fire is a laboratory. By playing with fire, children learn about about 'intake,' 'combustion,' 'exhaust.' Fire stimulates the imagination and kids who play with it keep thinking of new ways to experiment with it. It creates a wonderful context for self-directed learning." Read More 'Dangerous things (parents should let their kids do)' »
| January 13 2010 at 09:23 AM
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