Wimp World

Chas sent me this article from MacLeans that documents once more what a culture of fearful wimps we are becoming.

"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. On playgrounds, it's meant lowering jungle gyms, rubberizing play surfaces, and eliminating play areas with ponds and trees. Some districts have gone as far as banning swing sets and posting signs prohibiting running. Last summer, a father in St. John's, Nfld., was forced to dissemble his children's tree house after a neighbour complained to the city; he was told it didn't meet building codes. A pamphlet on playground safety from Halifax-based Child Safety Link sets out stringent recommendations to parents: ensure your child never jumps off a moving swing; be on the lookout for tripping hazards like tree stumps; never let your child wear a scarf, because she could choke."

(Snip)

"Instead, kids today spend 90 per cent of their days indoors. By some estimates, time spent in lessons and other adult-managed activities has doubled over the past two decades to five hours per week. 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.

"It's all working to keep kids from doing what they've done since humanity began: going outside into spaces where they can jump streams, climb trees, use sticks as swords, and do unjust things to ants and flies. According to a decade's worth of largely overlooked research, this free play is key to developing physical, mental and emotional skills -- such as self-reliance, risk-taking, altruism and delayed gratification -- that help children form into competent, functioning adults. "We seem to need to get our hands dirty and our feet wet from time to time," says Richard Louv, author of last year's landmark Last Child in the Woods, which compiled the mounting evidence supporting the need to reconnect kids to the outdoors. "We don't fully understand why that's necessary to our mental and physical health, but there does seem to be something there." "

(snip)

"For Ute Navidi, it's nothing less than getting parents to recognize the importance of childhood, and it's become a mission. When she asks audiences to reminisce about their childhood experiences, they recall excitedly how they climbed trees, got dirty, built forts and broke a lot of limbs. Within a couple of minutes, she says she has trouble quieting them down. But when she asks about the same risk-taking opportunities for their kids, they balk. "I wouldn't let my children do that" is the common refrain. "We don't know what the long-term effects of this downsized childhood are going to be," she says. "We can only imagine." "

Don't know how I lived to be twenty, never mind 56. Read it all.